Organic Farming and Quality of Food

Organic farming is becoming increasingly popular all over the world. Many consumers are feeling disillusioned from chemically produced foods and are making efforts to buy organic. Extensive use of chemicals and anti-biotics in inorganic food production technology compelled the health conscious people to explore and support organic farming methods in agriculture. In this context, this study was undertaken to analyse the Organic Farming and Quality of Food produced in Shimoga district of Karnataka. The survey was undertaken for collecting primary data from 420 equal number of organic and inorganic paddy farmers during 2011-2012. The study found that the illiterate and primary education category, the percentage of respondents is more among inorganic farmers compared to their counterparts in the organic farmers. It is quite natural that the knowledgeable people are more inclined towards the innovative farming practices added to increasing health awareness also encourages people to go for organic farming. The most important finding is that higher community people are more inclined towards organic farming and backward people like scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) are still practising inorganic farming. It is a fact that the upper caste people have more awareness about the negative effects of high external input based and unsustainable inorganic farming, hence large proportion of upper caste farmers are switching over to organic farming than the lower caste farmers. Growing interest in the organic agriculture is increasing consciousness about health hazards associated with agro-chemicals. Finally, 95.2 per cent of the respondents expressed the opinion that they shifted from inorganic to organic paddy to produce the health food, however majority of them are growing organic paddy for their self-consumption.