Austria: 30 percent organic by 2025

Austria is continuing to play a pioneer role in Europe in terms of organic. The new target is organic management of 30% of its agricultural land by 2025.

As the organic association Bio Austria, together with the state agricultural marketing organisation AMA, announced at BioFach, the target had been 20%. Austria has now gone beyond that figure, with 571,585 hectares currently being farmed organically – 22% of the area of agricultural land. Austria has 21,820 organic farms, which is 19% of the country's total number of farms. “More than every fifth hectare is cultivated today in compliance with organic guidelines. The expansion of the organic land area every year - from 2015 to 2016 it was around 26,500 hectares – is roughly the size of Malta, which is something like 38,000 football pitches,” explained Gertraud Grabmann, the head of Bio Austria.

She said this is why it is now time to create a new milestone: “Together with our politicians, we should adopt as our new target 30% of all agricultural land being managed by 2025 in keeping with the organic guidelines.” She added that the reason why they are moving forwards like this is the fact that the potential of organic farming in Austria is still far from being fully exploited.