Are Organic Farm Input Restrictions Sufficient to Secure Ecosystem Services? Lessons from New Zealand's ARGOS and Sustainability Dashboard Project.

The Agriculture Research Group On Sustainability (ARGOS, www.argos.org.nz) measured the ecological, economic and social outcomes from over 100 kiwifruit, sheep/beef and dairy farms in New Zealand between 2004 and 2012.  Sustainability indicators were compared between panels of farms that were either (i) certified as Organic, (ii) accredited to other market assurance programs, or (iii) not accredited to any assurance program. Indicators were frequently different between panels, sometimes in ways that reflected enhanced ecosystem services from organic farms. However, often these differences were slight and mostly it could not be proven that they actually were caused by organic management itself.  Could the weakness of observed effects result from organic protocols being too narrow because they focus primarily on restricting the nature of farm inputs?  Major lifts in ecosystem services may depend on managing other key determinants of the resilience of agri-ecosystems as well as restriction to organic inputs. Organic standards (input rules) do not encompass all the organic principles, nor do they cover many of the ‘new’ dimensions of sustainability, multifunctional agriculture and ecosystem services being increasingly demanded by consumers and market access gate keepers. The New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard (www.nzdashboard.org.nz/) is therefore integrating organic principles into a broad and multidimensional sustainability assessment framework.  This online tool allows growers to have their own scores instantly benchmarked against those of their peers and their own past performance. The goal is to simultaneously enable learning for sustainability, meet compliance requirements and verify environmental, social, production and business performance.  It will also test whether ecosystem services can be maximized by using organic methods in conjunction with broader conventional dimensions of best farming practice.