Systems: Economic and Ecological

Two items worth contemplating:

1. Simon Johnson in The Libertarian and the Lobbyists explores the role of government regulation (or lack thereof) on the recent financial crash. Of particular interest is the discussion of the findings from two recent IMF reports by Prachi Mishra analyzing lobbying practices in the US.
   

   Legislators, of course, have different preferences about what kinds of laws to support, which can make it hard to study mechanisms of political influence precisely. But Igan and Mishra approach the problem in a clever way – they look for instances when elected officials switched their position on legislative proposals that surfaced more than once. And they devote a lot of effort to figuring out what caused this switch. ...
   A big increase in lobbying expenditures helps to persuade legislators to switch their votes. And “whether any of the lobbyists working on a bill also worked for a legislator in the past sways the stance on that bill in favor of deregulation.” It is deregulation, of course, that financial firms want – fewer rules and less oversight of any kind. And it really is all about whom you know, and how you know them. In particular, your value as a lobbyist seems to depend very highly on whom you worked with in the past. Igan and Mishra find “spending an extra dollar is almost twice as effective in switching a legislator’s position if the lobbyist is connected to the legislator compared to the case where the lobbyist is unconnected.” ...
   Essentially, financial firms have been buying the right to take on more risk. When things go well, executives in these firms get the upside – mostly in terms of immediate compensation, because few executives are compensated on the basis of risk-adjusted returns. That means that when the risks materialize and the firms suffer losses, the costs fall on taxpayers.
   Ron Paul is right to point to imbalances of power and massive distortions within the financial sector. He is also correct that many government policies favor relatively few big firms – and favor them in a way that encourages excessive and dangerous risk-taking.
   But Paul and others are wrong to argue that the government is the ultimate cause of all financial evil. Executives in financial firms want to take big risks. They like arrangements under which they win even when they lose.
   Big financial firms can more readily buy the necessary political protection (in the form of deregulation), enabling them to become even bigger and more dangerous. This incentive structure has only become more extreme since the financial crisis of 2008.

2. Erle Ellis describes the findings of his most recent publication, All is Not Lost: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene, as:
   

   the first spatially explicit global assessment of contemporary patterns of terrestrial plant biodiversity (native loss + exotic species gain) at regional landscape scales.The main result: humans have caused a net increase in plant species richness across two-thirds of the terrestrial biosphere, mostly by facilitating species invasions. In most regional landscapes, native species losses were significantly lower than exotic species gains, with agriculture species causing minor increases, but ornamental species sometimes play a large role that is still hard to assess.

   
   While I'm not convinced Ellis's focus on the shift from biomes to anthromes captures the most fundamental characteristics of the Anthropocene, the work is both provocative and, as a result of his heavy use of maps, visually interesting. A number of relevant links are contained in this post by Andrew Revkin.

When did the Anthropocene begin?

Humans have a long history, going back well before the beginning of agriculture, of making substantial modification to the planet. The standard view, however, has been that such changes were comparatively modest in scale, affecting regions at most and not having planetary consequences significant enough to modify the operation of the global system. Global scale consequences, those tied to the emergence of conjoined social-ecological systems and significant enough to indicate the dawning of a new geological era (the Anthropocene) have been viewed as comparatively recent -- as a product of the industrial revolution.

The March 25 issue of Nature News, however, reports in The 8000 Year Old Climate Puzzle:

Scientists have come up with new evidence in support of the controversial idea that humanity's influence on climate began not during the industrial revolution, but thousands of years ago. Proposed by palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman in 2003, the theory says that human influences offset the imminent plunge into another ice age and helped create the relatively stable climate that we are familiar with today. It has been repeatedly panned as implausible by palaeoclimate researchers, but eight years on, Ruddiman and others say that they have the data to support early anthropogenic climate change.

The argument centres on a curious trend in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago and the current Holocene epoch began. In previous interglacial periods, CO₂ levels spiked early and then gradually declined until the globe went into another ice age. The Holocene began by following this trend, but then CO₂ levels changed course and began to rise around 8,000 years ago. The same thing happened with methane levels around 5,000 years ago. These trends align with the expansion of human agriculture, and Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, argues that it is no coincidence — the clearing of land and expansion of irrigation released huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Critics say that human populations were probably too small to support such a hypothesis, and recent studies have raised serious questions about early anthropogenic carbon and methane emissions.

