Sacred Cows – Organic food

Hi Laura, I have to agree that mixed farming is definitely preferable to mono-cropping. If you look at farming as a cycle then plants remove nutrients but don’t replace them, only animals do through manure. Of course naturally plants would replace nutrients when they die and are broken down, but in farming they are harvested and used for their seeds and hay.

This is one of the reasons for the old crop and animal rotation systems and growing clover, which fixes nitrogen in the soil for other plants to use later. I don’t know much about mediaeval types of farming practices, but the little bit I know is fascinating to see how it all worked together to move the nutrients back into the soil.

When you say fossil fuels are burned for nitrogen, do you mean the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia? It would be interesting to know what process Brian Dunning is referring to, because he clearly states ‘produces no waste’ and while the Haber-Bosch process itself has no waste, CO2 seems to be a waste product from making the hydrogen and methane used. So it needs to be seen how the burning of gas to produce the ammonia balances against the burning of fuel to apply more of the less efficient fertilisers.

This doesn’t take into account the extra applications of less efficient pesticides that also burns fuel and produces carbon dioxide in organic farming. I don’t know enough about farming to know what sort of impact this has.

You might be interested in this analysis on the nutritional content of organic foods. It’s a few years old, but I know there was one released by the UK Department of Agriculture in the last couple of years that I haven’t been able to find, I’m not sure if it is the same one but it had the same results – there is no evidence of nutritional differences between organic and intensively farmed foods, (except possibly vitamin C in green leafy vegetables). Now no evidence doesn’t necessarily mean no difference, but given the time and number of studies it is a very interesting finding. And given the general principal that if you make a claim you should have the evidence to back it up, organic farming doesn’t.

And I think that’s what Terrie is talking about here – the way that organic food has been marketed to consumers. Unfortunately there isn’t any evidence it is nutritionally better and the environmental claims seem to be questionable. I agree wholeheartedly that we should be questioning farming practices, but ‘organic products’ as they are currently sold to consumers seem to be getting in the way of this questioning rather than helping.