Regional Farmers Markets has decided to become more pro-active in promoting the organics philosophy through its markets. Over the next few years RFM’s selection criteria will gradually move to placing more importance on offering sites to local/regional certified organic growers and growers in transition to organic. RFM will continue to maintain its commitment to supporting other quality local growers and producers.

This move is line with RFM’s overall philosophy of supporting healthy and sustainable lifestyles for individuals, families and local communities.

RFM believes that by supporting this shift to organics we are supporting the improved future health of natural systems, farming systems and the wider community.

Organics has many benefits, which include:

Farmers Markets already support sustainability by reducing the amount of ‘food miles’ to get to the customer. This means that less CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere.

By moving to an ‘Organics First’ philosophy we plan to strengthen our commitment to a sustainable and healthy future. By supporting local organic growers you will be supporting the health of your family, and the wider natural environment, now and into the future.

Organics is about caring for nature. It’s about providing a sustainable future for all of us. It’s also about providing healthy, highly nutritious food to eat. It is not about ‘careful taking’. It is about working with nature to maintain, improve and secure diversity, richness and abundance.

Nature has always value-added by building reserves and increasing diversity and productivity.

Current mainstream agricultural practices tend go against this principle of adding to the long term value of natural resources. In the quest for quantity over quality they withdraw more value than they return. These practices remove topsoil, introduce potentially harmful chemicals into the environment and reduce diversity.

Organic principles are based on working with Nature to add value – improving the soil, increasing capacity, reducing or removing pollution and working to secure the future.

Its all in the Soils

Originally Organic Farming was mainly focused on becoming ‘chemical free’. While this has remained an important tenet organic farming has generally evolved to a more holistic approach to sustainable farm management.

This holistic farm management approach is based on securing, maintaining and improving healthy soils and ecosystems, which in turn support the long term production of high quality food which is healthy, nutritious and tasty.

Healthy soils lead to healthy crops - which are not attractive to insects or disease.

Industrial agriculture uses chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides which have been clearly demonstrated to damage soil and crop health to the point whereby the crops become more attractive and susceptible to insects and diseases. Yes, that’s right. Industrial agricultural chemicals, besides being potentially detrimental to the general health of humans and ecosystems actually make crops more attractive and susceptible to insects and diseases.

So even though you might kill the weeds, diseases and insects you are targeting in the short term, in the medium to long term you are encouraging and nourishing worse infestations. This process leads to the use of more and more chemicals …. Until you get to the point where chemicals are seen as essential to farming – farmers too terrified of disease or insects to get off the merry-go-round.

While this is happening chemicals build up in the environment, the soil is being depleted and the crops are gradually declining in quality.

The way to break this cycle is to support organic farmers who are improving the quality of their soils, and thereby improving the quality of their produce.

At Farmers Markets you have the opportunity to talk to stallholders about their farming practices and/or the ingredients they use in their products – and the quality of their products.

We will be adding to our website more background and detail about Organic Farming practices and the certification process. These articles will cover topics like: