'The Case of Stockfree Organic', by Richard Taylor of the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University and Piergiuseppe Morone of the University of Napoli is a conference paper which was presented to the Diversity, Inter-Connectivity and Sustainability Stream at the Complexity, Science & Society Conference, the University of Liverpool, in September 2005.
'... This paper argues that organic growing is associated with high levels of agricultural and ecological diversity, and should be understood as "complex systems of culture" compared to conventional farming. The objective of this paper is to use a framework of complexity theory to investigate the ability of organic systems to meet the contemporary challenges of uncertainty and change in food production, by testing for the properties of resilience, adaptivity and innovation. We present a case study of Stockfree Organic Services (SOS), a committee of organic growers who are trying to promote a new ‘higher’ standard of organic production called ‘Stockfree Organic’ (SO) in which the farms and commercial gardens are free of all animal inputs ...'
You can read the paper online at
http://cfpm.org/~richard/diversity_stockfree/paper_diversity_stockfree_1_1.pdf