The article goes on to discuss preliminary findings from several studies and to note that supporting evidence is scheduled for publication in a special issue of The Holocene later this year.

For a popular treatments of the Anthropocene, see National Geographic's Enter the Anthropocene: The Age of Man and the Walrus's Age of Breathing Underwater.

Jason Moore, World Systems and Agriculture

Several years ago, while at the Environment Section presentations at the ASA meetings in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of meeting Jason Moore. At that point he was a graduate student at UC-Berkley. The paper he presented (later published as "Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640") was, by far, the most interesting one at the conference.

It provided a fascinatingly detailed and historically rich description of the relationship between developments in Spain (leading to a need for silver) and those in Bolivia (where silver production was declining). At the core of the paper was a description of how Latin American agricultural practices were changed in order to free up the labor necessary to increase silver production through the implement new, labor intensive silver extraction and smelting techniques. While the bulk of the paper deals with the silver industry, it was the shift in agriculture that fascinated me. It went from a labor intensive vertical model that exploited the variety of ecological niches present in the narrow space between the Pacific and the Andes -- where different crops were grown and livestock raised at different altitudes with guano from the coast used as fertilizer -- to a labor efficient horizontal model -- combining agriculture and livestock into a single ecological zone and using the livestock to plow the fields. It remains one of the best historical scale accounts of the operation of social-ecological systems that I know. Unbeknown to me, Moore had already received several awards for his work (including a best graduate student paper award and an Honourable Mention for the Rheinhard Bendix prize offered by the Historical Sociology Section).

Moore, like Hornborg who's writing I've discussed here, is a world systems theorist. Indeed, one of his earliest pieces was a critique of Hornborg. I had originally intended to post material about Moore's work as a follow-up to the Hornborg posts, but things intervened.

And now Moore is back with another great piece "The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450–2010". Here is the abstract:

Does the present socio-ecological impasse – captured in popular discussions of the ‘end’ of cheap food and cheap oil – represent the latest in a long history of limits and crises that have been transcended by capital, or have we arrived at an epochal turning point in the relation of capital, capitalism and agricultural revolution? For the better part of six centuries, the relation between world capitalism and agriculture has been a remarkable one. Every great wave of capitalist development has been paved with ‘cheap’ food. Beginning in the long sixteenth century, capitalist agencies pioneered successive agricultural revolutions, yielding a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus. This paper engages the crisis of neoliberalism today, and asks: Is another agricultural revolution, comparable to those we have known in the history of capitalism, possible? Does the present conjuncture represent a developmental crisis of capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new agro-ecological conditions for another long wave of accumulation, or are we now witnessing an epochal crisis of capitalism? These divergent possibilities are explored from a perspective that views capitalism as ‘world-ecology’, joining together the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity.

While Moore's analysis, from my perspective, places a bit too much emphasis on capitalism and, correspondingly, too little emphasis on the consequences of industrialization, he provides a significantly more nuanced view of the social portion of socio-ecological systems than most individuals working with the concept.

Finally, for those wanting more Moore, Jason has graciously posted many of his papers to the web.

How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth's Resources

The September issue of Scientific American (Scientific American 303, 74 - 81 2010
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0910-74) includes a graphically rich summary of information about the availability of natural resources and various other environmental matters. For those who don't have access to the magazine, there is also a interactive version (see below). While the information is the same, I didn't find the interface to be particularly user friendly. Yes .... the interactive version is right here. But, really, you might want to have a look at the good old print version (or its pdf cousin) :+) There are also a variety of related articles and web resources.



