The new strategy for organic farming revealed at the National Ploughing Championships this week doesn’t lack ambition.

It targets a more than threefold growth in value to €750m by 2030, up from €200m at present.

This would mean around 12,000t of organic beef production and 3,000t of organic lamb, with tillage output doubling. This is expected to be delivered by around 8,500 organic farmers from 10% of the farmland in organic production by 2030.

The focus on increasing organic production is a complete change in direction of travel for Irish agriculture compared with what went before. Previously, Irish agriculture has sought to increase output and value and in the 180 years since the famine had moved to a point where we exported nine times as much agri food as we consumed.

While the expansion of output had reached the end of its expansion cycle, a focus on expanding organic production will inevitably mean less output from the sector.

Replacing volume with value

The challenge for the organic sector is to maintain or ideally increase the value of output by securing a premium price for the organic production.

This has been achieved across many EU countries where there is currently a higher level of organic output than the Irish 2030 target.

However, it is worrying to learn that there is so much leakage of organic beef and lamb into conventional markets, which is believed to be as high as 70% for lambs at present.

In the 2030 strategy, it is hoped to reduce this to 50% and to have sales of organic beef into conventional markets reduced to 10%.

Production-led

These targets highlight the biggest problem with the organic sector in Ireland, in that it is production-led as opposed to being market-led.

In other words, it isn’t the prices that organic farmers are getting for their produce that is the driver of expansion, but the level of support payments that make the business viable even if they are selling the output at conventional prices.

This is, of course, a sustainable business, so long as Government policy is to pay sufficient subsidies to keep the business viable.

However, if they disappear at any point in the future for any reason, then the sector would be in immediate trouble, as there doesn’t appear to be a market to provide the additional value necessary to offset loss of production.

With the strategy accepting that not all beef and up to half of organic lamb output being sold in conventional markets, then it is also saying that subsidy will be the driver of organic farming, at least for the remainder of this decade.

This policy may well continue, but should the Government ever find itself short of finance at any future point, then payment of subsidies to organic farming could be at risk.

Taking the 'build it and they will come' approach is very much a leap of faith, but it comes with considerable risk.