Organic Farming Examined

Yokai writes "An article to be released in Science shows that organic farming makes sense. The 21 year study by a Swiss team shows that even though the organic patch had 20% less yield than conventional farming, the input of fertilizer and energy was reduced by between 34% and 53%, and pesticide use by 97%, leading them to believe that organic farming makes sense. Also, the soil from the organic plot was healthier and held more organisms- including those that kill pests."

Comments

correct link

[Kraft]

here

Pesticide math?

[molo]

the input .. was reduced by ... and pesticide use by 97%

How does that work? I thought organic farming used NO pesticides, not 3% of the pesticides. Can someone clarify?

Re:Pesticide math?

[caca_phony]

It is not pesticides that cannot be used in organic farming, but rather non-biological ones (you can use all the ladybugs or BT you want- both are technicly pesticides, though they are organisms).

Re:Pesticide math?

[Pulchellissima]

Organic farming implies limited pesticide usage. All the pesticides have to be approved as organic; they are usually plant based (rotenone comes from marigolds for example) and have no to very few environmental side effects. You generally can eat produce sprayed with these things right after spraying. You can't use most chemical herbicides, you have to enrich the soil with compost (usually carefully composted manure). You can use high tech methods like row covers, spun bonded polyfiber frost blankets, micro irrigation...

Organic farming has now been defined by the FDA. There's a big list of what you can and cannot do as an organic farmer. If you wish to call your produce 'organic' you must submit to onsite inspections, follow all the FDA guidelines, and get certified every year at a minimum cost of several thousand dollars. In other words, organic is now Big Business.

I was an organic farmer. I now grow 'farm fresh', 'wholesome' and 'traditional' foods, as I have been shoved out of the organic field by the FDA's rulings. I can't afford the certification, so, I can't use the organic term which the FDA decided it owns.

The same goes for your lawn

[bihoy]

Today many homeowners use chemicals on their lawns. The use of products such as Scotts "4 step" actually give your lawn a chemical dependency. They don't allow them to function in a natural organic fashion. In addition they contribute to the pollution of water tables and watersheds. You would be amazed at how far away from a lake, river, or stream that a watershed extends. Basically the use of these chemicals is simply the easy no hassle way to have green lawn. It not necessarily a healthy lawn or healthy for the environment but people don't think about that.

Re:The same goes for your lawn

[Cyno01]

sometimes these super green lawns look unhealthey anyway, in suburbia (shudder) there are subdivisions that seem like they have neighborhood regulations about the color of grass, every single lawn the exact same disgustingly unnaturally bright looking green

US does send food

[texchanchan]

The US does send food and a lot of it, too. Get the details here. MT = metric tons

Excerpt from one of the reports: "A major shipment of U.S.-donated relief food for the Southern Africa region arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on May 26. The U.S.-chartered vessel "Liberty Glory" carried the 33,230 MT of food commodities, valued at $13.3 million. The shipment included 16,940 MT of maize, beans, and vegetable oil for Malawi, valued at $8.9 million, and 8,500 MT for Zambia, worth $2.9 million. These commodities were quickly off-loaded for onward transport to Malawi and Zambia via truck and rail. The "Liberty Glory" is scheduled to arrive in Maputo, Mozambique on June 5-7 in order to deliver the remaining 9,890 MT of food, valued at $4.8 million, for use in Mozambique. In addition, USAID/FFP is in the process of procuring approximately 36,450 MT of additional emergency food commodities, worth $16 million."

Is this labor-intensive?

[texchanchan]

The real question is, how labor-intensive is organic farming carried out on a large scale? For small plots that fit between Swiss mountains, I can imagine it working a lot better than on a Kansas wheat farm.

Who is going to be out there doing the labor? How many more field workers does it take? Where are they going to come from?

Re:Is this labor-intensive?

[skotte]

why would it be labor intensive? did i miss something?

actually, it is my understanding in fFact this is actually easier on labour. instead of laying fFertilizers 5 times a year, they are only doing it twice a year, and then the loads are lighter and work more on their own.

fFor example, a load (so to speak) of manure sits quietly on the dirt and sinks into the soil. as opposed to chemicalstuff, which has to be replenished regularly to keep active. or something of this nature.

Hmmm

[Hard_Code]

Wow, this is nothing like indigenous people have known, um, forever...before we introduced them to "correct" farming by ripping up the ground with a plow and stuffing it with chemicals and pesticides. They should thank us for indebting them to big agribusiness/chemical companies instead of falling for all that "sustainable" mumbo jumbo.

Re:Bullshit

[Cyno01]

look at your post title, wouldn't you agree that thats a pretty organic fertilizer, and theres certaintly enough of it around to fertilize the worlds crops

Somebody wants to do this for a living:

[Pulchellissima]

Me.

I do this for a living. I really enjoy it too. I also code for a living. The two nicely complement each other, and allow me an enormous amount of freedom.

