There is a great deal of media exposure these days about Organic food and Organic farming and it is ALWAYS asociated with several presumptions:
1. That Organic Farming is better for the environment.
2. That Organic Food tastes better.
From my own previous discoveries I have several pre-formed opinions:
A. Organic Farming’s output is sufficiently lower than non-Organic farming that we could not feed everyone if we all adopted it.
B. Organic Farming in general MAY not be the same thing as sustainable farming and non-organic farming practices MAY be sustainable.
C. Organic produce is no better in taste or nutrition.
Being a person of sound scientific method I am open to changing my opinions based on evidence. So I will try to address both the media assumptions and my own views. But first we need to know exactly what Organic Farming is. Does it mean no chemical fertilizer or pesticide? No fertilizer or pesticide at all? There must be differences from farmer to farmer but in terms of the legal ‘Organic’ phrasing in UK shops, what does it mean? Must they be non-GM products? What does GM even mean? Where’s the boundary between Modified and Genetically Modified?
Firstly the term Organic in relation to farming or produce is a generic one. To sell your food as Organic you must be certified by an agency. The most well known of these bodies, in the UK, is The Soil Association.
It was quite a wild goosechase to get to that previous statement that seems so trivial. From Wikipedia I found DEFRA from where I (eventually!) found the right BusinessLink URL for Organic certification, which here in the UK, is defined by the European Union and regulated by DEFRA. You have to be certified by a Certification Body of which, in the UK, there are 9 approved bodies. The link to find this list took me back from businesslink to DEFRA again. But then each of these bodies has its own certification requirements – they may be very similar but they are not the same – and from this page you can only get an email address for some of these bodies – apparently they don’t all even have a website!
So what can I find out about their certification? After a bit of searching I found their information pack and downloaded the one appropriate to agricultural farming. Only problem is that there’s nothing in there about what you have to do, just contractual stuff and an application form. Eventually I downloaded a standards document which is the closest I can find to a set of instructions.
So what’s involved? For the most part it’s what you would expect. Genetically Modified Organisms and nanotechnology are absolute no-no’s. Crop rotation is required. Packaging has to be ‘Green’. But there is a lot of content about everything beyond the actual food itself. From managing hedgerows to protecting forests, from keeping uncultivated land for wildlife to maintaining and restoring old buildings. Of course there is a great deal of detail on managing the soil, from not doing any deep ploughing to only using natural and organic fertilisers.
There are exceptions to pretty much every rule but they generally say “Where not possible to use organic xxx you MAY…”. However the sheer number of exceptions listed for supplemental nutrients is shockingly large. It speaks about “Where Justified” and “Heavy Metal Analyses” and “With Approval” but there are TEN such revisions taking up several times more space in the document than the actual Rules. See section 4.8. This same pattern is repeated in section 4.11 regarding the use of pesticides.
It would take a biochemist to state whether the options available to Organic farmer for Fertiliser and Pesticide “where justified” are relatively harmless compared to what is regularly used on non-organic farms. And it would take a team of researchers and a Freedom of Information act to work out how much non-organic fertiliser and pesticide is being used in our supposedly organic food. The conclusion one must draw though from the sheer number of exceptions in these rules compared to the rest of the document is that the Soil Association is having to give in to farmers’ needs to keep productivity up.
Interestingly you cannot burn crop stubble which, as anyone can tell you, is a zero carbon activity, but which I thought was the best way to return lots of nutrients to the soil. When I reflect on that I suppose it is the best way to get some nutrients back into the soil quickly so you can replant the field for the very next season, but if you are using crop rotation letting the field lie fallow and then mowing/ploughing is probably better. At least you allow everything to break down that way rather than risk losing some of the nutrient content to oxidation.
Overall the intentions of these Organic Certifying Bodies is undoubtedly good and I really applaud the requirements concerning wildlife habitats, boundaries, buildings and all the ancillary stuff that isn’t the food itself. But, given my above points about the exceptions to the rules, I have serious doubts as to whether the average Organic food is any more ‘organic’ than food produced on a modern non-organic farm which simply uses sensible policies. Just recently the BBC ran a program on farming in Australia where by creating custom nutrient mixes based on each field’s requirements the farmers have seen an increase in productivity and a decrease in both volume and cost of fertilisers. In the same program the same farming consultant showed how he had created another additive which allowed the water that the irrigation system delivered to penetrate deeper into the soil resulting in stronger plants and less water used.
