Our vineyard didn’t make as much money as surrounding vineyards but it was still self sustaining. More robust demand for organic wines would have made it even more so.
Organic farming has external benefits as well, or rather the absence of negative externalities like harmful chemical run off and less water usage. These aren’t as easily noticed by just looking at market dynamics currently.
All that being said, my understanding is that organic farming isn’t the right choice in all cases. It’s definitely more labor and sometimes resource or land intensive. It takes a certain wealthy consumer base to support it.
I hope that robots can eventually make organic practices more widespread. Instead of spraying pesticides (some of which are permitted under organic rules in the US and Europe) have robots come by continuously and pluck each weed as it appears. Pluck the pests from The leaves and stems. Water each plant individually per its need, etc. There should be no need to sacrifice a human on backbreaking and fiddly labor.
And this right here is why people are skeptical about organic produce.
There seems to be two kinds:
- The kind that doesn't scale (so any would be environmental benefits would stop existing if it became more than a niche)
- The kind that scales because they're abusing loose definitions of "organic" to charge the end customer more money.