I don’t know how effective soap sprays are, but it’s my understanding that the cheapest and most effective way to control aphids specifically, organic or otherwise, is ladybugs. You can generally buy live ladybugs from organic gardening catalogs, if they aren’t already in your area. And I don’t know the specifics for other bug types, but many other pests can likewise be controlled via predators.
Another pest-control method that can be used sometimes is proper timing of when to plant what. For instance, you can eliminate bean beetles by delaying planting your beans. In Northeast Ohio, “Bean Day” is June 20; it’s probably earlier or later in other climates. The idea is that the bean beetles can get through the winter without beans, but eventually, they’ll starve off, if the beans aren’t available early enough in the spring.
I couldn’t care less if you eat organic or non organic food. People that eat it , do it for themselves as a personal choice. Nobody is saying that the world has to switch over to only organic gardening. I don’t search out organic foods in the store, but I use the practices as much as I can in my garden. I prefer not to be spraying neuro-toxins and poisons. Many farmers end up with neurological problems that likely are the result of spraying the crops. I have an uncle that sprayed for a farmers cooperative over 30 years. He’s having severe neuralogical problems from years of spraying the chemicals. The water tables in most of Wisconsin are currently contaminated with nitrates.
It’s impossible to explain why organic gardening works in a small short thread. You really have to investigate into the partices to see why people decide to do it that way.
The reality is that, like solar power, the economics aren’t quite in line just yet.
Because Nitrogen deficiency has been problematic in the organic system, farmers are still studying the effects of crop management strategies and soil organism abundance and activity on nitrogen release to better understand soil nitrogen processes in organically-managed systems.
However, in absolute costs, weed management has usually been more expensive in the low-input and organic systems due to greater reliance on hand hoeing (Hey, even with cheap illegal labor, it is $$$$$) Although total pesticide use could be reduced by 50%, premium prices are needed to compensate growers for increased pest management costs which may average 50% more than conventional pest management costs - big number, which upsets the cost of everything tied to ground crops, from meats and poultry to people.
On small economic scales, organix and crop rotations and smart strategies are worth diving into. But in many ways, organix is not just a flat out ‘better’ way to eat, farm or incorporate economically. The tilted economics would affect the people at an economic disadvantage first.
Nitrogen is notoriously difficult to get out of the air, because molecular nitrogen (N2) is one of the most stable molecules out there, since it’s triple-bonded. As a side note, that’s why so many explosives contain nitrogen: TNT? The N stands for nitro-. And that’s why fertilizer bombs make sense. The explosions allow nitrogen compounds to relax to extremely stable molecular nitrogen, releasing a metric crapload of energy.
Anyway, there aren’t a lot of organisms that have figured out the trick of taking atmospheric nitrogen and turning it into a form that the rest of us can use, and we all really need it. It’s an important substance in our bodies. Amino acids that make up our proteins all have nitrogen in them, for instance. That’s why nitrogen-fixing bacteria are so important.
Just in case this is causing anyone any confusion: The USDA controls use of the word “organic,” but you can label anything “natural”–it means nothing on a product. I could sell my calves as organic (they never ate anything I didn’t grow on my own property, and I use no fertilizer or pesticide), but a group of calves I purchased from another rancher couldn’t be sold as organic because they had been born on leased BLM (U.S. Bureau of Land Management) property and the other rancher had no way to prove what they’d been eating out there.
Depends on the crop. I don’t have to add nitrogen to my alfalfa, as it naturally has root nodules containing nitrogen-fixing bacteria. When I rotate out the alfalfa for a different crop, the alfalfa root system that I plow under leaves enough nitrogen for the next crop, too. Various other crops (including the soybeans various posters have mentioned and other legumes) do the same.
Whoosh, I presume? If not, it’s a really good thing that we came along with our chemicals and modern farming techniques, because after millions of years of everything growing organically, the environment must have been on the brink of collapse!
Most of the good garden shops either have them, or can get them for you. I’ve even purchased live ladybugs from hardware stores.
You only need otlook at the increas ein food production in the last 100 years to see that this doens;t hold water. People have known about crop rotation for millenia, yet they couldn’t maintain soil nitrogen levels.
Philster is quite correct, we couldn’t possiblyhope to feed more than atiny fractionof the world; spopulation using just organic methods.
I hope this is a joke. I hope you do relaise that people haven’t been in existence for millions of years, much less practicing farming inorder to feed 6 billion individuals for that period.
You do realize (as I’m sure your organic buddies do) that almost all the plants we eat have been “genetically engineered” to be as they are now? The difference is that it takes a whole lot longer just to breed it the way you want it. Wild wheat doesn’t have a lot in common with modern wheat, even if by “modern” you mean the wheat your great great great great grandma threshed. Not to mention how un-auroch-like a domestic cow is.
I grow my plants organically because I like them that way. Granted, I haven’t needed huge pesticide applications and maybe if I did I’d change my mind, but at least on a small garden scale it isn’t difficult and I think it’s better for all of us.
The word natural on meat does have some meaning. The meat hasn’t been injected with solutions. It won’t contain 20% solution. Most meat is cured by injections of solution instead of the slower methods.
Go back and read the paragraph you were responding to and tell me what part of it doesn’t hold water. Everything I said in that paragraph is 100% verifiable fact.
Take out the word “tiny” and I’d agree with you on this. Yields are lower for organic crops. That’s true. Organic meat also has lower yield. But if our yields in both were halved (or even quartered) by switching all production to organic methods, that would hardly qualify as “a tiny fraction.”
And I think our dependence on pesticides and manmade fertilizers will continue to decrease as we develop new strains and subspecies (both through standard breeding practices and through genetic manipulation) that are more efficient and more resistant to standard pests and diseases.
