The new Northern situation: the challenge intensive organic food from Northern Ireland poses

On top of general recession-related worries, Irish organic farmers have another thing to contend with: technically organic but nonetheless intensive produce from Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish economies of scale and the sterling differential are continuing to put pressure on southern Irish organic producers.

In light of these effects, what were reported last week as strong signals for producer price reductions are reported to be continuing, whatever about the brave public face farmers and operators put on.

Organic farmers and operators fear and risk de-listing for putting their heads above the parapet and complaining. There are few processing and retailer options in Ireland.

Today I encountered an organic chicken in Tescos for E5.71. It weighted 1.118 kilos, and was E5.11 a kilo � down from E6.81 per kilo.

This chicken, from John Connolly in county Tyrone, was from Northern Ireland. Sourcing from the north seems to be an increasing trend for retailers.

The chicken was labelled UK2 - the Organic Farmers and Growers (OFG) certification code. There are nine UK certifiers, which includes the two Irish certifiers. This is mainly because Irish and UK certifiers can operate in Northern Ireland.

The Soil Association are the UK biggest organic certification body. They have been very critical of the OFG poultry standards.

While the Soil Association have a 500 recommended and 1000 birds maximum, OGF and others allow for 4800, with the option of going up to 9000 birds.

Southern Irish poultry farms tend to have up to 500 birds.

The natural flocking size of chickens is considered to be about 100. It is possible on smaller enterprises to allow for this, though some organic farmers stick rigidly to housing arrangements which encourage this.

Inevitably, this sort of flock size becomes more difficult when the numbers run into the thousands.

However the economy of scale of thousands of birds bring the price down for the consumer: hence half the price per kilo for Northern Irish as southern Irish organic chicken in supermarkets.

Competition from Northern Ireland is also effecting organic milk producers. Organic dairy farms in Northern Ireland are larger and more intensive. They rely more on concentrates than grass for feed. This increases the negative environmental effect, as feed production and transportation adds to global warming and the use of pesticides and herbicides more than grass growing does.

Organic dairy farms also have 2-3 times as many cows in Northern Ireland as their southern counterparts.

Up to half of the milk in Glenisk's pool comes from Northern Ireland. All of the organic milk in the discounter LIDI comes from Northern Ireland. This retails at E1.19 a litre, as does Tescos own brand organic milk. Glenisk' on the other hand, is usually about E1.65.

Inevitably, competition from the more industrialised Northern Irish farmers effects the price southern farmers can get.

There are also nutritional effects: organic milk regularly scores better than conventional when it comes to nutritional data, in particular the Omega 3 and 6 ratio. This has been found in studies across Europe.

Upon closer inspection of some of the more recent data, however, it appears that grass is at least as important as organic: milk from predominantly grass fed animals is nutritionally superior to milk from diary cows fed significant amounts of concentrates.

See for example the research of Professor Carlo Leifert from the Quality low Input Farming project in Newcastle University.

In southern Ireland, organic dairy cows are both predominantly grass fed and organic � a win win nutritionally.

However, for poultry and diary and the broader organic sector in general, scientific research specific to the Irish situation, followed by the marketing of the results, needs to be undertaken as a matter of urgency.

Otherwise people will see the word organic and think one product is the same as the next.

Consumers sometimes use the world organic as an anxiety appeaser: they see it and stop thinking, or worrying, about the broader ethics.

However, as even these two simple examples suggest, organic in one place is not necessarily the same as in another, even on an island as small as Ireland.