10 Reasons Why Organic Food Costs More
For most of the people, who are yet to get familiarized with organic food product, such products are less expensive as compared to the conventional food products. After all, in the production of organic foods, nothing artificial such as synthetic pesticides, artificial growth hormones or other chemicals are utilized. Yes, that is true, but here comes the surprise. According to a recent market research, the organic products are typically 20 per cent to 100 per cent more expensive as compared to their traditional counterparts. Keeping this fact in mind, we can easily find a majority of population that really want to move towards organic product, but fail to afford the price tag. Now, you would be wondering what are the factors that work as the driving force behind such raised prices! Well, to answer your questions, today we are going to discuss the factors behind the expensive organic products. So, let’s get started.
1. No Chemical means More Labor: In the conventional farming, agriculturists and farmers utilize chemicals and several artificial pesticides, ending up declining the overall production cost as the job is done quite faster and lot more efficiently. Without any such assistance in the organic farming, organic farmers require more field workers for tasks such as cleanup of polluted water, weed removal and taking care of pesticide contamination.
2. Demand Dominating Supply: The latest data claims that the number of populations opting for organic products is steadily growing while the farmland that is under organic farming is simply 0.9% of the total global farmland, which is definitely not sufficient to meet the increasing demand. Moreover, as compared to the conventional farms, organic farms tend to produce less due to zero utilization of chemicals. Conventional farms easily meet the demand, thus keeping down the costs by producing huge quantities.
3. Expensive Fertilizers for Organic Crops: Well, you might definitely not want chemical fertilizers and sewage sludge in your dinner plate, but you would be surprised to know that conventional farmers utilize them as they are quite cheap and easy to transport. Organic farmers skip these harmful and inexpensive solutions to keep the products all natural. Rather using chemicals on the crops, organic farmers use animal manure and compost that is quite expensive to ship.
4. Crop Rotation: Rather using the harmful weed killing chemicals, organic farmers use some of the most sophisticated manners such as crop rotation to keep the soil healthy and prevent the growth of weed in the fields. Usually such farmers, after harvesting the crop, use that particular area to grow what known as ‘cover crops’ that is known to add nitrogen and other elements in the soil, benefitting the next lot of crop. Now, the conventional farmers prefer using fertilizers to add the decreased amount of nitrogen. Due to crop rotation, the frequency of growing profitable crops decreases and that is why organic farmers fail to produce enough crop.
5. Slow Growth: As compared to the conventional farming, the organic crops take more time to reach the ripening stage as organic farmers don’t use any kind of chemicals or so-called growth hormones to facilitate the growing process.
With that being said, these are some of the many reasons why organic products are expensive than conventional food products. But in the end, health is all that matters and that’s why it is always better to shift towards organic food products.
