Swiss organic agriculture
Organic agriculture research is flourishing in Frick, Switzerland, the home of Forschungsinstitut fur Biologishchen Landbau (FIBL), the "Research Institute of Organic Agriculture." FIBL was started in 1973 as a private trust and moved to its current site in 1996. In its early years it served as the world secretariat of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). FIBL staff has organized key organic agriculture conferences over the years including the first IFOAM conferences in 1977 and 2000. In 1980, it set up BIO Suisse, the largest certifying organization in Switzerland. FIBL donated its green bud logo to the certifying organization.
Urs Niggli is the director of the institute, which has a staff of 120 in its Swiss office and smaller branches in Germany and Austria. Institute personnel conduct a range of disciplinary research as well as on-farm integrated studies. Lucius Tamm is the director of plant protection.
Institute scientists work with representative organic pilot farms throughout Switzerland, conduct regional and landscape studies, and socioeconomic and biological analysis of the 6,400 commercial organic farms in Switzerland. Organic farms make up 12 percent of all Swiss farms (11 percent of the land in Switzerland is farmed). Recently, the journal Nature published the results of a 21-year farming systems comparison trial conducted by institute researchers. About one-third of the institute's approximately $10 million in funding comes from the Swiss government, while 20 percent is from public European Union competitive grants, 14 percent from private funds, and 13 percent is from Swiss international cooperation projects. The remainder of the funding is from publication sales and training events.
FIBL is a cooperator on a 2004 European Union-funded project to improve quality, ensure safety and reduce costs in the organic and low-input food supply chains. The project includes 31 research institutions, companies and universities throughout Europe and will address social and natural science objectives including producer's aims and consumer expectations, cost-efficiency in the organic food chain, food safety risks, environmental cost-efficiency in the organic food chain, food safety risks, and environmental impact and fossil energy use.
Organic winegrapes
FIBL viticulturalist Dominique Levite is evaluating varieties and clones suitable for organic projection that include wine quality and disease resistance, focusing on downy mildew but also looking at Botrytis gray mold, powdery mildew, and black rot. The research is incorporating resistance from hybrid grape crosses as well as maintaining wine quality comparable with pure Vitus vinifera varietal wines.
Compost production and use
FIBL researchers Jacques Fuchs and Mohamed Larbi are working on compost production and disease suppression; they are characterizing locally produced compost from municipalities for key chemical, physical, and biological properties and relating these to bioassays indicative of disease suppressiveness. A portion of the research is focusing on the damping off pathogen, Pythium ultimum in cucumber to assess general suppressiveness of the composts, and Rhizoctonia solani on basil to test specific suppressiveness potentially driven by Trichoderma species that occur naturally in the composts. They are also evaluating the use of compost extracts in both of these crop systems and looking at possible mode(s) of action. They are also testing whether the biological control is due to specific microbial organisms alive in the compost or induced resistance to the plants themselves, and are looking at using the compost extracts against downy mildew in grapes and apple scab in apples, two key Swiss pathosystems.
Organic plant disease management
Tamm's group, including Barbara Thuerig, is working on the use of an aqueous extract of cell wall fragments of a dried mycelium byproduct of Penicillium chrysogenum (PEN) used in pharmaceutical production. They have found that PEN induces resistance to a variety of pathogens such as Phytophthora infestans, Collectotrichum lagenarium, Uncinula necator, and Plasmopara viticola in crops including tomatoes, cucumbers and grapevines. PEN works as well as some currently commercially available host plant resistance elicitors such as the harpin protein, although there are some phytotoxic effects that need to be reduced, either through greater purification of the material and/or isolating the active ingredient in the induction process, or through formulation. Researcher Hans-Jakob Scharer conducts trials with Tamm on organically permitted fungicides on grapes and apples, where key diseases include downy mildew and apple scab. They are looking for alternatives to copper because its overuse has resulted in water and soil quality problems.
The retail sector
The Coop, the second largest food retailer in Switzerland, is the largest supplier of organic food in the country. Switzerland's largest retailer, Migros, accounts for 25 percent of the organic retail market, with all other retailers totally 25 percent. The Coop has provided 100 million Swiss francs ($78 million U.S.) to address sustainability in food, energy, textiles and landscape management over the past 10 years through its Coop Naturplan fund. FIBL has received about 1 million Swiss francs ($780,000 U.S.) annually since 2003 from the Coop for research to improve the supply chain. Swiss consumers spent more on organic food in 2004 than other European consumers.
For more information on FIBL, visit their multilingual Web site at http://www.fibl.org/english/index.php. FIBL also publishes monthly magazines in French and German, informational folios, conferences and workshops, and with the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming and the German Federal Organic Agriculture Programme has created an online database of the published literature relevant to organic farming at http://orgprints.org/.
