Jon Hagen - 9/12/2012 22:05

I worked with a group, cleaning packaging and selling Omega flax into the health food market. My job was cleaning the flax to human food specs, actually I went well beyond that cleaning the flax to the point we could put in a clear plastic bottle on a store shelf and have it look beautiful and very pure, not one bad flax seed or weed in the mix.

I hated to clean organic flax. In the first place, it was so loaded with weed seeds, diseased seeds and thin empty seeds that the average clean out rate to get it to our very clean human food spec, was well above 50% of the already outrageously expensive raw product.
When cleaning conventional Omega flax, clean out was usually only 15%-20% of the raw product.

When running organic flax through the air /screen cleaners and gravity table, after having run nice heavy conventional Omega flax, I would have to go through a mad rush of adjusting air dampers and fan VS units to prevent blowing the much thinner, lighter weight anemic, organic flax right over the screens and into the screenings bin.

Those poor little organic flax seeds never had the feeding of good commercial fertilizer to help them grow into big plump seeds. Besides the poor things not getting enough food, they were under attack from every weed, insect , mold and fungus that can possibly attack a plant.
Once we did get those few marketable seeds in the oackage, the shelf life was much shorter than the conventional flax, because the seed coat was infested with molds, fungus, and insect eggs that tend to hatch inside the sealed bottle.

We had more than one organic customer complaining about finding a newly hatched something in the wonderful "pure " pesticide free organic flax that had been on their shelf for 6 months to a year.
We never had any comeback of the conventional flax that had been protected by a normal treat of fertilizer and pesticides to take out the insects and mold, fungus.

Another thing was the incredible complex paper trail the organic orginisation demanded on all the organic product we processed. Not only the hours spent on the paper trail, but also the extortion like inspection fees of the Organic organisation.
One time during one of the hours long organic inspections during a busy time, I lost it a bit, raised my voice and asked the inspector, why don't you just take samples of the stuff and have it analyzed at a lab and charge me for the lab cost ??

The inspector said, "oh no, we cant do that, the difference in pesticide level between organic and conventional is so small that no lab test can detect it. "
That statement was the final straw in convincing me that organics is nothing but a fear mongering scam with no basis in science.
It is a hippy dippy, fear mongering scam, to frighten people into buying an inferior product for a much higher price.

Felt good to cut loose with that little rant, as this bit of first hand knowledge of the scam involved with at least one organic product has been chewing at my insides for years