Philster said, “Organic = bad for the environement.” I was responding to that specific statement. There have been plants on this planet for millions of years (well, billions, actually) and they were all grown without pesticides and manmade fertilizers. Yet, somehow, “the environment” has survived. Philster’s statement is just plain silly.
Oh, and yes, there have been people for millions of years. Granted, Homo erectus didn’t farm a couple of million years ago, but I wasn’t talking about farming. Of course, if you’re speaking only of Homo sapiens, you’re correct.
There isn’t enough nitrogen (fertilizer) naturally occurring that could feed the plants that feed people and which feed live stock. That is a fact, one that you do not even dispute.
The additional fact that YOU can produce enough nitrogen via crop roation to make money for yourself doesn’t in any way invalidate that point.
You do realise that if our yields of food were halved that woudl result in something like 80% of the world’s population starving to death, right?
Yes, 20% is a tiny fraction. If our yields of food were halved we could only suport a tiny fraction of the world’s population, about 20%
No, your statement is funny. His point is perfectly sound.
“The environment” has not had to cope with 6 billion human mouths for billions of years. Do you dispute that point?
While “the environment” may have coped perfectly well for billions of years without synthetic fetrilisers AND without 6 billion humans it can not cope with 6 billion humans and no synthetic fertilisers.
By reducing agricutural productivity and decreasing the standard of living organic production forces peopel to either overexploit existing agricultural land or produce new agricultural land from what is currently wilderness. Both those things are far wose for the environment than simply using sythetic fertilisers.
Philster’s point is perfectly sound. If the world went organic tommorow it would be an environemtal catastrophe unparralleled in human history.
Then you are just being disingenuous.
This entire thread is discussing organic farming, not organic chemistry. When Phislter said “Organic = bad for the environement” you knew damn well that he was talking about organic farming, not organic chemistry.
For you to suddenly pretend that we were talking about organic chemistry or organic somehting-other-than-farming is disingenuous in the extreme.
When the plant produces the pesticides, you can’t wash them off.
Even when they’re natural chemicals, the pesticides produced within plants can be toxic (several have been mentioned) and commonly carcinogenic. One number I picked up somewhere (probably from someone on the SDMB who knows a lot more than me about the subject) is that approximately 10% of a plant’s dry weight is natural pesticides of various types; genitic engineering to increase that percentage further poses a nontrivial risk to human health. Particularly so since many of those chemicals probably are ones that the body can deal with at low levels without harm but whose effects at higher levels aren’t well-known.
Which is not to say I’m opposed to genetic engineering, of course (in either the scientist and test-tube sense or the artificial selection sense) but such technologies are not without substantial risk; if organic growers use “naturally pest resistent varieties” of crops, then they’re probably ones that contain more of these harmful chemicals.
Further, organic farming tends to involve far more tilling of the soil, which encourages the erosion of topsoil - a substantial problem in many areas. Conversely, “no-till” agriculture is considerably more environmentally friendly in that sense, but it involves heavier use of pesticides.
I’m not an expert on this stuff, so I wouldn’t claim to know the answers. But I’m skeptical that organic agriculture is necessarily that much better for humans or the environment. It would take real answers to some of these questions to convince me.
The 2005 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures was based around food, and went into some detail about agriculture and the benefits and drawbacks of conventional, organic and genetically-modified food. Well worth a look, especially the section on pesticides.
They can be–but they can also commonly be healthful for humans (e.g., capsicum is a pest-deterrent with healthful qualities for humans). I’m unaware of any human-manufactured insecticides that are healthful for humans. As long as there’s this major difference between “natural” insecticides and artificial ones, I don’t think it’s helpful to conflate them.
As for the ability of organic agriculture to feed the world, folks talking about doing so commonly talk about not feeding so much of our agricultural production to livestock. If we cut down on the grain-fed meat in our diet, our ability to feed the world on organic agriculture would rise significantly.
No it isn’t. Capsicum is a type of fruit, not an insecticide (unless you want to throw capsicums at your insects).
Can you name any natural insecticides that are beneficial to human health?
Even if you can, you are then talking here about untested, uncontrollable, undosed substances that you admit have an effective in human health being added to the food supply. Do you really think that is a goo thing?
The dose maketh the poison. The idea that something has beneficial health effects irrespective of dosage simply doesn’t hold water.
Well no, of course you can’t. That is precisely because artificial pesticides are targeted and produced for minimal side effects. Natural insecticides like nicotine, strychnine or THC have broad spectrum effects that often have unintended effects on humans as well as on insects/
That lack of human side effects is considered good thing.
And can you name any natural insecticides that are “healthful”[sic] for humans?
What major difference? What do you see as being the major difference between resmethrin and pyrethrum for example?
Well, yes, and if technology and yield been frozen at 1961 levels, then producing as much food as was actually produced in 1998 would have required increasing the acreage farmed from 12.2 billion acres to 26.3 billion acres or from 38% to 82% of global land area. That would have meant destroying forests, draining swamps, irrigating deserts and exterminating species on an unimaginable scale.
That is the sort of penalty we face by abandoning synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Which do you think is better, environmentally?
No it isn’t. Capsicum is a plant genus of the Solanaceae family. The fruit of capsicum species usually contain capsaicin, which is obviously what LHOD meant to say. Capsaicin is more a deterrant of furry browsers than it is an insecticide, although it is used against aphids and spider mites.
Common plant derived insecticides include pyrethrins, nicotine, rotenones, caffeine, limonene, and eugenol.
The original question asks if organic is a scam for high prices at the store. We’ve shown that the growing methods are different enough to explain the price difference, so your not being scammed for extra money. I’ll leave the rest of you to argue points. I’d hate to see this thread stuck into GD, so maybe you should start a thread there on organic benefits and practicalities.