Joe Fattorini writes in The (Glasgow)Herald about his new year's resolution which is to give up eating organic food:
It's self-indulgent, wasteful and frankly immoral. But you know how it is. I was swept along with the trend, and it felt good at the time. But I don't want to be a hypocrite. So I'm giving up organic food in 2006.
The incident that stiffened my resolve was a white rubber-banded wrist thrusting across me to grab organic apples. Here was someone who professed solidarity with the world's hungry. Yet they support a farming method that would starve over half the world.
The world was farmed entirely organically as recently as 1900. Since then the global population has increased over 3.5 times.
Unfortunately, the area cultivated for food has merely doubled. Even so, collectively we're better fed. In the past 50 years, the number who are starving has halved as the population has doubled. This almost miraculous turn of events is down to nitrogen fertilisers.
When it comes to basic needs such as food, the most important development of the last century has been the creation of nitrogen fertilisers. By replacing the nitrogen lost when a crop is harvested you can continue to plant the same plot of land each year without losing productivity. This means the same area of land produces anything up to double the quantity of food.... So I know what you're thinking. "Yes, but I don't want to feed the world organically. Just my precious family." I'm sorry, but that's rather along the same lines as: "I know they guzzle petrol like there's no tomorrow and are far more likely to kill pedestrians. But my family is special. I really need a beast of an SUV with spinning alloy wheels and DVD players in the headrests."
At the very least, in a country like ours that produces excess food, organic farming robs land that might otherwise be used to promote bio-diversity. That's because organic fields need to be left fallow, growing leguminous crops or livestock whose faeces can be used to return nitrogen to the soil. Yes, you read that correctly. The inefficiencies of organic land use make it less environmentally friendly than conventional farming whose efficiencies mean we can return land to nature. But there's a more sinister perspective. In our lifetime we'll see global population top 10 billion. We're lucky it won't be more.
That alone means finding 35% more calories to feed the world. On decreasingly fertile land. But if we are self-indulgently to insist that we are so important that we should be fed organically, with its yields some 20% to 50% lower, that can only put an additional, unnecessary strain on feeding the planet. Every organic mouthful makes it more difficult to feed the most vulnerable. As the distinguished Indian plant biologist CS Prakash put it: "The only thing sustainable about organic farming in the developing world is that it sustains poverty and malnutrition."
Now if this all makes you feel a little gloomy, then I'm delighted to report that like all the best resolutions, giving up organic food makes you feel better almost immediately. I already feel freed from the hypocrisy. Organic food sales have doubled since 2000. According to Mintel the greatest growth is currently among "lower-income consumers" and those concerned about the health impact of pesticide use in conventional farming.
But wait a minute. Organic food - because it's so inefficient to produce - is considerably more expensive than conventionally farmed food. Yet it brings no health benefits and doesn't even taste better. If it did, then the Advertising Standards Authority wouldn't have upheld complaints against the Soil Association for describing organic as "healthier" than conventionally farmed food. Or as the Food Standards Agency put it in 2004: "Organic food is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from food produced conventionally."
... I can see a few hackles rising at the suggestion that organic food is a "middle-class indulgence". And you're right. It's more a brand, or perhaps a religion. "Organic" sits up there with McDonald's, Microsoft, Starbucks, Tesco, Shell and Lucky Strike as one of the great brands of the twentieth century.
Read the full article here: http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/53522.html
Published in the Glasgow Herald on 3rd January, 2006
Thirsty - interesting point. I don't know but we should look.
In cotton farming "very" high yields come from getting everything right - weeds, fertilser, pests, watering, the right machinery for the job, timeliness and precise timing of the inputs. A sort of "total quality control" job. Some call it broad-scale horticulture! Oh - and you have to have some luck with the weather of course, and not waste inputs in water-limited drought years.
Bad management with good inputs won't give you the best result.
Can anyone (kindly) point me to an objective review of the long-term productivity ie: calorie outputs per input of land/water/labour (considering that intensive use of labour is good in undeveloped countries); fallow v's degraded land area, and N & P issues?
I'm aware of the complex issues involved but I don't want to support corporate intensive farming. People have been forced off the land from medium-sized Australian farms. Too much mechanisation (often subsidised by govt policies, therefore artificially cheap) undermines rural societies.
I think there's a good case for low-impact medium-scale farming (not strictly organic, yet neither large-scale industrial). I've read in academic articles that small landholders (subsistence farmers) in developing nations get the highest crop yields per unit of land *and* per unit of fertilisers/pesticides.
Detribe - I think we're plateauing out yield wise in some of our systems with "conventional practices" - deep rip and anhydrous N. Issues with soil flora and fauna and compaction I suspect.
There maybe some other hybridisations of technologies (not necessarily ideologies) we can learn from. So having some organic systems around is fine for a bit compare and contrast.
The following would have been heresy intially:
minimum tillage, green trash blanketing, and controlled traffic.
Of course some of the resistance to adoption of doing less is from love of recreational tillage.
I agree we ingest many insecticidal plant chemcials in our diet (natural ones, much more than a small amount of synthetic pesticides), and that decrying all synthetic pesticide use isn't necessarily logical. Looks like you have a store of Paris Green under the house.
I agree that in principle a discussion of manure and organics is worthwhile. Some organic ideas are good and a focus on better management of soil health is really worthy. An example is the concept of low input farming, also conservation tillage.
But there is a problem. Many organic people try and ban and demonise alternatives, before even knowing what the best path forward is. How can we ever know without experience and trials?
They have rules like "no synthetic fertilisers" " no synthetic pesticides" which don't have any justification, but then exclude synthetic pesticides like copper from those rules for no good reason. Apparently, synthetic pesticides from earlier centuries are Ok, its only 20th century chemicals that are bad. Their rule seems to be "nature knows best" when in reality nature can kill and cause cancer with the best of us.
Also it doesn't follow because they have "good intentions" their rules actually work. There is evidence that when you adjust for poor crop yield, they can be more water polluting with N and P runoff. The ability to time synthetic N when the crop most needs it can be a better way, and N release from manure is slow. Claims of "higher food nutrients" aren't backed up with data, because, with few exceptions, its the process not the outcome they judge. Buying organic also doesn't make certain they stick to their rules or that the food actually gives you meaningful benefits. It's really a "branding exercise" to appeal to rich customers who want to "feel good" about a "clean and green, alternative image".
Organic manure nitrogen is "subsidised" from synthetic fertiliser used on feed and pasture eaten by the cows/sheep/goats/chickens. Without this extra synthetic N organic fertiliser manure supplies would be stretched.50% of total crop N comes from synthetics so this subsidy is big.
Wild shot venison is organic. Too bad "they" won't let you have a gun, Phil.