Dialogue on organic farming in China: A way out for organic farmers amidst looming crisis of confidence in inputs

Despite the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global organic market hit a record high in 2020, according to the latest reports by Forschungsinstitut für Biologischen Landbau (FiBL) and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). The market for organic food in China is growing at an annual rate of 25%. In three years, China’s organic planting area has increased by 10%, reaching 2,435,000 hectares in 2020, according to data from Organic Industry Development Report of China (2021) released by the State Administration for Market Regulation, ranking fifth in the world.

Although the organic farming movement was initiated in Europe, the US organic market currently has the lion’s share, while the Chinese market is an emerging one. As China has such a large area of organic farmland, as well as rising concerns about health, spending power and willingness for consumption, AgroPages aims, by talking with players in the organic farming sector, to assess the challenges faced by China’s organic farming market, attitudes towards organic inputs, the industry’s opportunities for growth and related difficulties, and the backdrop of food crisis, to ensure farmers’ voices are heard. For this purpose, an interview was held with industry players, including the Crop Protection Manager of Shenzhen Chengwu Gold Rock Agriculture Limited; the head of organic rice of Jiangsu Baoying Lake Farm Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Jiangsu Province Agribusiness Group; Sichuan Jiunong Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd., an organic farming company; and the Chairman of the Organic Alliance, an NGO.

Increased consumption, food safety issues, and the ″passion″ of ecological farmers are the major driving forces of China’s organic farming market

Fang Yongbing Founder of Sichuan Jiunong Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd.

The size of organic farmland increased rapidly in China because more people are buying organic products as they are earning more money and attaching more importance to food safety. In addition, national policies have been adopted to promote organic production, advocating the slogans, ″lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets″ and ″green development.″ Fang Yongbing, founder of Sichuan Jiunong Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd., analyzed the organic farming industry from both producers’ and consumer’s points of view, concluding that as farmers and consumers are helping each other, more and more farms are shifting to organic planting.

Fang owns 160 mu(15 mu in 1 hectare) of organic rice fields and an organic vegetable farm covering over 30 mu. However, he began his agricultural career quite late. It was not until 2012 when he shifted from urban life to organic farming. Fang found out that most organic farmers are young people from cities who are enthusiastic about organic farming, while traditional farmers are just the second wave that entered the sector. In 2009 and 2014, two groups of people drove the market forward. Around 2009, some young people in cities started organic farming, as they were inspired by public welfare and environmental protection organizations and thought about food safety, due to social events such as the ″melamine milk powder″ incident. After 2014, more new players with diversified occupational backgrounds switched to this sector. Some traditional farmers turned to organic farming as they were influenced by environmental protection organizations or by organic farmers with higher educational backgrounds, while others were enterprise leaders of other industries who began organic farming because of their love for country life and, therefore, had little concern for profit. By contrast, other players joined the sector purely for profit, as they saw the wide margin between regular and organic products. However, the majority of the last category are expected to survive in the long-term.

In the chaos of the market, how can businesses and farms save themselves?

Guo Pan Head of organic rice of Jiangsu Baoying Lake Farm Co., Ltd.(a subsidiary of Jiangsu     Province Agribusiness Group)

More new players entering the sector have driven the organic farming market forward, but this has also led to chaos. Guo Pan, Technical Director of Organic Rice at Jiangsu Baoying Lake Farm Co., Ltd., shared the same view. In his opinion, the organic farming sector, over the past few years, was even ″hotter″ than nowadays. Since spurious organic products appeared in the market in recent years, some consumers no longer buy organic products. This situation cooled the market. Fang Yongbing and Guo Pan were not the only ones to mention the mixture of good and poor products in the organic market, Chao Daiwei, Chairman of nonprofit organization Organic Alliance, also told AgroPages that, according to the China Organic Industry Development Report (2021), a total of 94 certification bodies have been approved to certify organic products, and 22,700 certificates being issued to 14,000 companies. In this case, why did consumers lose their trust?

End consumers are not the only ones to ″distrust″ the process in which organic products are grown, but organic farmers are also ″doubtful″ about the agricultural inputs they use in organic farming, even certified ones. The Organic Alliance, led by Chao Daiwei, has more than 300 members, most of them running small organic farms. On average, one mu of land could supply organic products for about 30 families. Most of the alliance’s members have dozens of mu of farmland. Organic products growing in small farms are largely dependent on the weather, compared with those treated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers. A single plague of pests could kill all their crops.

