Horticulture Week
29 May 2009

The way protected crops are grown organically is likely to come under scrutiny as the EU’s standing committee on organic farming seeks to fill gaps in European regulations which came into force in January.

Roger Hitchings, head of the advisory service at the Elm Farm Organic Research Centre, said that both old and new regulations had been based on field production.

“There’s an absence of specifics to allow every state to take a common view on protected cropping,” he said.

For instance, some Scandinavian countries had chosen to interpret EU rules as allowing the production of protected crops in grow bags rather than in soil, as was accepted practice in the UK. That meant they were not only shortcutting the conversion process but also changing the definition of “organic”, he said.

Hitchings said the certification body in Iceland’s detailed standards for organic protected cropping state production must be soil-based, and that “These standards have informed the UK’s position”.