What's Left?Powered by Ergo:Ux

Hermaphroditic frogs, hip-hop science & corporate culture

In 1997 UC Berkley endocrinologist Tyrone Hayes was contracted by a subsidiary of Syngenta corporation to do research on the widely used agricultural chemical atrazine. Not surprisingly, the company wasn't pleased when Hayes concluded that the chemical might affect male reproductive development in frogs. Prevented by the terms of the contract from publishing the results, Hayes waited for the contract to expire, repeated an expanded version of the research he had done under contract and published the results. Thus began what has become a decade long battle between Hayes and Syngenta.

Hayes, who has always admitted to wearing two hats -- that of objective scientist and that of impassioned activist -- has long been recognized as a character. As in the clip below, he frequently peppers his academic talks with a rap delivery.



It turns out, however, that his hip-hop style has a bit of a gangsta flavor. For years Hayes has been sending rap emails with what is being described as lewd and inappropriate comments to various Syngenta employees. Now, in an attempt to discredit Hayes and his research, Syngenta has released the documents and actively worked to construct an ethical controversy.

Atrazine has been banned in the EU and, with the EPA re-re-restudying its allow-ability in the US, Syngenta seems to have shot off both barrels; attacking both Hayes and his research. It seems that the blood sport of American politics is beginning to affect its science as well.

For those interested in more, a brief clip of an academic talk by Hayes is below and here are links to the legal complaint against Hayes, the emails he sent, articles questioning the ethics of his actions in Nature and Science, and an article outlining the early history of the relationship between Hayes and Syngenta (which dates back to 1997) can be found here.

Artificial meat by 2050?

While perhaps not as dystopian as Margaret Atwood's view of headless chickens bred so that they are easier to feed and don't peck each other in the close quarters of factory farms, academics are now suggesting artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth. Even taking account of enhanced productivity from new technologies like GM foods and nanotechnology, hundreds of millions of people may still go hungry owing to a combination of climate change, water shortages and increasing food consumption.

These are some of the more striking conclusions reported by a set of high level UK academics in the current issue of The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B which is devoted to 21 papers dealing with the topic of Food Security: Feeding the World in 2050. Among the topics are the following:

• Dimensions of global population projections: what do we know about future population trends and structures?
• Food consumption trends and drivers
• Urbanization and its implications for food and farming
• Income distribution trends and future food demand
• Possible changes to arable crop yields by 2050
• Livestock production: recent trends, future prospects
• Trends and future prospects for Marine and Inland capture fisheries
• Competition for land, water and ecosystem services
• Implications of climate change for agricultural productivity in the early twenty-first century
• Globalization's effects on world agricultural trade, 1960–2050
• Agricultural R&D, technology and productivity
• Food waste within food supply chains: quantification and potential for change to 2050
..... and a number of others

Taken together the papers provide a exceptionally thorough look at the future of food supply.

While the scale of the problem, increasing food supply by 70% in the next 40 years, is daunting, the researchers don't see it as insurmountable. The papers identify a number of potential avenues to increase supply. Moreover, as with the current energy debate, there is likely to be a struggle between existing agribusiness which will pressure governments for subsidies to increase supply and those who advocate conservation and efficiency (one of the papers suggest that there is 30-40% food waste in both rich and poor countries).

Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone 2010

The previous post showed a map of dead zones around the world. Nancy Rabalais, Executive Director of Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Chief Scientist aboard the research vessel Pelican, has released an update on the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone -- noting that it is one of the largest ever. Some pertinent quotes follow:

The area of hypoxia, or low oxygen, in the northern Gulf of Mexico west of the Mississippi River delta covered 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 square miles) of the bottom and extended far into Texas waters. The relative size is almost that of Massachusetts. The critical value that defines hypoxia is 2 mg/L, or ppm, because trawlers cannot catch fish or shrimp on the bottom when oxygen falls lower.

This summer’s hypoxic zone (“dead zone”) is one of the largest measured since the team of researchers from Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University began routine mapping in 1985. Dr. Nancy Rabalais, executive director of LUMCON and chief scientist aboard the research vessel Pelican, was unsure what would be found because of recent weather, but an earlier cruise by a NOAA fisheries team found hypoxia off the Galveston, Texas area. She commented “This is the largest such area off the upper Texas coast that we have found since we began this work in 1985.” She commented that “The total area probably would have been the largest if we had had enough time to completely map the western part.”