Fang Yongbing is not ruling out organic inputs, such as bio-pesticides and biofertilizers, as long as they can drive pests and other problems away. But why are so many growers unwilling to use the inputs? All interviewees mentioned that in order to make them effective, biopesticides must be combined with chemicals, or manufacturers must add more insidious additives. The raw materials used for fermenting organic fertilizers are relatively poor quality, such as lowcost urban sewage, manure from factoryfarmed pigs and chickens, and other ingredients that are not suitable for organic farming. Farmers are more wary about using them. Therefore, how are organic biopesticides, bio-fertilizers and other inputs selected? Small-scale farmers can only verify information on the Internet, but they may eventually find out that they have been deceived only after having used spurious products for a whole season, so an entire year’s work is ruined. Shenzhen Chengwu Gold Rock Agriculture Limited, which owns several large organic vegetable farms across the country, has suffered great losses from spurious products in its early years. The company strictly controls inputs, and any to be used in production will be sent to professional labs for testing, causing a considerable annual testing expense that is unaffordable for ordinary organic farmers. Such a strict control process has unexpectedly made their organic vegetables competitive.

Chao Daiwei Chairman of the Organic Alliance, an NGO

Seeing the dilemma faced by farmers, some sellers servicing organic farmers would provide them with detailed certificates and other relevant documents, including organic certificates and pesticide residue test reports for each batch of products. Since certification bodies in China do not publish a list of certified suppliers of organic inputs, Chao Daiwei expressed his expectations for the work of Organic Farming, an annual magazine of AgroPages, which could objectively recommend solutions to farmers about organically-certified inputs, as well as trustworthy suppliers proved through investigations, so farmers can use these inputs safely for expected results.

Other than organic certification, some small farms and agricultural product buyers are more confident with their own corporate standards. On some farms, standards are more stringent than practiced by organic farming, such as Natural Farming, Permaculture and Demeter. As no certification criteria have been established aside for these farming standards, they have prioritized their ″reputation″ and brands, and usually host popular science activities and salons to increase their consumers’ awareness. In the industrial chain, large multinationals would ask farms to adopt their corporate standards for the agricultural products they would purchase. Jiangsu Province Agribusiness Group, the state-owned enterprise where Guo Pan is employed, supplies 500 mu of organic rice to Heinz. Maintaining very strict controls and regulations, Heinz sends supervisors to the farm every few days and deploy cameras in the field to monitor the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

Challenges to agricultural technology in organic farming

In 2020, the planting area of organic crops in China totaled 1,154,000 hectares, accounting for 47.5% of total, including 298,000 hectares for rice. Jiangsu Nongken Baoying Lake Farm has a 3,500 mu (or 233 hectares) organic rice field, yielding some 1,050 tons of organic rice every year. The biggest problem encountered by Guo Pan when growing organic rice is insufficient nutritional supplements. For organic rice, more consideration should be given to pesticide safety and food safety. The quality and yield of organic rice are much poorer than rice grown in the ordinary way. Organic rice grown on the farm is not as good as ordinary rice in terms of appearance (with wormholes) and taste. The yield is also lower because insufficient nitrogen is supplemented, so organic rice cannot fully grow. The rice milling yield is only 60%. To meet the nutritional requirements of conventional rice production, 25kg of urea is needed for one mu, while for the same area of organic farming, 500kg of organic fertilizer is needed as its nitrogen content is only 5%.

Another problem concerning Guo Pan is weeds. Weeds in rice paddy are known to everyone to be very difficult to identify. Even skilled farmers who have grown rice for years have difficulty distinguishing weeds from seedlings. The cost of manual weeding at the farm where Guo Pan works is as high as 1,000 Yuan/mu. In addition, an aging rural labor force is also a serious issue. The resident population of the village where the farm is located is 3,000, and most of them are over 60-70 years old. It is hard to find the right people to do the farming, and the presence of old people working on farms may be risky. Compared with weeding and labor, the issue of pests is not so serious for rice growing. As organic fertilizers are largely used, a relatively good ecology is established so small amounts of biopesticides are used, considering their costs are considerable, ranging from 500 to 600 Yuan/mu if fully applied. Meanwhile, as few fertilizers are used and less nitrogen is taken in, crops are relatively yellow and not vulnerable to pests and diseases, which usually prefer crops that are growing well.

