Actually, it doesn’t say that. If I may quote from the article
Which is exactly what I just said: Organic farming can increase biodiversity on the land on which it is used, but it may often decreases biodiversity in that land too.
I was put off of Organic produce when I watched a “Life Swap” programme and saw the O farmers concerned putting their own faeces on their crop as fertiliser.
Apart from the Ick element it is also a way of spreading pathogens.
Not so healthy.
Though I’m not saying all, or even a large number of O farmersdo this.
You probably wouldn’t enjoy it on the Space Station. Astronauts routinely drink their own recycled urine.
It seems to me like you’re missing the larger point, too. In an ecological cycle, what is poison to an animal or plant in one part of a cycle is food for another. E.g., plants don’t have much use for oxygen, but they sure want the CO2 that our bodies work hard to get rid of.
You are picking and choosing positive and negative effects to make your position seem plausible. The question is not whether organic farming is less efficient: It’s whether overall it has less impact on the human body AND whether it has less impact on the environment.
Agri-business is concerned with cost-effective yield above anything else. In practice they are willing to allow soil to erode, to heavily fertilize with artificial fertilizers that pollute rivers and have an undercertain effect on the human body. They push to have genetically modified crops. The maker of a genetically modified crop actually (successfully) sued a farmer in a famous case, when the farmer’s crop was contaminated by his neighbor’s genetically modified crop! The reason? The farmer was using THEIR invention without payment!
Organic farming excludes radical, untested techniques involving chemicals whose import may not be understood for decades. Non-organic farming is not a single alternative, but an entire philosophy which is: We’ll try anything that might make us a buck. I.e., it’s a selfish, partly unregulated philosophy versus what is a relatively unchanging organic process that has persisted since before recorded history. I.e., amorphous “wish fulfilment” versus pragmatic success.
Finally, we’ve been doing human testing on organic food for thousands of years. Those foods that tend to harm people disproportionate to their value disappear. That’s simple economics. It’s a workable system. There’s no proof, and neither do the producers of artificial fertilizers and genetically modified crops intend to make a proof, that historically their food will be best for the human body or the environment or biodiversity.
I.e., organic food is safe. Non-organic food is a crap shoot. You want to save a few bucks risking your body? Go ahead. If I get really worried about biodiversity, I’ll send a note to our farm manager, and ask him to have someone evaluate the nature areas that are cordoned off on our property. Intentionally, regularly poisoning my body with chemicals in cheap food from quite malignant companies such as Monsanto is not one of the options I even consider. Any option is better than those from a company that basically couldn’t care less.
Actually there’s a good chance that your very own sewage is being used as fertilizer. All of that waste is chock full of nutrients that make it an excellent fertilizer. And the pathogenic bacteria don’t make it through the treatment process, since they can’t compete with all the decomposer bacteria. Still to be safe it isn’t used to fertilizer human crops; instead it’s used for growing animal feed.
Really one of the biggest environmental problems we have is the disconnect between inputs and outputs. Recycling waste is a necessary part of sustainable agriculture.
I can only assume at this point that you are being deliberately disingenuous. Nowhere does it say that it “often” decreases biodiversity, in fact, the exact phrase used is “usually enhances species richness”. Not can, as you are trying to suggest, but usually does. It’s not exactly what you said by any stretch of the imagination.
Regarding your point about organic farming being less efficient in terms of crop yields, I’ve spent the day educating myself about this, and you are correct - it appears that organic farming results in about 15-20% lower yields, which means approximately 20% larger farms for the same yield. This just reinforces the conclusion I am increasingly coming to in all matters environmental - the ultimate problem is not technological, but population. We simply exceed the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet at the lifestyle that we wish to adopt. I would also raise the point that a 20% reduction in farm size could easily be achieved by reducing meat consumption, which would also have the added benefit of being healthier. This would compensate for the need to have larger farm sizes due to organic farming’s lower efficiencies.
Is this is true at all, and it clearly is not, then it is true of all agri-business. Both the organic and traditional kinds.
No, that is not true. Such an event never happened.
You are either misremembering the Percy Schmeiser case, or, more likely, you have only ever read biased accounts of the case. Try reading the actual court transcripts for the facts.
Schmeiser took great pains to produce a GM without paying its owner any money. He was, of course, sued for stealing patented technology from the maker of a GM crop. The court found that Scmeiser is either an outright thief and a liar who deliberately stole the crop, or that at best he is an immense idiot who took great efforts to do something that any reasonable person would have known was an act of theft.
Nobody, not even Schmeiser himself, ever claimed that he accidentally grew the crop. That line was an invention made up from whole cloth by Greenpeace after the trial was over, and one that Schmeiser never claimed during the trial. Morevover it is contradicted not just by Schmeiser’s evidence during the trial, but by the evidence of several other witnesses. So either Schmeiser is a liar who perjured himself in court or else he and Greenpeace are lying in their current account. You get to decide
No, it doesn’t, as we have already established.
Oh, how cute. You actually believe that organic farming is not a massive business. you really believe that Monsanto is not the single biggest producer of organic produce on the entire planet.
This doesn’t even make any sense.
So getting potentially fatal food poisoning is what you call safe is it?
You either have not read, or can not understand, your own reference:
“16% of [organic farms]actually showed a negative effect of organic farming on species richness.”
16%. That is indeed often. So yes, it does say that organic farming often reduces biodiversity on the farms on which it is used.
The fact that your own references makes this statement clearly in the second paragraph, yet you claim that it makes no such claim at all, tells us all we need to know really.
