Organic vs. Conventional

I was listening to the radio recently and heard a brief he-said-she-said “debate” between a supporter of conventional agriculture and a supporter of organic agriculture. The conventional agriculture supporter’s main argument was that organic growers use pesticides too, just organic ones. The organic supporter (not a farmer) wasn’t able to address this point but talked about wanting to eat vegetables without pesticides on them. Her support for organic ended up sounding a bit simplistic, while the conventional supporter made it sound like organic and conventional agriculture are practically the same thing. It was not an enlightened or enlightening debate.

There are very concrete and specific differences between organic and conventional agriculture. To be certified organic, a farmer must meet very strict rules concerning materials that can be applied, inputs that can be used, techniques for combating weeds, diseases, and pests, types of seed that can be used, and products used in post-harvest handling of the crop. Organic farmers are prohibited from using genetically modified organisms, sewage sludge fertilizers, synthetic (petroleum based) fertilizers, soil fumigants, and toxic pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and defoliants.

Here is one example of how conventional and organic farming systems differ. Conventional farmers often use herbicides to kill weeds so that the food crop can grow without competition. For instance, the GMO crops Roundup Ready soybeans and corn are genetically modified so that they are not killed by the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate). Round-up is applied directly to the growing crop to kill the weeds around it. The use of Roundup has skyrocketed from 11 million pounds in 1987 to nearly 300 million pounds in 2012. As so much farmland is blanketed with Roundup, weeds are developing resistance, resulting in even more of the product being applied in order to be effective. While not considered an acutely toxic product, use of glyphosate at this high level is concerning. Last year, the UN’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a “probably human carcinogen,” and it has been linked to antibiotics resistance and hormone disruption. Amphibians may be particularly sensitive to glyphosate. In addition, this massive use of herbicides is killing off the milkweed that used to thrive on farm border areas, threatening the survival of the Monarch butterflies, which lay their eggs only on milkweed plants. This is just one example of the habitat destruction happening around farms with this kind of management.

An organic farmer uses different methods to combat weeds, often using many practices in conjunction. We plant many of our crops in the greenhouse, so that when we plant them out to a prepared farm bed, they are big enough to outcompete the new weeds that will come up when we water. When we’re seeding directly into the ground, we will sometimes prepare a “stale seed bed,” watering it (or letting the rain do it) and letting the weeds sprout. A pass with the tractor cultivator kills the weeds and then we plant the seed for our crop. A similar method used with crops that take a long time to germinate like carrots or cilantro, is to plant the crop seed, wait until it is just about to sprout and flame the top of the seed bed to kill the weeds that have emerged first. Mechanical cultivation both with tractors and hand weeding with hoes is generally necessary as the plants and weeds grow.

Combating weeds is a labor-intensive activity for organic farms and often accounts for much of the increased cost of growing organically. Organic rules take away the option to just kill everything with herbicides, so organic farmers have to be more thoughtful about how we address the problem.

One of my favorite book titles is What Are People For?, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry. This is a question worth asking, and I think part of the answer is that people are for doing good work, thoughtfully, making the extra effort to understand and own the consequences of the work that we do. In a way, organic agriculture is about asking questions like this and finding answers that cause the least harm to the world around us.