Organic Food's Rise and Dip

For the time being, I will be writing blog posts that pertain to my junior theme research paper.  Although we've been working on the paper for some time now, this is my first post where I feel confident in the direction of my thesis, which is exploring the recent growth of organic products in American society.  Contrary to this, however, is an article that I found while researching on the New York Times home page, one of my go-to sites for reliable sources.  The article's title is "Organic Dairies Watch the Good Times Turn Bad", and at first this didn't really surprise me all that much.  We've been living in an economic recession for the past few years, so undeniably people would start to cut back on things deemed as trivial, things like organic food.  This phenomena goes against my paper's exploratory question thus far: "Why has organic food become so popular recently" because of how even though organic products peaked before 2008 after progressive growth, it suddenly dropped in about 2008/2009 (the New York Times provides the helpful graph to the right to show the linear progression in the case of organic milk.)

The article, published on May 28, 2009, says, "As the trend toward organic food consumption slows after years of explosive growth, no sector is in direr shape than the $1.3 billion organic milk industry."  The article also says that farmers have been told by their "conglomerates" that due to the lack of demand and the excess of supply, milk production must subside by 20 percent.  That, sadly, puts many small-scale farmers out of work.  One Vermont farmer in the article named Ken Preston said, "'I probably wouldn't have gone organic if I knew it would end this way.'"

Preston's remark stirred a thought in me about why people "go organic", and thus why it has become so progressively popular.  There is often a difference, I've seen, between why people in supermarkets buy organic and why farmers farm organically.  It's apparent in Preston's case that, although organic foods are nice, it's really all in the name of profit, and profit depends on the choosy stay-at-home parent sifting through piles of various fruit.  No one can see a recession coming, but if Preston had, he probably would've used conventional farming practices, or whatever would make him a living of course.  Despite this downturn in organic food in 2009 especially, there has still been considerable growth from where it used to be, so there must be something strong that still causes regular people to buy organic even in tough times.  In a report titled "Recent Growth Patterns in the U.S. Organic Foods Market" done by Carolyn Dimitri and Catherine Greene of the USDA, "Growth in retail sales has equaled 20 percent of more annually since 1990.  Organic products are now available in nearly 20,000 natural foods stores, and are sold in 73 percent of all conventional grocery stores."  Why the growth is what I'm looking into right now for the next blog post-update, but it seems major retailers selling organic products are definite signposts in the dense forest that is this complex issue.