It’s overlooking a lot of the other benefits of organic agriculture, for instance: less pollution in the waterways, healthier soil, and bigger harvests. Organic food is more labor-intensive (hence the higher costs) but studies show that organically run farms produce more food acre to acre than their nonorganic counterparts, not the other way around.
Well, the article asserts the opposite of what I claimed, but assertion ultimately doesn’t mean anything. A writer can assert the sky to be purple, but ultimately those assertions, however strongly they’re worded, don’t make the sky purple.
Ultimately food is food, and as Mike Lipin notes, this is largely a first world problem. I’ve known a few organic people who act as though conventionally raised food is toxic to eat, and I think they’re nuts. Conventional agricultural techniques have done plenty to reduce the labor needed to produce food, and in that regard potentially do a lot to feed the hungry of our world. Someone who would keep nonorganically grown mangoes off the fruit stands in places like Fermathe, Haiti, is not someone who understands hunger.
But, drilling down into the assertions that the writer of the article makes, I’d be curious to know what research drives his claims. The negative environmental impact of pesticide use is well known, from the fear of a “Silent Spring” down to the recent and ongoing collapse of honeybee colonies.
Although DDT can be beneficial in controlling mosquito-borne malaria, it also was wreaking havoc with other parts of the environmental web, from amphibians to birds; and although manufacturers of modern pesticides deny their product is to blame for honeybee collapse, the European Union found the evidence credible enough to ban their use.
Compare that to organic pest management, and I’m puzzled as to how organic techniques should be “worse for the environment.” Organic techniques involve using predators such as praying mantids, ladybugs, and birds; mixing crops together to create a natural firewall against outbreaks; and rotating crops so that pests don’t have multiple seasons to establish themselves in the soil. A beetle that bores through squash vines one year is unlikely to have much luck with the tomatoes in the next.
Crop rotation also has the benefit of keeping the soil from becoming exhausted. Soil that hosts nitrogen-enriching legumes one year can host nitrogen-depleting corn the next. Keep growing corn in the same fields each year, and you’re going to have to keep adding heftier and heftier fertilizers. Studies have shown that those fertilizers leach the nutrients out of the soil, pollute the waterways and screw up the ecosystems there as well, and on and on.
Aside from that, this past year, I think it was the USDA that determined this past year that our conventionally grown produce has been losing its nutritional value, due to overuse of the soil without properly replenishing it. By growing the same crops year after year in the same small area of California, as most of our spinach is in the United States, we leave fewer and fewer nutrients in the soil for the plants, which in turn have fewer nutrients for us.
In other words, conventional farming increases the amount of pollution flowing into the soil and into our waterways, while producing poorer crops as a result. That’s not merely an assertion; that’s been determined by food scientists observing what we grow and eat in our country.
Organic agricultural techniques, in contrast, do not jack the plant up on chemical fertilizers that wash away in a big storm. They build up the soil and the soil ecology, and add potassium, nitrates and phosphates in a form that breaks down gradually. It’s the difference between growth driven by steroids, and growth that comes over a sustained burst through proper diet. (The crack about pathogens was an odd one; yes, guano and manure do get used in organic fertilizer, but only after they’ve finished composting, and never from a carnivore. If there’s E. coli or another disease-causing pathogen in composted cow manure, someone’s been feeding Bossie meat, which should be a big no-no.)
As to crop yield, my understanding is the opposite of what you assert, Weston. The Rodale Institute in Emmaus, Pa., runs experimental farms to develop organic agricultural techniques, and to compare their efficacy to conventional agriculture. Several years ago, I read the results of a study that found that the organic beds, because of the higher levels of organic material in their soil, needed vastly less water than the conventionally maintained beds, and saw substantially higher yields, particularly during drought years. I don’t recall the exact figure; I’m afraid it has been years since I read the article.
Now doubtless we can contend that the Rodale Institute is going to be biased in favor of organic techniques, but the same surely can be said of the writers of this Forbes piece, given the credentials they burnish at the end of the article. It will take better analysts than you and I to determine the reasons for the divergence.
I could go on, but why? It’s surely just as fun to deride advocates of organic agriculture as elitists who don’t think about the hunger of the teeming millions, as it is to sneer at the wealthy agricultural-industrial complex that is doing its best to crush more wholesome and beneficial ways of feeding the planet; but ultimately we’re just belittling caricatures of people, and thus belittling ourselves in the process.
We have a hungry planet. We have to feed its people in a responsible, sustainable way, but ultimately, we have to feed them.
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