There are probably quite a few other people who would be willing to do farmwork if our society valued the work. We don't, so they don't. Hard to fault them such as it is.

Re:Somebody wants to do this for a living:

[texchanchan]

Most people, though, prefer even the most degraded urban life to peasant life. I don't know why because I haven't tried peasant life myself. However, look at the industrial revolution and the current Third World. They aren't all driven off the land. Millions of people go to the cities and live in slums because they prefer it to subsistence farming.

Re:Somebody wants to do this for a living:

[Cmdr Taco (luser)]

I think you may have missed the main thrust of the poster to whom you replied. Restated, can organic farming be scaled to commercial operations? Not small-time stuff like selling your organically grown tomatoes at the roadside, I mean single operations that grown *tons* of produce. A Kansas or Oklahoma wheat farmer may work anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand acres of land. In 1997, Kansas produced a record 492.2 million bushels of wheat. Thats a lot of bread. That wheat really does feed the world.

That's all well and good, but the economy of wheat production is an unstable affair. Many smaller farm operations (ummm, less than 1000 acres) literally "bet the farm" every year. Usually, it's a fairly safe bet. The costs and cashflow are unlike those of other businesses. A new 4WD tractor from John Deere or Case can pull an unbelievable number/size of ploughs or drills and allow 1 or 2 people to work all that land, but they cost more than the farmer's house. During the planting and growing seasons, there is *no income*. You borrow from the bank.

When June/July rolls around, the yield must be just right. If the yield is too low, you may find it difficult to finance the next crop. If the yield is very high on average (not just your farm), the selling price will nosedive and you may find it difficult to finance the next crop.

The costs associated with planting, growing and harvesting are fairly well understood. An infestation of pests is guaranteed to reduce your income. Let alone, your yield will be too low. Hiring a cropduster and paying for the chemicals is money right out of the bank.

Organic gardening methods, which I practice in my 0.125 acre vegatable garden, just don't scale to "feed the world" proportions.

Will that really work?

[TheLink]

Who is going to _give_ them gm crops? AFAIK the corps don't want to give anybody anything - all they want to do is _license_ some seeds for _one_ crop. The farmer will be Big Corp's slave.

And whatever it is, people will still starve - it's nothing to do with agricultural efficiency. There's plenty of food to go around, but other people don't want them to get it. People are starving because there is evil in the world (not that we should give up trying to help of course).

Example: in Sudan, when food is being distributed, the Sudanese gov drops bombs - that's because Sudanese gov wants to wipe out the people receiving aid.

Just do a google search on Sudan bombs food.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/from _our_ow n_correspondent/newsid_1287000/1287188.stm

--
And very often in other places the people in power steal the food and resell it.
--
Over here often there is a chicken glut, and some farmers actually _burn_ the chickens :(.

Other countries farmers pour milk onto the fields etcetc.
--
In the old days when farmers have a great harvest they throw a celebration. Now they throw the harvest!

Re:Will that really work?

[texchanchan]

what?

Pesticide free works for myself

[BetaJim]

In my garden the Colorado Potato Beetle is my summer nemesis. Growing up, Dad would always use pesticides to control them. It didn't work very well. We still had to pick the larva off the plants by hand.

Now, for my garden, I've ditched the pesticides. After doing some research on the potato beetle, I found out that they quickly become resistant to one pesticide, unless you continuously use different type of pesticides (this explains my father failing to control them.)

My solution? I control the bug by hand. Once a week I examine the plants and squish and kill all the egg clusters, larva, and adults that I find. This keeps the population managable to the point that predators of the potato beetle keep things under control. This method works very well.

I don't expect that large farms can invest in this much labor, but for my home garden this is a good solution. Oh, large farms also use other pesticide-free methods to control the beetle, such as plastic lined trenchs that catch and trap the bug.

Devils Advocate

[4of12]

pesticide use by 97%,

For the record, I

• like organic farming,
• prefer to buy organic produce when I can,
• dislike GM foods or GM anything else (there's too much unknown about biochemical interaction in our ecosystem),
• dislike livestock loaded with hormones and antibiotics, etc.

But.

I have to wonder about how sustainable the non-use of pesticides can be.

Think about human vaccinations against childhood diseases. Overall, it's a great idea. On an individual basis, if everyone else's child has been vaccinated, then you can forego the risks of vaccination, secure in knowing that your child will probably play only with other vaccinated children that will not subject your child to those diseases. Also, by not vaccinating your child, you don't suffer the one in several hundred thousand risk that your child will actually get sick. Great.

Great, until more and more other parents also decide that they don't like the risks of vaccination on their children, either. Then you end up with a sufficient pool of unvaccinated children, where there is increased risk that the diseases will take hold and be communicated in that group.

Is it not similar to an organic farmer sitting in the middle of California's Central Valley, with all his neighbors using all manner of ugly pesticides to effectively sterilize their fields? The small organic farmer has little to worry about: he's not going to catch any pests from his neighbors.

