About 15-20% of California’s certified organic farmers drop their certification each year, and researchers at the California Institute for Rural Studies wanted to know why. So they interviewed 104 farmers who had recently been deregistered with the California Department of Food and Agriculture Organic Program. Here are some of the trends they discovered:

• 27 of the farmers the state listed as deregistered had not really dropped their certification – the state agency was mistaken for a variety of reasons.
• Of the 77 who really did drop their organic registration, 35% had quit farming.
• Of the 48 who were still farming, 60% reverted to conventional practices, and 40% said they were either still using organic methods or were using methods they described as “beyond organic.”

Several survey questions were included to assess the degree of philosophical or pragmatic attitudes toward organic farming: 40% of respondents rated as ‘philosophical’ in their outlook, while 17% were primarily ‘pragmatic.’ The remaining 43% were balanced between the two attitudes. Small-scale (less than 50 acres) farm operators tended to be more philosophical in their attitude toward organic farming. Almost 50% of these farmers fell in the “philosophical” category, with just 8% in the “pragmatic” category and the remainder in the “balanced” category. Conversely, there were no farm operators over 50 acres that could be categorized as predominantly “philosophical.”  (http://www.cirsinc.org/SustainableFoodSystems.html)