Credit: Jim Wehtje/Photolibrary
ADVOCATES OF ORGANIC FARMING argue that it is better for the environment and more sustainable. But is it?
Australian farmers are considered among the most innovative in the world, growing their crops in difficult conditions on ancient, infertile soils that have an unfortunate tendency to blow away in clouds of dust. One high-tech solution is known as no-till farming. The plough may be the icon of farming, but it turns out that ploughing actually wrecks the soil. The soil that farmers prize has a structure that resembles a stack of peas with pores running through it. Earthworms and other creatures maintain this structure, and the whole thing is meshed together by the tendrils of fungi and plant roots. In other words – a spongy soil that holds onto water and won't blow away. Too much tillage destroys that structure, so a method of no-till farming had to be developed.
Tillage is used to bury the previous year's crop residue and destroy weeds. But in no-till farming, herbicide removes the weeds and the new seed is sown directly into the stubble of the last crop. Leaving the stubble in the soil means the planet benefits. Roush estimates that all that carbon kept in the ground by no-till farming reduces carbon dioxide emissions by up to eight million tonnes per year.
Compared to the bad old days where virtually every part of a field was ploughed, these days the scars are restricted to two-centimetre-wide furrows 30 cm apart. No-till systems also win hands down when it comes to hanging on to soils. An 11-year farming experiment by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland, compared crops grown three ways: conventional tillage, organic methods, or no-till. Compared to the conventional tilled plot, the organic plot was likely to hang on to 30 per cent more soil. But compared to the organic plot, the no-till plot hung on to 80 per cent more soil. (It's possible to combine organic and no-till on a small scale by relying on hand weeding. But that's not practical for large-scale farming. And without tilling, it's difficult to work manures into the soil.)
THE DOWNSIDE to no-till farming is that steel ends up being replaced with chemicals: herbicides control the weeds. But in areas where soil erosion is a major problem, that is probably a fair trade-off, especially bearing in mind that most chemicals do their damage when they piggyback into waterways on the back of eroded soils. David Pimentel is a Cornell University entomologist who has written much about the negative environmental impacts of pesticides. Nevertheless he says, "I'd take chemicals over soil erosion any day."
Australian farmers also practise the time-honoured tradition of crop rotation; for instance alternating a nitrogen-guzzling wheat crop with a nitrogen-producing legume such as clover. Not only does the clover pasture fertilise the field, but the unwelcome pests and weeds that adapt themselves to the wheat-growing schedule (wheat is planted in spring) get left high and dry when the winter clover is planted. So the farmers reduce their chemical use and are actually able to supply about 70 per cent of their nitrogen needs from the legumes.
"Our broad-acre cropping is at the very low end of the spectrum as far as chemical inputs," says John Kirkegaard, an agronomist at the CSIRO. In places like Western Australia with its poor soils, 100 per cent of broad-acre farmers use these environmentally-friendly techniques. "It's an economic imperative as much as an environmental one," he says.
Australian farmers, like those all over the world, have also reduced their use of pesticides because of the impact of a discipline that started more than three decades ago, known as integrated pest management (IPM). The first line of defence is to take advantage of natural insect or animal predators. Pesticides, targeted at specific pests, are a last resort. According to David Pimentel, integrated pest management has slashed the use of pesticides by over 65 per cent in Thailand and Switzerland.
"Organic" food... laff...
"Organic" food is the new snake oil. The problem is, this nostrum is being wholeheartedly embraced not just by the pretty people and ivory tower elitists, but by governments, and little inconsequentials like actual facts are clearly not going to stand in the way of Politically Correct "progress".
If these whack-jobs have their way, within our lifetimes, we will once again be living in 14th-Century serfdom, complete with a super-privileged ruling class and rampant poverty, death and disease for everyone else. They won't come out and say it, but the fact remains, this IS the earthy-people's long-term goal.
Hoorah to you for adding another voice in the wilderness, and keep up the good work!
BadKarma Reader - have you actually done any real research?
There are the blind, the dumb and then there is the downright stupid! Hey BadKarma reader have you actually ever done any real research or indeed ever even been to the wilderness from which you say you cry?
Perhaps if you care to stop your blubber for long enough to visit www.i-sis.org.uk (and perhaps Ms Finkel could research a bit more non Monsanto backed data to refer to next time) and read...
"Dozens of prominent scientists from seven countries, spanning the disciplines of agroecology, agronomy, biomathematics, botany, chemical medicine, ecology, histopathology, microbial ecology, molecular genetics, nutritional biochemistry, physiology, toxicology and virology, joined forces to launch themselves as an Independent Science Panel on GM at a public conference, attended by UK environment minister Michael Meacher and 200 other participants, in London on 10 May 2003.
