Engaging Across the Organic/Conventional Binary: Preliminary Results From the ARGOS Programme in New Zealand.

There has been considerable debate involving both strong supporters and detractors of organic agriculture as to whether broad-scale commercial production of ‘certified organic’ actually represents a positive move for sustainable agriculture. This paper reflects on this debate from the perspective of the Agriculture Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) project. The ARGOS project is a six year social–ecological study of over 100 farms and orchards in New Zealand using either organic, conventional or an ‘environmentally oriented’ management system. As such, the ARGOS project is studying a paradigmatic group of new ‘commercial’ organic growers and their competitors.
This paper focuses on the interplay between social and ecological findings from the study – exploring the question of whether being certified organic actually signifies any real difference in the social orientation or ecological outcomes on farms?
The early results from ARGOS suggest that being certified organic does make a difference, with social, economic and ecological data showing a range of subtle differences associated with being organic. Going further into the ARGOS social data, some interesting social dynamics can been seen around issues of auditing and certification, and how the idea of being a ‘good farmer’ is influenced by new audit processes.

The conclusion is that while ‘certified organic’ does act as a modest market proxy for a range of desirable social and ecological outcomes around sustainable agricultural practice, the analytical and discursive  tendency towards mobilising an organic/conventional binary does obscure some of the key complexities that differentiate between producers. While the market-audit category of organics does collapse many complex tendencies under one label, an even more problematic tendency is the obscuring of a very high level of heterogeneity that lies behind the category of ‘conventional’ production.