While it may be true that the cost of individual organic items is usually more than their "conventional" counterparts, there is something else to consider.  How much do you spend on groceries overall?

Our family switched to buying most everything organic a few years ago.  Our local vendor of organics is Whole Foods, a switch from the local Safeway and its somewhat less expensive warehouse affiliate.  I assumed that our grocery expense would go up as a result (but that's OK, right?--we are talking about our health and the health of the workers involved in the process).

After a year, curious about how much MORE we were spending, I ran a Quicken report that compared the cost of the first year of shopping at Whole Foods to the previous, "inorganic" year of grocery shopping.  There were no changes in our household size (three), etc.  To my amazement, our overall spending on groceries went DOWN!

"Why," you ask?  The only explanation that I can think of is that by shopping less often at Safeway, we made fewer purchases of impulse items and junk food, like those yummy Lay's potato chips and Hagen Daz ice cream bars.  But the difference was real, about a 10% decrease as I recall, amounting to several hundred dollars per year (it's been a while since I ran those numbers).

My point is that you may have to look deeper than pin-point price comparisons to find the true savings in adopting healthier eating habits.

I think your author may have answered her own quandry.  If she's hoping that constantly increasing demand is going to drive prices down, I'd say she needs to review a little economics 101.  Constantly increasing demand, assuming supply stays the same, drives prices up, or keeps them high.  What we need is a constantly increasing supply of organic products, now that would drive prices down.  

The last time I checked, American consumers spent an average of 6-8% of their annual budget on food.  By contrast, in Europe and Japan, average consumers spend 12-15% of their annual budget on food, while in poorer nations, the % is higher - as high as 80% in deeply impoverished regions.  Americans are used to food that is really really really cheap, so when we see food whose price actually reflects the ability of the people who grew it to earn a living, we think that it is expensive.  Our mass produced cheap food comes from huge farms that provide income to a very small number of people (and need I mention that in spite of our cheap food, or perhaps because of it, we have many more food related health problems than other wealthy countries - we call it "the obesity epidemic").  From a farmer's perspective, organic food is more expensive because it reflects more of the real costs of growing food.

So in short, I don't think it is desireable for food to be cheaper.  I think food is really really cheap.  Instead of designing federal subsidies to make food cheaper (and thereby drive farmers out of business, as we've been doing in this country for 100 years), why not increase the food stamps program, which helps provide food for low income people, and use a more direct approach to feeding the poor.

Also, everyone likes subsidies - so are subsidies for organic food a good idea?  I'd rather see an end to the many subsidies for large-scale, conventional farming (economies of scale?  one of the biggest ones is the ability to pay for big scale Washington lobbyists to procure subsidies).  The savings could go to increase food-stamps.  This would level the playing field between organic and non-organic production, and increase our ability to feed the poor, without any additional cost to the government.

One thing that the article failed to mention was how hard it is for small farmers to make a living anymore.  The cost of "conventional" produce is so low that it can hardly be made profitable. The price has been driven down artificially by the largest most automated corporate farmers, and this is driving whole communities of family farmers out of the farming life.  This has happened in many places just in the last generation or two.  

Who knows -- there might be a Wal-mart effect when the small farmers are finally all gone, as the new farm monopolies raise the prices they kept low to drive the little guys off of the land they had worked for generations.

Organics are not any more expensive than food ever was before -- working people are making less, and are then being sold a substandard, poisonous product that is by no means the same food our great-grandparents grew, and our grandparents were raised on.

Honestly, if organic produce gets any cheaper, I will become very nervous about the future of farming in this country.  Food being too expensive for working people to buy is an indication of the need for a stronger labor movement in the U.S., not a call for lower prices.

I'm posing this as a question more than a comment.  In fact, I am usually heavily in favor of abolishing subsidies but I have to wonder in this instance.  Obviously, the cost of living and agricultural production is higher in the U.S. than it would be in some parts of the world.  

If we completely eliminated huge factory farm subsidies, that would no doubt lead to a collapse in the U.S. agricultural industry because instead of buying U.S. crops, most consumers would simply buy more food from overseas -- perhaps food grown on felled rainforests or by using questionable production methods -- posing an additional environmental threat to say nothing of what it might do to the U.S. economy, and the effect that would have on the poor.  

Am I off base here?  In theory, I'd like to say no subsidies too but I have my doubts because of what I think the fallout could be.  

Something about the cost of organic food in our local chains has been bugging me for awhile. Perhaps it has you as well.

We purchase most of our food from a small, local market that carries only organic fruit and vegetables. It has one other store which is slightly larger in the next town that also sells organic meat and poultry. It is almost always the case that the produce, when purchased in season from either of these two small stores, is $1-$2 cheaper per pound than similar organic items in Safeway, Andronico's, or Albertson's. Is it possible that these larger chains, which one assumes buy in larger quantities thus achieivng lower unit costs, are simply taking advantage of the willingness of the consumer to pay more for organic produce because we have been conditioned to believe that organic is more expensive?  Are we being conned?

Basically the difference between organic and chemical farming is in the soil.  Organic has soil with natural micro-organisms producing what the plants need continuously in symbiosis with the whole living system.

This makes for healthier, better tasting, more nutritious vegetables.  It also makes weeds grow very well.  

In chemical farming the crops are designed to be resistant to poisons applied to kill everything (insects and other plants)except the crops themselves.  The soil is dead, nothing but a semi-sterile chemical hydroponic media supplied with nutrients by oil based and mined fertilizers.

