German organics farmers fear rapid growth

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

You might expect German organic farmer Agnes Timmermann to be delighted that her country's Agriculture Minister wants to rapidly expand organic agriculture.

But practicality is everything to Timmermann, a nurse who has become an organic farmer.

Renate Kunast of the Green Party, the Federal Minister of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture, aims to expand organic farming from two to 20 per cent of Germany's agricultural area by 2010.

After 13 years of selling organic products from their Hamburg farm and shop, Timmermann and husband Wilhelm know the growth of their type of farming must be led by customer demand.

"Change [in farming] will come when people want the products," Timmermann said.

If there was a sudden increase in the amount of organic products on the market prices would drop.

Because their production was lower and costs higher than conventional farms, organic farmers could not survive without their price premiums.

In Bonn at the German Farmers Association, DBV, Uta Meiners attested to the fragility of organic farms.

When East and West Germany were united the entry of the East's large organic farms damaged the viability of those in the West.

Interest in organic farming hinged on a "question of money", Meiners said.

There are around 410,000 farms of more than 2ha in Germany. The average size is 41.6ha but those in former West Germany averaged 30ha and those in the East, 197ha.

Wilhelm Timmermann is the ninth generation of his family to farm the land on the outskirts of the northern German port city.

He was a reluctant successor to his father's enterprise and over his father's objections, he gradually turned the former dairy farm into a diverse organic operation.

Now the only reason the 38ha farm survives, keeping egg-laying hens, growing vegetables and occasionally killing a steer, is because it is organic, operating under Bioland certification, one of several organic labels used in Germany.

Minister Kunast has just launched another label, Bio, in an effort to clarify the sector for consumers and provide assurances on production methods. But it is unclear whether this will clear or further clutter the branding issue.

German organic farmers get higher Government support payments than conventional farmers.

But even with the subsidies, the Timmermanns' main income earner is their farm's shop selling 3000 organic items from homegrown cucumbers to imported New Zealand manuka honey to nearby residents.

The Timmermanns' wealthy neighbours are happy to drive to the shop and pay double the price for eggs and to choose from its stock of 400 organic wines and 100 organic cheeses.

They can also make it an educational outing for their children by popping round the back to see two pigs wallowing in mud, hens scratching around and the stabled ponies of local riders.

Some of the hens look very much worse for wear, with large bald patches and ragged feathers, victims of more aggressive birds which chase them from the feed or water.

The death rate of the young chicks is high, too, because without antibiotics they succumb to diseases.

Add the high cost of organic feed, the reduced productivity of the victimised birds and the high death rate, and you had the reason for the high prices, said Agnes Timmermann.

This made the farm's educational role very important because people understood less and less about how was food was produced, she said.

For that reason she has encouraged a scheme allowing local school children to visit the farm.

A convert to organic farming following her marriage, she is not afraid to put her philosophy ahead of customer relations.

When new customers flocked to the shop during the BSE food scare, its supply of top beef cuts soon ran out.

Despite irate demands for more of the choice meat she was adamant that no more animals would be killed until nothing but the bones were left of those already slaughtered.

People had to either take lesser cuts or go on a waiting list for the best ones.

Timmermann believes that education and the rightness of the organic philosophy will attract more people to organic products.

But she said that progress would not be fast in Germany, where organics had taken a different route to Britain, where its popularity was fostered by big supermarket chains.

Organic products in Germany were sold mostly through speciality shops like her own.

In France, where organic farms occupy 1.3 per cent of agricultural land, organic products were also hard to find on supermarket shelves.

But from a low base the market had been growing by around 20 per cent a year since 1994 and this had encouraged the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to set up a long-term plan for the development of organic farming.

This aimed to have one million ha and 25,000 producers in place by 2005. There are about 735,000 farms in France on 33.4 million ha. The average farm size is 40ha.

French organic farmers also get higher subsidies because their operations meet sustainability criteria.

Daniel and Francoise Delmotte are organic dairy and crop farmers on 80ha in the Loire Valley, about 300km southwest of Paris.

Their conventional farming of around 40 cows was beginning to prove uneconomic until they were allocated more milk quota, allowing them to raise numbers of their herd to 48 cows, but he was unhappy at his lack of control over the enterprise.

He turned to organic farming in 1992, encouraged by the proximity of a ready market in the city of Tours, 15km away, and got state support for the two-year transition phase.

Delmotte, too, has found a high-paying niche market for his products, selling unpasteurised milk in speciality shops for up to five times the price it would get from the local dairy co-operative.

It was more motivating to be farming organically and selling the milk, yoghurt and cheese from the farm in shops and farmer markets, which gave him some independence from bureaucracy, he said.

Like his German counterparts he also believes it is important that he is bringing townsfolk closer to the country.

That was a good way to introduce people to farm-life, which had got a bad image as a result of the European Union's Common Agriculture Policy handouts to farmers.