Ontario loses four per cent of its certified organic farmers in 2014

by SUSAN MANN

When organic chicken and beef farmer Grant Robertson was recovering from a heart attack he had in May, he and his wife, Sarah Slater, decided it was time to leave farming and they voluntarily relinquished their certification.

Robertson, a former National Farmers Union – Ontario coordinator, and Slater’s operation was one of the 36 farms or agrifood businesses in Ontario to voluntarily give up their certification this year so far, according to numbers posted on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency website. In 2013, there were 43 farms or agribusinesses in Ontario that voluntarily gave up their certification.

And spokespeople familiar with organic certification say those numbers are normal.

Robertson says they’re selling their farm “so it didn’t make any sense to continue being certified.” They were officially certified in 2006 after a transitional period “but we’ve been farming organically since 2001.”

Jacob Pries, operations and outreach manager for the Organic Council of Ontario, says there could be a number of reasons why a farm or agribusiness voluntarily gives up its certification. One is it may be switching certifiers, while another is retirement.

Pries knows one 70-year-old organic farmer who sold his business to a young couple who plan to continue operating the farm as certified organic. “But the way the certification works is it’s in a specific person’s name so if anything changes with the business then the cancellation has to happen and the new person has to apply for certification,” he says, adding he hasn’t been hearing that there’s a mass exodus of organic farms from certification.

In fact, “we get on average about a call every week or two from conventional farmers who are looking to go organic,” he says.

There are 869 certified organic operations in Ontario, but about 230 of that number are processors with some of the processors also being farmers. In addition, to the certified organic operations there are more than 1,000 farms that aren’t certified but adhere to the organic standard, he notes.

Pries says there’s a huge demand for organic products in Canada. Organic sales in Ontario are more than $1 billion annually and nationally they’re about $4 billion a year. “Ontario represents one of the largest segments of sales and processing,” he says, adding during the past decade organic sales have been posting double digit increases. “Organic has been one of the strongest growth segments in our economy.”

Organic farmers create jobs at about twice the rate as conventional farms. Pries says one reason is farmers rely on other means to deal with weeds besides chemicals and that requires more people.

Byron Hamm, head office certification manager and assistant manager nationally with certifier Pro-Cert Organic Systems Ltd., agrees with Pries the voluntary certification withdrawal numbers for Ontario are fairly standard. “We typically see a certain number of growers that go out every year and a certain number of new growers that come in.”

Organic production has been “around in Canada as a whole for 25 to 30 years now and some of those original farmers from 25 to 30 years back are aging out and they’re retiring or they’re quitting farming or in some cases, unfortunately, they’re passing away,” he says. Sometimes a farmer turns the operation over to the next generation, but since the certification is assigned to the person that farmer has to give up their certification and the new person gets certified in their name. “The farm may still be organic but it’s just the original operator is no longer the one responsible for it.”

There was a dip in the number of farms seeking certification in the past five years across Canada but “we’re starting to see a return to a slightly growing trend again,” he says. Pro-Cert, the largest certifying agency in Canada with its head office in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, certifies about 1,700 operators in Canada. It also certifies farms along both coasts in the United States and a bit in the central portion of America too. BF