Reply #533: That's because until recently the organic market was very small

[Hippo_Tron]

And it is true that once the demand is there, you will see tiny industries expand greatly in size and efficiency and prices will go down. But the agriculture industry isn't a tiny industry, it is already a huge industry and there's a certain point where you simply can't just keep making the industry bigger and more efficient until new technology becomes available to do so.

As far as subsidies go, it does indeed drastically reduce the incentives to operating your business efficiently. Efficiency doesn't inherently mean more profit, it means producing at the lowest cost possible. I'm not saying that farmers don't work hard. But if subsidies were removed some farms would go under because they can't become more efficient and some farms would be forced to become more efficient to avoid going under. That means that because of subsidies we are producing inefficiently.