Organic agricultural production in Australia: 2010-11 and 2015-16

Summary

In 2010-11 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) included organic agriculture in its census, which was repeated in 2015-16. In this paper the progress of the Australian organic production between those two years is tracked.
In 2015-16 the farm gate value of organic production in Australia was estimated at well over $1.1 billion, almost three times the value estimated five years earlier, in 2010-11.
By far the largest contributor to the growth in that period was beef – with an almost six-fold increase in returns since 2010-11 – due mainly to the enormous growth in organic grazing areas (covering over 90 per cent of the area under organic agriculture in 2015-16), but also partly to an increase in beef prices in the conventional market and in premiums.
However,the Australian organic sector is more than extensive grazing. There is also a more intensive agriculture with broad-acre and horticultural crops, where livestock is kept in a more intensively managed way.