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| Well, this debate has never been rational for decades, and there is lots of fear mongering and abuse on both sides, so I don't expect we'll be able to solve it in this thread. It is really hard to put a cost on health and environmental issues, or the economical or "carbon" cost of pesticides made from foreign oil for production and transportation, etc. although several have tried.
One thing though, is that most studies or arguments against organic farming should really be labelled as against American mass-production organic farming, not organic farming as a whole.
For instance, a single company, Horizon, produces the largest amount of organic milk in the country, and while by the number, most of their contractors are family farms of under 100 milking cows, by the quantity, their milk comes from factory farms of several hundreds or thousands of cows who barely see any pasture even in summer. It can be called "organic" by the USDA very permissible book, but it is no by my book, or by European standards.
The organic produce in the U.S. supermarkets suffers from a lot of the same problems as conventional: Monocultures, selection of the most productive varieties, trading off diversity, taste and nutrients, farming organically for financial rather than ethical reasons, or the opposite, for ethical reasons but no or poor farming knowledge or practices, etc.
That said, some assumptions are just plain false: Organic farming, especially of produce, produces a comparable yield as conventional. This has been proven many times over and over by ag university studies. Field crops might be a different matter, but they still return 4 to 5 times more money than conventional for corn and soybeans, and probably a similar order for wheat, even when the yield is 10-20 lower for organic.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=onlin...
It's not just about the yield, it's also about lower entrant costs and premium crop prices.
Actually, one of the argument against organics, its higher retail price, is caused by the higher labor cost for this manually intensive form of agriculture, and is in my opinion one of the best argument in favor of organics in these times of crisis, as it means an organic farm supports more workers than a conventional one, acre for acre.
True, it really hurts to see organic milk over twice the price of conventional, and I am pretty sure this reflects more on financial speculation than on the true cost of this factory farm organic milk, but looking at field crops, isn't it madness to sell a bushel of corn or soybeans for $8 or $16? Does it reflect true production cost and is it worth the hard effort put into it? Does it allow the farmer to survive after 2 consecutive bad years? Is it better to get 10 cents on the dollar of federal crop insurance at tax payer's cost or to save enough by yourself on a good year to get you by the bad times.
Granted this is not all about organic vs. conventional, but organic farming is also based on sustainability and responsibility.
As for the latter, studies about the health benefits of organics have a hard time proving anything specific. I'd rather take a look at the whole picture: Health issues have never been so present and so costly, and you can't put it all on air pollution and obesity. There are hundreds of chemical substances registered for use in agriculture, manufacturing and the food industry, only a few dozens being actually regulated. These includes compounds similar to feminine hormones in our food, 2,4-D and other chemicals in our ground water, and stuff you really don't want to breathe that is emanating every day from our carpets, wall paints, etc. Average life expectancy is now declining in the U.S., and since the ancients said "we are what we eat", I can't help thinking that non-organic food is partly responsible for this mess. The growth hormone used in milk production has already been shown to impact puberty for girls, some reaching puberty before they're 10, but it is hard to differentiate by how much the added GM-produced hormones impact over the hormones present naturally in milk, or what are exactly the effects of these feminine hormones on boys and teenagers. For many studies, we just don't know what to look for in the first place, so it's no wonder there are few of them, and even fewer proving anything. Another example is the dozens of different compounds pesticides degrade into. A typical Californian strawberry field might use over a dozen of chemical substances. We just haven't got the slightest idea how these products degrade and how the degraded products combine together. And several of these so-called quickly degrading products have been shown to leach into the ground water undegraded.
I'd rather be safe than sorry, even though I can't financially buy or practically find only organic food.
I guess that like everything else, it's more a question of supporting farmers (and I mean professional farmers, not just hippies) who share the same ideas about the environment, politics, health, our legacy and stewardship, etc. | |
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organics opposition
