Why Is Organic Farming Bad – If It Is?
April 12, 2010
Why is organic farming bad, if it is? We have been told that organic farming is good for our health. Proponents have trumpeted the message that organic farming is good for the environment. How could it possibly be bad?
It seems that, increasingly, life is being divided into traditional and alternative. Each side claims their methods to be better than the other’s. Each tries to win people to their side. Traditional schooling fights alternative schooling. Conventional medicine fights alternative medicine. Mainstream culture fights alternative subcultures.
Farming, too, is involved in a battle, conventional farming against organic farming. Environmentalists and those concerned with their health assure us that organic farming is preferable in many ways. But others argue that organic farming is bad.
Why is organic farming bad?
Research Results
In 2002, Swiss scientists at the Research Institute for Organic Agriculture published in “Scientist” a highly publicized study. Their study, which covered 21 years, compared four types of farming. Two of those types were organic farming. The other two types were conventional farming.
Reporters quickly stated that the study proved organic farming was more efficient. Organic farming’s advocates said the study showed that organic farming uses 50% less energy. The facts?
1. Conventional farming is 20 percent more productive than organic farming.
2. Crop yields were significantly lower in organic farming.
3. The above two facts meant energy savings in organic farming were actually only about 19 percent per unit of crop produced, not 50 percent.
4. The study did not test organic farming against the most current methods of conventional farming. If it had, experts say, the 19 percent advantage of organic farming would disappear.
5. Current conventional farming matches organic farming when it comes to environmental advantages. Both have beneficial insects, produce less pesticide and fertilizer runoff, and reduce soil erosion.
6. Food quality was almost identical in conventional and organic farming. Advocates of organic farming had long claimed their food was far superior.
7. Current conventional farming methods produce the same or greater yields mentioned in number 1 above.
This research does not, of course, conclude that organic farming is bad. On the face of it, the conclusion is more that organic farming is not very different from current conventional farming. There most be other reasons for people believing organic farming is bad.
Organic Farming Can Kill
Many took from the Swiss study a realization that, as Cambridge chemist John Emsley said, “the greatest catastrophe the human race could face this century is not global warming, but a global conversion to ‘organic farming’- [where] an estimated 2 billion people would perish.”
Organic farming may supply food for small markets, but how can it feed starving nations? Its adversaries claim that current conventional farming is the only hope for these people. If we turn entirely to organic farming, they say, we will doom billions to die of starvation.
Challenging Organic Farming
Alex Avery, Director of Research and Education for the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues, recently published a new book, “The Truth About Organic Foods.” (2006) In this book, Avery offers an unemotional look at the odd origins and unscientific basis for organic farming.
Nobel Peace Prize Winning Agricultural Scientist, Dr. Norman Borlaug, says about this book, “The Truth About Organic Foods gives consumers a thorough and straight-forward explanation of why organic foods offer no real health or safety benefits. More importantly, Avery communicates why organic farming’s lower yields and reliance on scarce organic fertilizers represents a potential threat to the world’s forests, wetlands and grasslands. The book offers scientifically sound evidence that more-affordable conventional foods are healthy for families and also good stewardship of nature.”
Skimming Mr. Avery’s book, one finds statements that indicate:
1. Organic farming started in the 1920s when a German mystic advised use of only animal manure because synthetic fertilizers had no cosmic energy.
2. Soon, the wealthy decided manure-fertilized produce was better.
3. J.I. Rodale first published his “Organic Gardening Magazine” in 1942, and the organic farming / organic gardening movement was named.
4. In 2007, organic farming advocates still have no credible science to support their beliefs.
5. Organic farming does not avoid pesticides. About 5 percent a vegetable’s weight is natural pesticides, some of which are cancer-causing.
6. Foods from organic farming have more illness-causing bacteria. (The January 2007 issue of “Consumer Reports” showed that chicken from organic farming has 300% more Salmonella than that from conventional farming. University studies have found more bacteria in vegetables from organic farming than in vegetables from conventional farming.
7. If organic farming, which decries synthetic fertilizer, was chosen over conventional farming, we would have a choice. We could kill millions of people to reduce global food needs, or we could sacrifice wildlife habitat in the amount of millions of square miles so we could produce more manure.
Why is organic farming bad? Mr. Avery believes he has the answer.
Notwithstanding Mr. Avery’s new book, I am not sure whether organic farming is bad or not. It is often difficult to sort through rhetoric and find fact. I do know that my forefathers had large organic farms. The produce was good and it was nourishing. Before I can turn my back completely on organic farming and organic gardening, I need clearer evidence. You probably want to do more research, too.
Anna Hart
http://www.articlesbase.com/gardening-articles/why-is-organic-farming-bad-if-it-is-136437.html
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9 Responses to “Why Is Organic Farming Bad – If It Is?”