If the soil on your farm is just deficient in Manganese don’t you think it’s better to take your waste (which may well be ‘organic’) and process it in a factory to produce a Manganese product for you and other products for someone else, rather than just dumping a generic product with everything in it on your land? And do you think that plants grow differently depending on whether that Manganese is organic or synthetic? Do you think any other part of the eco-system that it may get into reacts differently based on its origin? If Manganese is harmful, say in the nearby river, then is it better to dump a small amount in the river from using a small amount of organic fertiliser or is it better to dump a tiny amount in the river from using the precise amount (large or small) of a modern, targeted, soil-penetrating, synthetic?
What I’m trying to get at here is that Science is a tool to be used. Without doubt in the past huge amounts of broad spectrum fertilisers have been dumped on fields simply because ‘they do the job’. However modern farming techniques use targeted fertilisation and pesticidal techniques. This is cheaper and results in the minimal amount of run-off from the fields to the rivers for the maximum crop yield. If I can create a targeted fertiliser that results in no run-off from your field but it happens to be synthetic and not organic would it not be the right thing to do to use that instead of the organic solution? Does it therefore not follow that a certifiably organic product may not have been produced in the most environmentally friendly way? And isn’t the real driver behind organic produce that of being Green?
Moving on, consider for a moment what a genetically modified organism is. The particular phrasing means that a scientist in a laboratory has specifically altered the gene sequence of an organism in order to change something about it. It may be that the change makes it glow in the dark, or have larger leaves, or be resistant to a parasite. It might even make the fruit of the plant produce a chemical which can be manipulated through the ingestion of another chemical to produce an immune reaction. This last point is salient. We know how to modify rice such that by prescribing a simple pill people will gain the same benefits as an anti-malarial injection – it’s been done with mice already – and it could save millions of lives. The conventional injection techniques do not reach the vast majority of people who need them because of the need to refrigerate them. I’ve been searching for the link to this article but sadly cannot find it – it seems to have been lost in the furore of on using modified mosquitos instead!
So are GMO’s evil? No. Could they be mis-used? Yes. Can you trust the companies that are going to produce these things? In general of course you can. They may backstab each other and stories about them forcing farmers to burn crops that have been contaminated with their patented GMO may be true, but ultimately they want to make money. And how do you make money? By selling a successful product to more and more consumers. If you damage or even kill your consumers you generally lose money, go bankrupt or go to prison. In addition I DO trust the scientists who do the actual ground work, the tests to see if there are any unintended side-effects; and I trust the government bodies who approve products for use.
But take away the word ‘Genetically’ and you’re still left with something ‘Modified’ and we’ve been modifying food since humans first stopped wandering nomadically and became a sedentary society at least as far back as 11,000 years ago, when, as the megafauna of North America declined, the Clovis people turned to cultivation of plants for an increasing amount of their diet. Naturally they re-cultivated the strongest and highest yielding plants and those with the most useful products. Within only a few hundred years they had created, by selective cultivation, plant breeds that could not survive without human intervention.
In the rather more recent past, from the 1950’s onwards, large-scale and intensive cross-breeding produced most of the strains of cereal crops that are grown around the world today. Even those grown on organic farms are Modified by the actions of the past. These breeds would not exist without human intervention in their genome, albeit through macroscopic manipulation. There is an Episode of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” which discusses this in some detail that I would highly recommend viewing. This “Green Revolution” was driven by Normal Borlaug who is often referred to as having saved 1 billion lives with his work.
I should also mention a program I watched on the BBC a few weeks ago on farming and specifically one farmer who had some wonderful (and organic) farming methods that had increased his yields, completely removed his need for fertiliser and reduced his waste products.
His cattle were confined to a relatively small tranche of a field at any time. There was plenty of room for them have no fear but he had parcelled his fields off into 30 or more smaller fields. They were kept in a given tranche for just a few days at a time and then moved to the next. The first result of this was that the cattle had changed their grazing style. Rather than pick and choose the best grass from a larger field they simply ate what was in front of them. It wasn’t that they had to eat the area bare to get enough to eat but rather as the farmer described it, the cattle knew they wouldn’t be able to eat that grass in the near future so they just grabbed whatever was nearest. This keeps the entire field area in a growth cycle rather than just the best bits of it. I assume that it beneficial for the field as nature’s abhorrence for a vacuum will surely increase the nutrient levels in those less luscious areas of the field if the plants require the nutrients to regrow. Additionally I assume that the cattle are better off for having a more varied diet.
