Dr. Kevin Hanrahan:

As Department officials have stated, there has been a very welcome growth in the number of organic farms and the area of organic farming but my expectation would have been that the first people to become organic farmers are those with the shortest to travel to qualify as an organic farmer. That is, they are relatively low-stocked, with low levels of use of chemical fertilisers. That seems to be revealed in the data. For the time, we have got an NFS sample of organic farms that we hope to publish before the end of the year. That will give us an insight into what these farms look like and how less intensive they are. That will basically help us inform our assessment of what this movement into organics means in terms of animals displaced and emissions reduced.