Nonsense. your point was that organic farming increases biodiveristy. It does not do any such thing. It can sometimes increase biodiversity on the farms on which it is used, though often it leads to a decrease in biodiversity on those farms. Most importantly on a national or global scale it leads to a serious decrease in biodiveristy by destroying 20% of wilderness areas.
a) This is is nonsense.
b) It has no relevance at all to fact that organic farming has a major detrimental effect on biodiversity.
And…
It could also be achieved if we all ate a nothing but bread, water, beef and seafood which would also be “healthier” than some nebulous, undefined alternative.
So what? It has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that organic farming has a major detrimental effect on biodiversity.
Or we could just not use organic farming, which would have the same effect.
Please fight my ignorance. I have heard that organic farming works in the same way that being unvaccinated can work in a population where most people are vaccinated. That is, because of all the non-organic farms killing off weeds and bugs and fungus, the organic farms that may be nestled in among them don’t have to deal with those problems and can get away without using pesticides or herbicides. Maybe this is not accurate?
There are many good reasons to eat organic food: Hunger, boredom, wanting to be the world’s fattest man … .
Bill Door said that we should trust the commercial pesticides, instead of risking the possibly higher-concentration – and untested – ‘natural toxins’ that plants produce.
Do you really want to trust someone on this, who calls himself Bill Door? :dubious: It’s obviously a pseudonym, and who knows who he may be really?
Modern medicine uses radical, untested techniques involving chemicals (!) whose import may not be understood for decades. We’ve been doing human testing on viruses for thousands of years. Humans whose immune systems can’t kill viruses disappear.
i.e. letting illnesses run their course, up to and including death is safe. Taking medicine for them is a crap shoot.
More succinctly, you’ve selected some weird anti-creationist stance: the assumption that only humans evolve, and nature stands still during the process. Us vs. nature is an arms race, and both sides are working to improve their effectiveness. Nature is, by and large, trying to protect it’s foods from being eaten; “synthetics” are designed from the very beginning to be eaten, and tested for safety in ways natural foods never are.
Even more succinctly:The “argument from antiquity” (i.e. that older things are better by virtue of being old) is a recognized logical fallacy: consider astrology, trepanning, exorcism, chinese medicine, herbal remedies, etc. all of which are usually ineffective and often dangerous, but nevertheless haven’t “disappeared”–quite the opposite.
It sounds as though you’re saying that the accreditation means nothing and that there’s no enforcement? - Which isn’t the same thing the USDA says here. What’s the deal?
I don’t think it is. I’ve never heard of organic farmers being able to simply ignore the pest control problem because they’re lucky enough not to have any pests.
Rather, organic farmers use a wide variety of pest control techniques, from companion-cropping to planting sacrificial species to applying organically approved pesticides and herbicides to introducing natural predator species to using physical pest barriers such as row covers.
They definitely don’t have the luxury of just relying on some kind of agricultural “herd immunity” provided by non-organic agriculture to protect their own crops from pests and weeds.
My impression is that organic farmers don’t want to be “nestled in” anywhere near standard farming operations, because of spray drift/GMO contamination issues.
Eating organic food is fine if you don’t mind paying a premium for it and don’t require compelling evidence that it’s better/safer for you. Contributing just that little bit towards lower agricultural chemical use is about the only justifiable reason I can think of for going organic.*
*I don’t typically buy organic produce. I do tend to be minimalist about using non-organic pesticides in my own vegetable garden.
This has everything to do with the varieties grown and methods of picking/shipping, and nothing to do with organic vs. non-organic raising.
It could be attributable to organic methods - because plants under stress may produce crops that happen to have the attributes we consider desirable (albeit probably accompanied by lower yields).
For (a rather crude and obvious) example: Chillies will produce fruits higher in capsaicin if the plants are stressed through water shortage or insect attack. You get fewer and smaller fruits, but they taste better (assuming hotter=better, which it is for many people). Tomatoes also have similar responses to some kinds of stress.
What I’m trying to say is that, rather than tasty produce from happy organic plants (as some people might imagine occurring), it could be a case of miserable, stressed plants struggling to produce crops that happen to taste better as a result of the struggle.
Obviously it won’t work that way in all or even most cases - some plants will produce tough or bitter crops in response to stress.
I suspect the key element there is “locally produced” rather than “organic”.
I get an organic fruit and veg delivery every week. I get it in large part not because (or not just because) it’s organic but because whatever arrangements they have with local farmers means that the stuff that turns up is much fresher and much tastier than the bland fare available in the local supermarkets. Even the produce they get from outside the country - citrus, mostly - is far superior to what I can find at my local Tesco’s. I could buy organic at the supermarket but it’s just as bland.
Or, as Kimstu put in more succinctly:
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Penn & Teller Bullshit episode. I can’t link it, but look for it on YouTube. It has at least the first two parts, and covers both the environmental, health, and taste issues.
I unfortunately am not able to summarize the claims at this time, as I can’t view the video. But I remember it claims that organic food doesn’t pass a taste test, that pesticides are used and that the ones are allowed to be used are actually more harmful, that manure is the only allowable fertilizer and carries pathogens, and that there all of the studies fail to show any health benefits.
I do not believe either of the first two parts or the reduced version cover biodiversity.
I totally agree, but the human waste being spread on their food crop was completely untreated.
I personally think that it is a waste when sewage works burn off the methane by product, at least some plants use it to power equipment.