Organic Research Database
WSU Organic Agriculture Project Database
The WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources (CSANR) has developed a web database of organic agriculture projects. The goal is two-fold:
- Improve access for those seeking information on organic agriculture in the state;
- Create a record of organic agriculture projects to track institutional involvement and public investment over time.
WSU faculty, staff and students, along with others with organic research and education projects in the state, are invited to add organic agriculture projects to the data base. To add projects, or if you have any questions, please contact David Granatstein at granats@wsu.edu.
Using the Database
The database consists of a series of tables that contain the data on specific projects and project leaders.
Search Database for various searches, particularly to find a specific project or find what projects exist on a specific topic.
Search Faculty and Staff if you know of a person doing the work you are interested in. All the projects a person has submitted to the database will be listed.
Browse Projects by Keyword to see what is available in a more general way. List All Projects lets you see what is entered under general keywords (caution: a project is only listed by the most frequent keyword used and may not show up where you think it should).
List All Keywords helps you fine-tune searching by knowing what keywords have been entered into the database from the different projects.
Background
The emergence of the term ‘organic farming’ to describe a distinct system of agriculture began in the first half of the 20th century, with significant public visibility occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, most land grant universities experienced a significant shift of focus towards environmentally sound and sustainable food systems, but few have focused on organic systems due to the very small acreage and number of farms involved. Organic farming expanded dramatically in the last decade, and this expansion continues today. In response, public agricultural institutions are beginning to dedicate resources to support the needs of the organic sector.
Washington State University has a history of support for organic farming, starting as early as the mid-1970’s when a few research and extension faculty members engaged in organic farming projects. For instance, the first USDA report on organic farming (1980), was chaired by a USDA scientist who was based at WSU Pullman. Yet another WSU scientist chaired the first symposium on organic farming at the American Society of Agronomy national meetings. This led to a publication on Organic Farming by that society in 1984. Researchers and graduate students at WSU have published articles on their organic farming research in well-known peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and New Scientist. Extension faculty have also contributed by organizing numerous conferences and workshops, in addition to publishing several extension bulletins about organic production.
This database covers Research, Teaching, and Extension activities in Organic Farming at Washington State University. It began as an e-mail survey by Carol Miles and David Granatstein, WSU CSANR, in April 2001 and was presented as a publication of CSANR (Miles, C., D. Granatstein, and T. Koskinen. 2002. An assessment of organic farming research, teaching and extension at Washington State University. Report No. 3, Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, Washington State University, Puyallup, WA. 25 pp.; available in PDF). Through the survey, faculty in the WSU College of Agriculture and Home Economics were asked to describe their past or present organic farming research, teaching and education efforts.
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