For Fang Yongbing, weeds are also a constant issue during his career of more than a decade. Weed control fabric can be used in fruit growing. However, due to different varieties, weeds cannot be controlled in the same way as in vegetable growing. For example, for vegetables with diverging leaf veins, the practice is to help them build competitive advantages at the early stage. But for vegetables that grow upright, as weeds cannot be isolated for the sake of photosynthesis, the harvest will be substantially impacted.

Zhang Zhenhai Crop Protection Manager of Shenzhen Chengwu Gold Rock    Agriculture Limited

Major organic farming companies have their own ways of dealing with weeds. Zhang Zhenghai, Crop Protection Manager of Shenzhen Chengwu Gold Rock Agriculture Limited, said his company has a daily output of organic vegetables of up to 70 tons from 15 farms in five regions of the country. These farms are located in Ningxia, Gansu and other areas ″away from the rain, under the sun light, and with suitable temperature.″ There is plenty of sunlight so that plants can grow more healthily, and the relatively dry weather with less rain can help avoid the heavy work of weeding. The company also chooses to grow plants during months when pests and diseases occur less often. Biopesticides are mainly used to control pests for organic vegetable growing. More and more biological pesticides have been developed and used in recent years, from 21 in 2019 to 31 in 2021. However, there is no fungicide available for controlling diseases, Zhang Zhenhai said.

Organic fertilizers are promising organic inputs

Small farms can prepare sufficient fertilizers by themselves through composting. However, this requires higher technique requirements. ″During composting, organic waste, temperature, weeds, microorganisms and other factors should be strictly controlled. It is not something that can be easily mastered,″ Chao Daiwei explained. For large farms, the amount of fertilizers they produce fall short of demand, so they have to buy from other resources. Huge amount of organic fertilizers is needed on farms. Moreover, crop farming and livestock farming are separated in China, so that crop farmers are kept away from some sources of fertilizers. Therefore, if commercial organic fertilizers are properly regulated and supervised, ″organic fertilizers definitely have great prospects,″ Fang Yongbing said.

Asked about what product development advice he would give to input manufacturers through AgroPages, Guo Pan expressed his hope for finding solutions to increase nitrogen content in organic fertilizers and improve nitrogen utilization rate.

In a better ecological environment, organic farming yield would be no be lower than when chemical pesticides are applied

Before the magazine is published, AgroPages collected some feedback from readers about certain situations, such as current geopolitical conflicts and soaring international food prices. Readers expressed their concerns about the effects of these issues on organic farming. All our four interviewees stressed that the food crisis would have little impact on organic farming. China has 1.8 billion mu of arable land, and the area used for organic farmland is very small. Organic farming is targeted at the high-end consumer market. Regarding recent topics on the Internet, such as the difficulty in renting farmland or the fact that farmland intended for growing cash crops have been used for growing food crops, Zhang Zhenhai said that the unavailability of farmland is more common in ordinary agriculture, and for organic farming companies that can pay higher rents, this is not a problem. Fang Yongbing also noted that as long as reasonable planning is done according to local conditions, food safety and staple food security are considered, and the economic benefits of cash crops are fully known, then balance is achievable.

Since the advent of organic farming, there has been controversy over its low yield. Zhang Zhenhai said the output of leafy vegetables is not low compared with conventional agriculture, but fruit vegetables are more prone to problems as they have longer growth cycles, which may offer more time for pests and diseases to develop, resulting in yield reduction. After years of exploration, Fang Yongbing and others found that the problem of lower yield in organic farming can be solved gradually. In the first year, after switching from conventional farming with pesticides and chemical fertilizers to organic farming, the yield may drop considerably and be as low as 30%. As the soil and biodiversity improves and the land reaches a better ecological balance, the yield would increase to 50%, and then to 70%. So far, the yields of some farms have reached 100%, meaning organic farming does not necessarily mean lower yields.