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Organic Farming?
i need to know everything there is to know about organic farming. any good websites? any new technologie? or any cited quotes? everything is great. thanks
Start here — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming
then look at the references and links.
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Organic farming does not use the inorganic fertilizers, no sewage water no pastes and all other stuff which are used by the conventional farmers. It is claimes that their products are more healthy than the other vegs and fruits.
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Sounds like somebody needs help with their school report. There is a ton of info on the internet, start googling.
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http://ofrf.org/index.html
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Hands down BEST information can be found at http://www.attra.org
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The life and career of Gene Kahn have tracked the growth and gawky adolescence of the organic food business perfectly. Kahn, now 59, dropped out of his graduate program in English at the University of Washington in 1972, leased some farmland near Rockport, Washington, and started figuring out how to raise food without pesticides, herbicides, or artificial fertilizers. He went on to create Cascadian Farm, one of the first organic food companies in the United States, which he and his business partners sold to General Mills in 2000. Kahn, the erstwhile hippie farmer and organic pioneer, has since become the big company’s VP of sustainable development.
If you just extrapolate today’s organic onto a gazillion acres, you do get an impossible dream.
No, that wouldn’t work. Because that’s simplistic thinking. But we’re not going to be dumb about it. We’re going to put the whole agricultural research infrastructure behind this thing, we’re going to put public policy behind this thing. Organic has equal or increased potential to produce feed and fiber for the country, in theory. In practice today, that’s laughable.
My assumption is that by waving the magic wand, we’d be doing it right. To create an organic agriculture that was the only form of agriculture in the United States–well [laughing], you’d need to deal with a number of broad areas. Where are you going to get all of the nutrients, the macro- and micronutrients to grow the food? Currently, we’re using fossil fuel for most of that–to make fertilizer–but we’d need to find organic sources for a whole host of nutrients. The best, the most practical way would be to build a whole new composting infrastructure across the United States. That would require tremendous coordination across municipalities, and much more thorough composting of all human refuse. We’d have to find more practical ways of growing crops without the use of synthetic pesticides. You would need insect control, disease control, weed control–weed control is the single largest factor, the most influential, most costly.
Why is weed control so hard?
Weeds are very costly to control in agriculture in general. In organic, it’s the single largest cost factor that differentiates organic from conventional farming. Instead of spraying or using Roundup-ready soybeans, you have to weed those fields. If you looked at the current process and extrapolated that to 100% of the agriculture in the United States, there would have to be an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of people who were essentially hand-weeding and doing the more labor-intensive forms of agricultural work. Are there people who want to do this work? What are the societal implications of having hundreds of thousands of people involved in stoop labor?
It’s possible now to live an almost entirely "organic" life, even shopping at a grocery store–especially if you have access to a chain like Whole Foods. Organic products are everywhere–you can even buy organic frozen pizza. Consumers have the impression we know how to create food organically. What are we missing?
Organic is an infant industry. The commercialization of organic is a relatively recent phenomenon, so the support network–the distribution, the manufacturing, the research–is just gearing up right now. There’s a lot of theoretical knowledge about organic, a lot of conceptual knowledge, but very little technical knowledge outside of the innovative farmers who really made this whole thing happen. If we’re going to convert all the food to organic, we have a lot of people we need to teach. While there are certain universities–Cal Poly, UC Davis, Cornell, University of Wisconsin–that are involved in this, it’s a very rudimentary effort compared with the money and effort that’s spent in solving, for instance, the nematode issue in horticultural crops with methyl bromide. Then there’s the institutional side–all of the support payments that go to certain types of farming, and crop insurance payments, a whole set of policies, governmental programs, institutional programs–that would need to change.
Fresh produce and milk are two of the organic categories that have become almost mainstream at this point. Is the wide availability of certain organic products like produce and milk a function of the skills of farmers now? Or has consumer demand driven the technical expertise?
Both. I don’t think it’s easy to raise organic dairy cows at all, but because of demand, more innovation, and more acres, more farmers have excelled in that. The cows are somewhat easier than certain other highly technical horticultural crops, I think, like growing potatoes. Although I don’t have any real evidence of that. I think the dairy farmers would laugh at me for saying it.
What’s hard about being an organic dairy farmer?
I can’t tell you. I’ve never raised a cow. I can tell you what’s hard about being an organic potato farmer. Ever hear of the Irish potato famine? A little creature, a little fungus called Phytopthera infestans–that fungus and that disease are with us today, and it is very difficult to control organically. There are hundreds of other potato diseases, and potato insects, that are very difficult to control without the toolbox of agro-chemicals that we rely on today. One myth we frequently hear is that farmers are big polluters, that they are hugely committed to these agro-chemicals. There’s a reason why: Those chemicals work. They are cost-effective, based on today’s internalized cost factors. Farmers aren’t thinking about the externalized costs–to the environment and to future generations–of systemic potato insecticides. They don’t have the freedom to think about that.