LSU’s Dr. R. Eugene Turner had predicted that this year’s zone would be 19,141 to 21,941 square kilometers, (average 20,140 square kilometers or 7,776 square miles), based on the amount of nitrate-nitrogen loaded into the Gulf in May. “The size of the hypoxic zone and nitrogen loading from the river is an unambiguous relationship,” said Turner. “We need to act on that information.”

The size of the summer’s hypoxic zone is important as a benchmark against which progress in nutrient reductions in the Mississippi River system can be measured. The Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Nutrient Management Task Force supports the goal of reducing the size of the hypoxic zone to less than 5,000 square kilometers, or 1,900 square miles, which will require substantial reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus reaching the Gulf. Including this summer’s area estimate, the 5-year average of 19,668 square kilometers (7,594 square miles) is far short of where water quality managers want to be by 2015.

For more information: http://www.gulfhypoxia.net

The 20 minute neighborhood and other ideas for Fredericton

Groups as different as Mother Nature Network, Popular Science, and Grist have ranked Portland Oregon as the most sustainable city in the US (though Portland was ranked 3rd by the Natural Resources Defense Council).

In a recent interview, Portland mayor Sam Adams talked about his new initiative -- the 20 minute neighborhood.

We're also working to make every section of Portland a complete 20-minute neighborhood to strengthen our local economy. Two-thirds of all trips in Portland and in most American cities are not about getting to and from work. So if I can offer quality, affordable goods and services, eliminate food deserts, have neighborhoods with schools and parks and amenities--if I can create these 20-minute complete neighborhoods all over Portland--it strengthens our local economy. We drive 20% less than cities of comparable size, and because we don't manufacture cars, produce oil, or have car insurance companies, every dollar that we don't spend elsewhere, will stay in Portland's economy. There's about $850 million that stays in Portlanders's pockets because we drive less. With a 20-minute neighborhood, also reduce congestion and meet our climate action plan goals.

It's interesting the way the idea is framed in terms of the local economy. I recently returned from a visit to the other Portland (Maine) where I was really impressed with the strength and sophistication of their 'Buy Local' initiative. They aim to get everyone to shift 10% of their spending to local stores pointing out that "For every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 stays in the local economy, creating jobs and expanding the city's tax base. For every $100 spent at a national chain or franchise store, only $14 remains in the community." Part of their success comes from the merger of local farms and the restaurant industry. Bon Appetit labeled Portland "America's Foodiest Small Town." They use some interesting electronic technology to help inform locals and tourists about food related matters. And the food is simply amazing. While I like our local Greek food at Dimitri's, it pales in comparison to what you get at Emilitsa. Probably the best meal of my life and definitely the best baklava!

Perhaps a better comparison for Fredericton is Bellingham, Washington (a university city of 67,000 people where I did my BA) and ranked Number 1 by the NRDC as the Greenest Small City in the US. They have an active Transition Towns movement.

GM Foods and Resilience Thinking

The National Academies of Science just released their first systematic assessment of genetically modified crops Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States. Here is a brief description of the report:

Since genetically engineered (GE) crops were introduced in 1996, their use in the United States has grown rapidly, accounting for 80-90 percent of soybean, corn, and cotton acreage in 2009. To date, crops with traits that provide resistance to some herbicides and to specific insect pests have benefited adopting farmers by reducing crop losses to insect damage, by increasing flexibility in time management, and by facilitating the use of more environmentally friendly pesticides and tillage practices. However, excessive reliance on a single technology combined with a lack of diverse farming practices could undermine the economic and environmental gains from these GE crops. Other challenges could hinder the application of the technology to a broader spectrum of crops and uses.

Several reports from the National Research Council have addressed the effects of GE crops on the environment and on human health. However, The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States is the first comprehensive assessment of the environmental, economic, and social impacts of the GE-crop revolution on U.S. farms. It addresses how GE crops have affected U.S. farmers, both adopters and nonadopters of the technology, their incomes, agronomic practices, production decisions, environmental resources, and personal well-being. The book offers several new findings and four recommendations that could be useful to farmers, industry, science organizations, policy makers, and others in government agencies.