You see my point. At some critical level of non-use of pesticides, the pests will start to propagate much more than they do now.

Re:That would imply...

[flewp]

For my religion (Call it evolution, physics, science, whatever you want) these terrorists (not just terrorist either, anyone who would rather war than work something out) are quite counterproductive.
I've yet to see a confirmed case otherwise.

Re:Bullshit

[skotte]

you really dont have a good understanding of fFertilizer, do you? strictly speaking, water is fFertilizer. no, i'm not so jaded as to think of water as fFertilizer, but the idea here is "things you add to the dirt to make stuff grow".

or did you think all you had to do was throw seeds into some dirt and it will grow, without any help whatsoever?

an organic fFarm -- that is, a place which is built on the idea of fFarming en masse -- will probably have several compost depots. these will be mounds of dirt and decomposing leaves and sticks and such. this is generally considered organic (although the pursit will sift throuhg everything in their compost to take out what might not pass)

Re:Organic Markets

[skotte]

i agree in concept. but in truth, there's a couple things to take into consideration.

fFirstly, supply and demand. it's quite likely you eat more or less organic fFood without knowing it. but when people put a little label on it, this makes it really worth something. so the price goes up.

and because people are willing to pay the premiums. people like to fFeel like they are getting more than they are getting. my mother in law will eat only organics if she can. and she maintains my next point.

the fFood is simply better fFor you. the yeild may be less, but it is a higher quality. so the price actually is higher fFor the higher value. to put this into more common terms, compare Mcdonalds with the Ritz Steak House. the ritz makes more money per meal, because the price is higher. but not everyone eats at the ritz all the time. sometimes ya just wanna crummy burger and fFries. or its all you can afford right then. likewise, organic has a higher payout fFrom a higher price fFor higher quality fFood. but not everyone is willing/able to buy the better stuff.

Re:Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

[skotte]

ahhhh .. this is a much better version of what i was trying to illustrate over here:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33492& cid=3625213
although i think mine sounds like simpler english, you have nicely asked what i was struggling to get at. the basic actual math of the loss/gain difference.

at any rate, all this doesnt mean they are "lying", per se, just not giving us all the data. consider, what is the time difference involved, or more specifically, the labour-pay rates. (are organic methods more/less labour intensive, or do they require a more/less skilled hand, which would require more/less pay?)

this is a great study. but this article alone doesnt give anywhere near enough data to convert an entire industry.

Re:Junk Science Debunked

[texchanchan]

thanks... junkscience seemed so promising a concept... but then I went and looked at it. Man, why can't people just get things straight without adding in their politics? And usually a high level of indignation ("the amphetamine of the emotions"TM)

Sustainability is the only issue

[Zen Mastuh]

Agriculture is an ~8,000 year old undertaking. Most of the changes in agriculture have occured in the last hundred years. In that time much of the arable land has been developed or paved over. We have increasing food production demands and a decreasing quantity of land with which to produce food on. Hence the need for food science.

Brief segue: I read an article online [maybe here?] about research for food/air/water/waste systems for a mission to Mars. The major requirement is that the systems on the spaceship must use the waste from the other systems to minimize resources used and to keep the human cargo alive for the entire trip. Planet earth can be thought of as a space ship--and it has--and that puts everthing into a more clear perspective.

Will our spaceship be able to sustain its human cargo? Our current system of chemo-geneto-monoculture guarantees high yields for now, but has problems of its own. For example, monoculture requires high levels of fertilizers. Most chemical fertilizers have a chloride content in the teens percentagewise--eventually the salt content in the soil will become high enough to render the soil infertile. The lack of rotting organic matter in the soil causes the soil to hold very little water, which calls for additives to increase water holding. Other posters have pointed out the production costs which are borne by the rest of society--such as fertilizer runoff and cross breeding by GM crops--so I won't elaborate on that. There is also the practice of using Roundup-ready GM crops which can survive high doses of that product. What happens to that soil once the GM crops are banned or if Monsanto pulls the plug on that product? The soil becomes poisonous and incapable of growing any crops.

There is only one system of agriculture that employs sustainability in the heart of its philosophy: organic. Yes, it is labor intensive. Yes, it is expensive. However it does appear to be the only way to travel. Call me a hippy or engage in whatever ad hominem attack that your threatened sensibilities deem necessary, but don't raid my crops when your farming methods fail.

Have a rebuttal, Mr. AC

[Zen Mastuh]

Roundup isn't a long-persistence herbicide

It isn't effective for long, but still toxic. Don't forget runoff and the other costs to society that you "non-nutbar" types conveniently leave out of your analysis.

I take it you're volunteering to be the one doing the labor? I didn't think so.

Sorry, bud--I already do! Really, your cynicism prevents you from thinking objectively. You are being angry with me because our society doesn't value farm labor but [for example...] pays people thousands of dollars a day to model clothing in front of a camera.