Wal-Mart announced this year that it would double the number of organic products in its grocery stores, to about 400. Should we be happy about that?
I think that’s a huge win for the organic industry and the consumer. If what we’re trying to do is create an organic world, we could never achieve the dream without Wal-Mart. The fact that they are doing it is going to be a signal to farmers all over the world that organic is coming of age.
What does it mean for someone who started out growing organic zucchini and carrots to become a vice president at General Mills? How does your evolution track back to the world of organic itself?
I’ve always been interested in creating the largest impact on food and agriculture that I was capable of. I found a very receptive company in General Mills–first as a home for my company, and second, for a broader effort at improving the environmental record of food and agriculture. That’s what I do now. I work on developing strategies to improve the environmental performance of the food industry.
Is there any tension between the original organic values you grew up with and large multinational companies putting the word "organic" on their products?
Yes, there’s a lot of tension, and there are a lot of critics of that. But I have no personal tension [laughing]. A lot of people wanted to maintain that original, small model. But to imagine that we were going to change U.S. agriculture and keep it all in the hands of market gardeners, instead of production scale farmers, is not only a fatuous dream, it’s an undesirable perspective from my view. While success certainly makes it harder for smaller producers, there are plenty of opportunities for all.
What is the meaning of an organic frozen dinner? Is it a sign that organic is growing up, or that organic is being co-opted?
It’s a sign that organic is a business like anything else. It’s about what we eat. The world is not either/or. That’s an artificial antithesis: an idealized view of consumption–where all we eat is fresh fruit right off the farm–versus a supermarket economy. Nobody would challenge that it’s best to eat fruit right off the tree, or to drink milk right out of the udder of the cow…. But that’s not paying attention to what people really do consume.
Let’s put aside the fantasy for a minute. Do you think the changes you talked about will happen "organically"? Will we see the creation in the next decade of an infrastructure that can support an industry 10 times the size organic is now–say, 20% of the U.S. food supply?
"If integrated pest management were truly practiced in the U.S.–if it were widely practiced and widely adopted–there would be a 60% reduction in pesticide use. That’s a big deal." Yes. I think so. I think those things are happening. But it’s going to happen incrementally, along with increased consumer awareness of the benefits of organic. But I’m glad we can’t snap our fingers. We’ll make sure this gets done right and done in a way that is really sustainable. That enables farmers to have a reasonable return on their investment. That maintains the kind of high level of standards and consumer and environmental benefit that goes along with organic farming. And I would say this: The conversation isn’t really about "going organic"–it should be about how we change the world for the better, how we deal with the world as we currently see it. Not about creating some impossible dream. What we really have to fix is agro-chemical use and its impacts on soil, biodiversity, and human health. "Integrated pest management" is the appropriate use of agro-chemicals, to optimize their efficiency and minimize their use–IPM, it’s called. Now, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment claims that if integrated pest management were truly practiced in the United States–if it were widely practiced and widely adopted–there would be a 60% reduction in pesticide use in America. That’s a big deal.
The point is not to overuse chemicals. That’s a key problem with conventional agriculture. Nobody benefits from the overuse, except the chemical suppliers. Farmers in general use agro-chemicals because they don’t have viable alternatives, or viable markets, that would allow them to avoid them. And farmers in general don’t like to be polluters–they are people who live on the land, who care about their land. That’s what we’ve got to be focused on–not whether we go organic or not. Organic is part of the solution, but it can’t be the solution. I don’t want to have a simplistic opposition–the good guys, the organic guys, versus the bad guys, the conventional guys. Everyone has a role in improving our environmental performance, and an obligation to improve it. And that’s what’s critical: the improvement. Whether we get to 100% organic is not the issue. It’s whether we become a sustainable society.
References :
http://www.newfarm.org
http://www.acresusa.com
http://www.organicconsumers.org/
http://attra.ncat.org
http://www.oeffa.org
http://www.mogfa.org
http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/
http://www.nofa.org/
http://www.ifoam.org/
http://www.rain.org/~sals/my.html
http://www.sare.org
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Well, I grew up on an organic farm and I can tell you the one thing that stood out in my mind as being interesting was watching the complete derailment of the movement through companies like whole foods, horizon milk, and cascadia farms and watching a whole lot of people jump on the bandwagon without really understanding what it means. Not to sound pretentious…. which is the other thing I learned the organic food movement is all about. Good luck.
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