The next step in the process is to move the cattle on to the next tranche and to introduce hens to the tranche the cattle have just left. The hens do several things. First they stamp and strut through the cow-pats, mixing it with the grass to form a high quality fertiliser. Secondly they feed on the parasites in the cow-pats. As a direct result of the latter the cattle have become entirely disease free and the farmer claimed that he had reduced his vet bills for the herd to zero.
The farmer had reduced his bills, improved the quality of his fields, increased the meat yield from the herd AND gained another source of income from the hen’s eggs whilst utilising the exact same space as he had previously. This is sustainable farming working brilliantly.
A second system the farmer had set up was to have a barn with rabbits in mesh cages, suspended above the floor. On the floor were more hens. The rabbits and hens both require a food input for this and additionally sawdust is scattered across the floor. The rabbits provide the farmer with meat and pelts and the hens mix the rabbit droppings with the sawdust to make fertiliser that can be sold, as well as laying eggs. The farmer makes a significant profit and has no waste products.
These are the kinds of techniques that we need to be encouraging. An organic certificate does not ensure that these kinds of approaches with minimal inputs (particularly fertilisers and pesticides which are the pollutants we really need to cut down on) and maximal outputs are being used. But neither does not having said certificate mean that methods like this are not being used.
I have been looking for evidence in the Organic vs Non-Organic Debate but it’s not easy to find a proper discussion on it.
My first search was for ‘Organic farming pros and cons’ and my first link was to this hugely long domain name. As I started reading it I thought it seemed quite rational. The page is even titled ‘Advantages AND disadvantages of…’. However by a third of the way down the page I realised something was awry. Perhaps you’ll notice that there are no links to any research or that there are lots of links to books for you to buy.
The graph of cancer rates fails to correct for anything except life expectancy so it remains a graph showing the impact of everything else on cancer rates. Everything else and Exposure to toxic chemicals are not the same.
And lastly the Disadvantages section claims all perceived disadvantages to be advantages or at least desirable.
My second search result led me to Buzzle.com. Sadly this website falls down on its homepage with the bold statement that:
Organic Farming is a technique used in farming without the use of any chemicals or synthetics.
As we already know that is incorrect. Synthetics are allowed.
Aim of organic farming is to produce crops which have the highest nutritional values with least impact on nature.
We have yet to address this issue. We will shortly!
Crop rotation, green manure, use of natural fertilizers and biological pest control form the crux of organic farming. It is a proactive ecology management strategy. This strategy enhances the fertility of the soil, prevents soil erosion and at the same time protects the humans and animal kingdom from the side-effects of chemicals and synthetics.
Crop rotation does enhance soil fertility by giving it time to recover between periods of intensive use. However many non-organic farmers do this anyway as purely sustainable, green and economic sense. Soil erosion is caused by deep ploughing – another thing that most farmers do not do anymore.
Organically grown food tastes better too.
We haven’t addressed this yet but no evidence is offered by the site.
The overall cost of cultivating the crops reduces as the farmers use green manure or worm farming to replenish the lost nutrients of the soil.
Kind of… All farmers will re-use their own ‘organic’ waste products if it is the appropriate source of nutrients for their fields. However if the soil is deficient in something specific the most effective, sustainable and cheapest solution is a narrow-spectrum fertiliser which may or may not be organic.
The life of organically grown plants is longer than the plants cultivated by traditional methods.
A plant only grows the way it is genetically programmed to grow. It matters not what nature of external forces acted on it. The lifespan of a given species will always be the same with the same inputs – whatever their source.
Organically grown crop is more drought tolerant.
Totally incorrect. GMO crops are vastly more drought tolerant than unmodified versions of crops. The gene that makes them so came from an existing crop of course. Nature provided it and we copied it.
And the site continues to be inaccurate when it comes to the disadvantages of Organic farming, although I give it a little credit for mentioning that there are some:
The first disadvantage of organic farming is low productivity. With the highly developed chemicals and machinery, the farmer is able to multiply his harvest manifold times. The organic farmers use the cultivation method as opposed to drilling method used by the traditional farmers. The cultivated soil is prone to wind and water erosion. The traditional farmers opine that direct drilling does not cause any disharmony in the soil structure.
Organic farming uses machinery too you know!? Traditional farming also eschews deep ploughing because of the problems it causes with the soil.
The next argument, which goes against organic farming, is that the organically produced food is expensive. The cost is very often 50-100 percent more than the traditional food.
