Organic agriculture – importance and development

Abstract

Agriculture, as the most important strategic industry, is tasked with providing sufficient quantities of quality and safe food. Intensive and often excessive, uncontrolled, and unskilled use of the means for protection and nutrition of plants, as well as means for the prevention or treatment of animals, are carried out to increase yields in conventional production. This approach in food production has contributed to the increasingly common endangerment of the health of plants, animals and humans, as well as significant environmental endangerment. Unlike conventional production, organic food production is now increasingly attracting interest from modern consumers. However, organic agriculture involves not only producing without artificial fertilizers and other agrochemicals, but without antibiotics and hormones too. It is more of a holistic production system that functions as a sustainable unit, and unites interconnected and conditioned actors: plants, animals, microorganisms, insects, organic and mineral soil matter, and humans. In Serbia, organic agriculture has been developing for the last thirty years. However, the intensive development of organic agriculture has only happened in the last decade, with plant organic production being more developed than animal organic production.