It is interesting that a report which is generally supportive of the productivity gains that GM crops have provided is highly critical of those same crops from an ecological sociology perspective. Specifically, there is a concern with a) the tendency toward homogeneity (i.e., monocrops) and the resulting lack of resilience in the agricultural ecosystems and b) the emergence of glyphosate resistant diseases due to the wide spread use of Round-up (a glyphosate based herbicide) in combination with Monsanto's Round-up ready GM seeds. The latter development leads farmers to use additional, even more toxic chemicals, to kill off the unwanted weeds.

Local systems

Decentralization is a major idea in lots of environmental thought. It can be traced back at least to 1973 and Schumacher's classic work Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. But, as local food producers are discovering, it isn't sufficient to localize one element of the system, you have to decentralize the whole system. The NYTimes has an interesting article illustrating the problem: small farmers are cutting back on the production of locally raised meat because they are unable to access slaughterhouses.

Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People

The current issue of Science magazine has a special section on Food Security. The introduction to the section, along with a list of the articles, is available here. One of the most interesting articles, "The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People" (Science 12 February 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5967, pp. 812 - 818 DOI: 10.1126/science.1185383) takes an ecological sociology perspective arguing that "the goal is no longer simply to maximize productivity, but to optimize across a far more complex landscape of production, environmental, and social justice outcomes." In other words, the global food security isn't simply a matter of sufficient food, it involves a number of interconnected problems: 1) Matching the rapidly changing demand for food from a larger and more affluent population to its supply, 2) in ways that are environmentally and socially sustainable and 3) ensure that the world’s poorest people are no longer hungry.

Aquaculture, specialization and resilience

In New Brunswick, where factory farmed salmon have largely replaced wild salmon, aquaculture immediately conjures up an image of unsustainable economic specialization. Over 100 fish farms now dot the coastline, using the Bay of Fundy as a sink for their waste.

In contrast,fish and crustaceans have been farmed sustainably in Asia for at least 3000 years. However, rising global demand for seafood has led to the development of new technologies and culture systems and pressure to for specialized production similar to that found in New Brunswick. But, unlike New Brunswick, there are active attempts to develop more sustainable alternatives. An interesting example aimed at increasing both economic productivity and ecosystem resilience is captured in the photo below of a rice/shrimp farm in Soc Trang province in the Mekong Delta during the wet season. In the dry season the rice fields are filled with brackish water and the farmers produce a crop of shrimps. Early in the next wet season the fields are flushed with freshwater and the next rice crop is planted. This dual crop strategy is sustainable and has positively transformed the economy of the region.



This example is described in detail in Troell, M. 2009. Integrated marine and brackishwater aquaculture in tropical regions: research, implementation and prospects. In D. Soto (ed.). Integrated mariculture: a global review. The abstract of the publication does a nice job of outlining the key ideas involved:

While the concept and practice of integrated aquaculture is well-known in inland environments particularly in Asia, in the marine environment, it has been much less reported. However, in recent years the idea of integrated aquaculture has been often considered a mitigation approach against the excess nutrients/organic matter generated by intensive aquaculture activities particularly in marine waters. In this context, integrated multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA) has emerged, where multitrophic refers to the explicit incorporation of species from different trophic positions or nutritional levels in the same system. Integrated marine aquaculture can cover a diverse range of co-culture/ farming practices, including IMTA, and even more specialized forms of integration such as mangrove planting with aquaculture, called aquasilviculture. Integrated mariculture has many benefits, among wich bioremediation is one of the most relevant, and yet is not valued in its real social and economic potential although the present document provides some initial economic estimates for the integration benefits derived from bioremediation. Reducing risks is also an advantage and profitable aspect of farming multiple species in marine environments (as in freshwaters): a diversified product portfolio increases the resilience of the operation, for instance when facing changing prices for one of the farmed species or the accidental catastrophic destruction of a crop. Yet such perspectives are far from been considered in mariculture where, on the contrary, there is a tendency to monoculture.