This doesn’t have to be the case. If you take the examples above of the farmer with cattle/hens or rabbits/hens he was able to produce more for less. By being sustainable your costs will always be lower and by manipulating synergies you can increase your yields. But sustainability does not go hand in hand with the presence or lack of an organic certificate. Being sustainable is an entirely independant call. Yes there will (always?) be some farmers willing to dump vast amounts of fertiliser on their land to gain a short term productivity that cannot be rivaled and to make a small margin of profit on a lot of product. But hopefully we can make them see sense.
The other valid argument is that organic food is not always available. There is a reason behind that. The organic farmers grow crops in accordance to the season. Neither do they artificially grow any crop nor do they extend the life of the plant or use chemicals, synthetics or pesticides. Therefore, oranges will be found only in winters and mangoes only in summer. Looking at it from the health benefits point of view, there is no doubt that you will benefit if you eat a particular food item, when it is actually in season.
There’s no reason you can’t create organic food out of season. I don’t recall anything from the Soil Association’s guidelines that preclude the use of UV Lights. I admit it’s fairly unlikely that an organic farmer would use them but either way there’s nothing unsustainable about the poly-tunnels in The Netherlands that produce an enormous proportion of the UK’s vegetables on a tiny amount of land. As a sealed system the ‘run-off’ could be collected and processed to prevent any pollution which would in fact be more sustainable and Green than anything else.
The last statement about benefits of eating foods in season just leaves me bemused. Can anyone think of any reason why anyone would even put this forward as a rational hypothesis?
Anyway, enough of quoting from random websites. I have to assume that, somewhere out there, there exist equally biased sources on information on the other side of the fence. I haven’t found one yet but they must exist. If someone hasn’t come up with it already I announce the law that ‘If it can be perceived of then it exists on the internet’, which is probably analogous to infinite monkeys and typewriters.
I still need to tackle the issue of whether organic produce tastes better.
My first search took me to TheNibble.com, a gourmet food website. In a non-scientific test 11 products were tested and:
Organic was the clear winner in one and tied in five others.
What she fails to mention is that the conventional food won in two of the remaining 5 categories (!!!) with the last three being described as ‘NONE’. I think this tied-but-not-tied result was where both products were just horrible.
So that’s twice as many wins for conventional food as for organic (which I can happily state about this non-scientific test). 
You could also check out another episode of Bullshit which I would trust as reasonably good testing. No double-blinding but I don’t think Penn has anything to gain by fudging his results. 71% preferred non-organic products. And 90% (9/10) people were tricked into thinking that one half of a regular banana was in fact half of an organic banana. Actually this video excerpt from the same episode puts across most of what I’m writing about in the kind of manner I would normally like to put it across!
What remains to be answered? Whether or not Organic Farming could be used to feed the entire world…
I could tell you the answer is No. I could point you to the mathematics and you might respond that it’s too abstract. You might argue about crops we could use in areas we don’t currently cultivate. We could go back and forth for ever. So let’s instead ask the one man who probably ought to know, who since the 1930’s has been working on increasing crop yields around the world and feeding the starving, Norman Borlaug, in his 2000 interview with Reason Magazine:
This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.
At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.
If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive.
Since this has been such a long article, let me summarise:
1. Is Organic Farming is better for the environment?
No. Modern scientific techniques that are not necessarily compatible with the Organic Certification result in less pollution.
2. Does Organic Food taste better?
C. Organic produce is no better in taste or nutrition?
While I haven’t found any broad double-blind scientific tests, what evidence does exist is that people assume organic tastes better because they are told that it does. Ultimately a food product consists of exactly what it is genetically programmed to consist of and it doesn’t matter one iota where the elements come from to make it and therefore the nutritional content is the same.
A. Organic Farming’s output is sufficiently lower than non-Organic farming that we could not feed everyone if we all adopted it?
True. I have mentioned some methods which can increase yields for some food products but they would equally apply to non-organic farming and in the arena of crop yields which are the most important source of the world’s nutrition I bow to Mr Borlaug.
B. Organic Farming in general MAY not be the same thing as sustainable farming and non-organic farming practices MAY be sustainable?
True. While the aims of the organic movement to provide sustainability are noble this is not their core aim. Green and Organic are NOT the same as Sustainable. Both Organic and Traditional Farming can be sustainable but organic farmers are not able to use many of the best scientific techniques and products to improve their yields and reduce their pollution.
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Personal | PadainFain April 29, 2010 | 
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