These poisons persist in the food, atrazine for example renders the sperm of males living in corn country unable to swim.  The chemical companies rresponse to this?  They are no doubt developing a male birth control pill based on atrazine.

Organic farming relies on human labor to physically separate weeds and bugs from the crops, eschewing the use of poisons and crops designed to resist those poisons.  Food is produced from a natural, oraganic living system.

But that human labor makes organic food inherently more expensive.

The way to reduce labor costs asociated with organic farming?  Machines.  Smart machines taught to do the repetitive labor of planting, weeding, mulching, watering, fertilizing, harvesting...by human gardeners.

I just want to add a comment about the relatively low cost of conventional food. For nearly a century, there has been a concerted effort to eliminate the farmer from the whole food equation. Now by "farmer" I mean a person who cares for and husbands the soil and nurtures the animals they raise -- the kind of thing we picture when we think of organic farmers. This is in contrast to the absentee businessman who owns an agribusiness concern and hires people to manage the growing. The power brokers want the true farmers, who actually care about the food they grow and the people they feed, to disappear.

Thus a major role of subsidies has been to reward the argibusiness concerns, while ignoring the small farmers, and keeping food prices artificially low so as to drive the small farmer under.

And it's working. Thousands of small farmers each year give it up. Not a few of them commit suicide, a fact that's been fairly well hidden. In so-called developing countries, similar schemes are driving farmers off the land. The suicide rate in India, for instance, is epidemic.

We cannot merely clamor for cheaper organics. We need to support our local organic farmers, paying them a fair price for their efforts.

Agribusiness is starting to take over the organics business, ironically driving the small farmers who brought us the organic revival out of business. This is not a good thing, as it will mean huge monocrops and long shipping distances -- just like with conventional crops. And it does nothing to build community.

Food is cheap enough, probably too cheap, given how many farmers can't even break even at today's selling prices. (And yes, I'm oversimplifying for the sake of brevity; many small farmers are in debt owing to mechanization, over-reliance on fertilizers, etc. -- but that story is ... a whole other, if related, story!)

As for the inability of poor people to afford organics: To change that, we need to work on the social justice and job creation side of things to see to it that no one is ever too poor again.

amazingdrx wrote: But that human labor makes organic food inherently more expensive.

It depends.  You say "inherently" because the US has been accustomed to cheap fossil fuels and relatively high wages.

Consider a world of expensive energy and low wages -- the Third World, the pre-19th C world, the probable world of the future.

In such a world, local organic produce grown on a small scale has a cost advantage.

If you would expand your definition of "machinery" to include energy-efficient technology of all types, then I would agree with you.  Problem is, we're wedded to the idea of fuel-powered machinery and overlook the other possibilities.
 

I am advocating plugin electric equipment actually, to replace oil powered machinery.

The thing about inexpensive labor from the underdeveloped nations of spaceship earth is that it is being exploited to produce the same old genetically engineered, big agri biz, chem oil toxic,tasteless food.

Because of the long shipment from these countries to the big consumer markets the produce is designed to be picked green and hardly ever really ripens, mainly it rots.

The main advantage of robotic assistance to growers is that real heirloom crtops with great taste and nutrition can be grown to peak and harvested and transported quickly, all without the labor costs asociated with selective weeding, watering, feeding, and harvesting.

Crop rotation in strips  and natural pest repellant plants can substitute for chemical toxins.  Hand weeding and mulching, necessary without the use of chemical toxins, can be done quickly and productively with renewable electric powered machines that crawl between the rows.

And organic fertilizer made from waste can substitute for oil based and mined fertilizer.

to afford organics":  In the U.S., except for extremely poor people, it's not an "inability," it's a question of priorities.  When I made only $6.50/hr driving a recycling truck and paid almost $400/month for rent, I still bought only organic.  I just didn't eat out much (almost never, and always cheaply when I did), and I used my imagination and friends for entertainment instead of wasting money on needless garbage.

The article expresses a hope that as the organic industry scales up, the cost of organic food will go down.. but isn't the scale of current agriculture business what got us in trouble in the first place? Is it even possible to grow that large an operation without chemicals, storage and transport infrastructure? There was a good point in other comments, that the local is just as important as the organic... local, organic, a complete package. It may very well be that non-organic food is actually more expensive -- but the real cost evades the consumer. With rising energy prices, the cost ratio of organic vs non-organic may yet be reversed..

"With rising energy prices, the cost ratio of organic vs non-organic may yet be reversed.."

Good point!  

Recycled organic fertilizer may beat the cost of oil based fertilizer and even human labor may beat the cost of running tractors and farm machinery running on oil and oil based chemical toxic elimination of weeds and insects.

But human labor assisted by solar and wind powered electric machinery and solar cogeneration produced organic fertilizer from the waste stream will beat that by orders of magnitude, feeding the people of spaceship earth in harmony with nature.

Renwable energy based green technology and organic farming are not mutually exclusive.

I belong to a local organic CSA in Western New York State at a cost of $400.00 for 10 months worth of produce (and believe me, that sure is stretching the growing season here in snow-laden WNY).  I split a large weekly share 4 ways and we each have lots of food most weeks.  I have done some checking and conventional produce purchased in a grocery store would cost me more (even the local stuff).  And the conventional fruits and veggies I can buy locally directly from the farms are rarely available before May or beyond November.  What I can't get organically in the local area, I will buy conventional from our other farmers, but those occassions are pretty rare.  If you look around in your area you might be amazed at just how affordable organic fruits and veggies can be.

So long as consumers are ready to pay a premium for fresh organic food, we should expect that vendors will charge what the market will bear.