The conference coincided with the publication of a draft report, The Case for a GM-free Sustainable World, calling for a ban on GM crops to make way for all forms of sustainable agriculture. This authoritative report, billed as "the strongest, most complete dossier of evidence" ever compiled on the problems and hazards of GM crops as well as the manifold benefits of sustainable agriculture, is being finalised for release 15 June 2003."
Are all these scientists 'earthy-people' too? Funny that, I thought we all lived on this one earth... maybe you are from a different planet!
GM food
I totally agree, the proof that GM food is bad in many ways are there and we have to open our eyes and do something. That dossier of evidence, where scientist and authority worked on, is the proof that GM free food is the way to go and that we are working against our own good. To produce more is great, but what when our health is at stake. Quality over quantity they said? I'm pretty much certain that is we worked as hard to find ways to solve current agricultural problems in an ecological way, we would have less pollution, better global health and probably a lot less problems with new disease popping "out of nowhere"!
Just my 2 cents..
Vivi Peterson
Sustainable agriculture - a myth
No matter how, where or with what methods agriculture, i.e remove nature and plant whatever is unsustainable. The question then remains how to feed the current most devastating pests of the planet -us! Fiddling around the edges with GM, no GM organic, no organic etc etc is just that - fiddling around the edges of the population problem.
How about some of the 'actual facts' on GM?
Interesting that the first comment listed here is such a strong advocate of the article...hmm? Have you ever even looked into the 'actual facts' that you speak of? I found a very informative pod cast from Bob Phelps of Gene Ethics on wonderfulworldmedia.net. Check it out and then get back to me! The panels on lifting GM bans are sitting right now in Australia - do you even care about what you eat or are you a Mackers consumer? If they lift the ban on GM in Australia in Feb 2008, eventually no one will even have the choice of eating clean non-GM contaminated food and articles like this one are a travesty of mis-reporting.
A rather disappointing effort from a magazine that I had thought would know better.
Organic vegetables, beef, chicken, milk?
I don't agree with the last comment. Even if i respect your opinion, there was no way in the past to see if that snake oil was actually working. But today, scientists from all over the world proved that antibiotics and growth hormones will be bad for us in the long term. Think about kraft dinner and doritos, that just can't be good for out health ;) If we eat modified vegetables, beef, chicken, even milk, it's for only one reason, it's because right now we're putting money before health. Big corporation don't have enough opposition right now, so they do what they want.
Patty
You are ignorant
Organic food means that your body is not ingesting, storing, and altering DDT or other toxic chemicals. Thanks to non 'earthy-people' (by the way you also need the earth to survive) the meat industry is allowed to flourish and now every one who does not hunt for their own meat has to worry about not only whether their vegetables and fruits are genetically modified (which by the way there are no regulations for in the U.S.) but also what types of artificial hormones have been crudely injected (and by injected I mean force fed) into the animals scheduled for mass slaughter. It is sick. If you think that mass produced food is better, more environmentally friendly or nutritious I advise you to seriously reconsider.
Laff and a Haff!
BadKarma (pretty much says it all really!) I find it very ironic that you have been able to connect pastoral traditions to serfdom- You are defiantly suffering from a patriotic bout of paranoia! I see around me everyday, extremely sick, overweight people that have been cut down at a time in their lives that they should be at their healthiest, because of a misguided and abusive system that has no place in nature. If you want to understand what it is like to be subjugated, you need to look at a system that prevents one from having a choice as to how the very thing that they consume is produced!
Organic food
The cafeteria at Monsanto has banned genetically engineered food at the insistence of Monsanto employees. That's a pip, eh? The Bt plants that are so lauded in the article are responsible for the deaths of thousands of sheep , goats and cattle in India after they grazed on Bt cotton.Dr Finkel speaks of Australian farmers and 'modern farming techniques w/ safer pesticides that allow for living soil. Perhaps that is true in Australia, but my first hand experience is that you can't grow healthy food in sick soil. And you cannot have healthy soil by dumping tons of petro chemical additives, be it fertiliser(what?) or synthetic pesticides.As for the good Doctor's assertion that organic farming cannot feed the world,I refer her and anyone else interested to the recent University of Michigan study which shows not only can organic supply enough food to feed the world, but that it is the preferrable model for poor and developing countries.
Petro Additives: Say what it is, Urea
I used to work at a Urea Plant.
Urea is an organic chemical, same stuff you piss out every day in the process of eliminating Nitrogen from your system. It is highly soluble, and actually was the founding of organic chemistry when it was first produced from non-organic chemicals in 1828.
It is put on the soil in a dilted form, but chemically is not any different then your own, naturally produced kidney juice.
We are not putting oil on the ground. We are not putting anything on the ground as fertizer that is not naturally produced by every living organism.
One is just far more pure, clean, and easy to control.
The other is crap.
Josh