On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, Mike Spencer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Pete> Organic flax is inherently expensive... > > Why is that so? > > And are there detectable amounts of herbicide in ordinary linseed oil? > > >- Mike
Well, when we started, all organic stuff was expensive as (as far as we could tell) a result of supply and demand. There weren't enough people making it for the demand level. Initially, we thought with our entry into the market, if we were successful, it would inspire more farmers to produce the product, which would lower our cost. However, what happened was that our success inspired other manufacturers to copy our product, so the increased production was gobbled up by competitors, and during the time I was involved and saw the numbers, the price never went down significantly. There seemed to be a level which the farmers demanded, and it only ever dropped slightly with good crop years, otherwise trending upward with inflation and spiking occasionally with bad harvests. There was one particularly bad year in the latter half of the nineties where the price almost doubled. After averaging through stocks on hand, that translated to a boost in retail price of more than a third. I've wondered if there weren't more clever things the farmers could be doing. Flax is also the source of linen, but conventional wisdom says that linen flax is a different variety, even though oil flax growers complain that the persistent long fibres from the flax plant interferes with their cultivating machinery, and clearing it out of the fields was part of what makes flax cultivation expensive. I would have thought there would be some sort of way to utilize it if it were that persistent. Maybe that is being done now, as I gather flax crops are becoming steadily more common. As far as organics and herbicides, the standard for north america is that it can be called "organic" if there have been no chemicals used for five years. I don't know if there are other tests done as well; I was never involved in that aspect of the project. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
