Long term performance of organic farming in the hills and uplands - Redesdale and Pwllpeiran organic units - OF0368

Summary

During the 1990’s significant areas of hill and upland in the UK were converted to organic production. In the short term, this was driven by the downturn in conventional prices for beef and sheep, and the aid to conversion payments available. In more recent years there has been an expansion of organic farming in lowland beef and sheep, and arable systems. This provides a better opportunity to integrate hill and lowland production, and address some of the problems of infrastructure e.g. organic concentrate feed supply and limited finishing capacity for hill livestock. Decoupling of EU support from production, through the single farm payment scheme, will affect the financial performance and longer-term sustainability of both organic and conventional production systems. By altering the scale and type of production on conventional farms, CAP reform also has the potential to impact, directly and indirectly, on the development and long-term prospects for organic farming in the hills and uplands.
Supported by previous Defra-funded research, the overall objective of this project is to analyse physical and financial performance from the long-term data collected on the upland organic units at ADAS Redesdale and Pwllpeiran.The project consolidated and interpreted the data collected at Redesdale up to March 2006. This report presented the results to Defra. The technical messages were to be communicated more widely by means of an e-booklet by 31 March 2007.