Making the Transition, Page 4

Transition approaches

	Cattle producers can make a fairly easy transition to organic production. This Benton, Ark., rancher rotates his herd through paddocks every three weeks in an intensive grazing system. – Photo by USDA--NRCS

There is no one correct strategy for transitioning to organic. Growers have used one or more of the following approaches successfully.

Transitioning one parcel at a time. Start with limited acres as dictated by finances and labor availability. Certify your farm one area at a time to minimize risk and experiment with a portion of the farm rather than the entire acreage. Wende Elliott and Joe Rude attribute their success to their careful approach of introducing one field at a time.

"I've seen farmers hit a wall the third year of transition," said county extension agent Brad Brummond. "The chemicals have worn off, and the biological systems haven't quite come into place, so if you transition piecemeal, you can minimize the amount of land that is subject to problems, and you can learn on a smaller amount of land." Transitioning one parcel at a time also helps minimize the economic losses you may face during transition.

Gradual transition. Withdraw one class of inputs at a time, or start by banding fertilizers and herbicides and monitoring pests for threshold levels. Preliminary results from a North Carolina study investigating the impact of withdrawing classes of inputs show that there were no yield differences between conventional, transitional and organic soybeans for the first year of the transition. This approach will delay how quickly land can be certified - three years of complete chemical withdrawal are required - and may impact your profitability. However, direct marketers may be able to take advantage of transitional status to fetch a higher premium. (See "What's in a Name?" below).

John Vollmer grows 25 acres of conventional fruit and vegetables, including strawberries, which he markets for the same price as the organic strawberries. Consumers want the quality, he said, and when you are direct marketing, and the product is good, they'll pay for it.

"Cold turkey." Originally not considered a wise strategy because transitioning was thought to take three to five years, switching to organic within a shorter timeframe actually holds potential. Research shows that if you use crops that do not have high nitrogen requirements, or select varieties that can fix their own nitrogen, you can avoid yield declines. Moreover, legume crops such as soybeans are easy to cultivate and perform well even with all chemical inputs withdrawn. A Minnesota study showed that even corn could perform well by the third year of the transition.

Certifying Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land. If you can document that it has not received prohibited inputs, CRP land or pasture may qualify for immediate certification. A SARE-funded study on Iowa CRP land showed that there was virtually no economic loss when transitioning using soybeans. By the third year, the economic returns in the certified organic soybeans were 180 percent above conventional.

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