Urban Food Webs And Resilience

Food Web Resilience

The Great Agricultural Land Grab

What do you do if your country has an increasing population, a lack of agricultural land and lots of cash? The standard answer coming from the CEO's of large corporations in the developed world is "give us money to develop more productive crops. We developed 'miracle rice' back in the 60's and with sufficient development funds we can save you again."

Increasingly, however, it appears that these countries are opting for an alternative solution: shopping for agricultural land in even less developed countries. When I visited my daughter last Christmas, she had this fascinating map up on her wall. Taken from an article in The Guardian, it graphically depicts the location of various land purchases made by several wealthy developing countries: China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emerits. Convinced they will not be able to provide the food necessary for their future populations, they have started to invest heavily in countries with historically unproductive agricultural lands like Sudan and Ethiopia, with the intent of using the land to support their burgeoning populations. A number of people have questioned the ethics of such actions since these African countries are already unable to feed their populations and, hence, can ill afford to use their land for export crops.

Thanks to the efforts of the folks at Grain and their related website (farmlandgrab.org), these developments are receiving an increasing amount of attention. The recent NYTimes Magazine article 'Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism' provides a good overview of the issue.

Stewart Brand on 4 Environmental Heresies

Stewart Brand, the author of the Whole Earth Catalog, was one of the leaders of the 60's environmental movement. He has recently been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. His ideas (Cities are Green! Nukes are Green! Gene modification is Green! Geoengineering is Probably Necessary!) have recently been published in WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto a review of which is available here.

For the video inclined, he covers much the same ground in this TED talk.

Climate Change and Agriculture in East Africa

In the context of the earlier post discussing expected changes in global agricultural productivity by 2050 (in which the southern hemisphere suffers hugely), it is reassuring to see the recent article "Adapting to climate change: Agricultural system and household impacts in East Africa" in the journal Agricultural Systems.

While East Africa is likely to be one of the least affected regions on the continent, the article notes:

Yields of staples like maize and beans will double in the region's highland areas as a result of rising temperatures, as warmer climates make crops mature faster.

But the reverse is likely to occur in both drier and more humid areas, with crop harvests decreasing significantly in these places.

In the worst-affected areas, the researchers recommend farmers keep more livestock, switch to more drought-hardy crops such as sorghum, or abandon crop cultivation altogether. New sources of income might include carbon sequestration, they say.

In areas where the effects of climate change are likely to be less severe and crop losses more moderate, the authors call for the adoption of new technologies and agricultural techniques — such as water harvesting — that will enable farmers to continue growing crops.

While it is somewhat comforting to know that mitigation techniques are plausibly successful in such the region, there remains the pressing issue of providing the resources necessary to make such adaptation possible.

World Development Report 2010 focuses on Climate Change

The most recent World Bank Development Report, WDR 2010, focuses on development and climate change. The main ideas of the report aren't particularly surprising: a) both developed and developing countries need to address emissions now and b) developing countries can shift to lower-carbon paths while promoting development and reducing poverty, but this depends on financial and technical assistance from high-income countries.

However, there are a number of interesting specifics. Among them this map showing the predicted global changes in agricultural productivity. Canada, Northern Europe and Russia are the big winners, with the southern hemisphere suffering substantially.


Another graph compares the emissions savings from more fuel efficient cars in the US with the additional emissions needed to provide 1.6 billion people in developing countries with electricity. Quite a thought provoking comparison.

Organic Farming in the US

The New York Times took 2007 USDA data and mapped the location of all farms and of organic ones. They noted:

"The map of organic farms in the United States is clustered into a few geographic centers, a strikingly different pattern than the map of all farms, which spreads densely over many regions, breaking only for the Rockies and Western deserts.

Areas in the Northeast and Northwest have many small organic farms that sell produce directly to consumers. Large organic farms, which some critics call organic agribusiness, have flourished in California.

The largest organic markets by far are for vegetables, fruit and dairy products, according to Catherine Greene, an economist at the Agriculture Department.

Organic vegetables now account for 5 percent of all vegetable sales; organic dairies, which are the fastest-growing sector, now produce 1 percent of the nation’s milk."