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Well, we farm organically (small scale, just for our family and friends consumption) because we know many commercial farmers. Growing up in a farming based county, I have seen the destruction of the fields, rivers and lakes because of overfarming, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and soil erosion. Our rivers are filled with silt and a filmyness that sticks to your skin despite repeated washings. My brother in laws family are huge farmers, owning over 1/4 of the land in our county. They wear space suits and breathe in respirators when they are spraying Roundup on the fields. Then they dispose of the suits in hazmat bags. They wear protective gear when fertilizing and the land is stripped. No weeds even grow there. That alone tells me its not healthy. That, and the farmers would not feed this food to their families.

We grow food without any chemicals at all. We pull weeds, we pick off bugs or pull plants that have disease. We have richer soil each year due to our compost, and we mulch with grass trimmings from our yard. Our garden produce is so incredibly good, so fresh, so tasty, and its our way to give back to the earth.

Sure, if you just want to grow massive amounts of unhealthy food, and you don’t care if it means pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers get into the water supply, and you are making corn syrup or ethanol, large scale farming is fine.

All of the organic farmers we know are very conscious of creating a healthy soil, so much of the need for pesticides is eliminated. If you have kids, would you rather have them eat a delicious strawberry grown on rich, natural soil or one sprayed, genetically altered to always be red, grown to be big but not really tasteful?

The best alternative is to buy food from local farm markets or roadside veggie or food stands, or even better, grow your own. Its not only better for the environment (way way way less gas, pesticides and energy consumed), it tastes better.

We do not have a shortage of food in the US. We can afford to take the time, space and effort to go back to a more naturally sustainable growing process.

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Traditional farming methods using pesticides kill natural soil organisms, making it so you must use fertilizer. Because the soil organisms that help the plants to absorb nitrogen are dead, the nitrogen flows right through the soil. All the rest seeps through the soil into local streams, often reaching toxic levels.

Also, one of the reasons we need the pesticides in the first place is because we grow one strain of a food en masse(and all year), making it easier for pests and diseases to evolve.
Another aspect of the movement is eating heirloom varieties, which slows this process.

The factory farm produce travels hundreds or millions of miles to get to you, using up tons of gallons of oil. They must pick fruit before it is ripe. Once you pick a fruit, it will not get any sweeter. Thats why there is a push for local produce.

There are advances every day, making it easier and faster to grow produce without all the harmful effects. Neither method is perfect. We just need to keep trying to make things better.

Hm?

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I absolutely agree with you - organic is bad.

The more people that buy organic - the more we stand to devastate the earth. Thats right. Organic only works now because it depends directly and indirectly on inputs from conventional farming (more on that).

Every piece of fertile soil has a limited store of nutrients (in some cases they are re-generated but at a much slower rate than they can be removed form harvesting). Each organic food harvest depletes this store of nutrients. Even if the farmer ploughs back in the remains - there is still a net loss. The current practice is to replace this estimated loss of nutrients with manure - from conventional farms.

This means one of two things: Seeing as it’s manure, the nutrient quantities are unknown by the organic farmer so when he applies the manure he may either over apply or underapply the manure.

If he under applies - then the harvest will go down and the soil has been depleted further. If he over applies then soluble nutrients such as nitrate get washed out and end up in rivers or lakes causing eutrophication.

In the past conventinal farming could be blamed forn eutrophication, but now there are precise measurement methods so that only the bare minimum amount of nutrients as required by the soil and the plant are applied - these are then all used up by the plants and no runoff into rivers occurs, this keeps the costs down as well as they do not waste money over-applying.

The current system works because organic farms are in the minority and rely on inputs form the much more efficient conventional farms - organic farms can get away with not using pesticides at the moment because tehy are basically islands surrounded by pesticide using farms. If everything went organic - trust me that wouldn’t be the case.

To summarise: Organic farming would work in a world where all outputs were returned to the soil in which they were grown - i.e if all the excrement from a harvest was returned to the field it came from. Seeing as however excrement ends up in a centralised sewer the output are still being replaced by inputs from conventional farms.

Finally - lets all think about it: civilisation has been using organic food for centuries, (in those days there was no centralised sewer so inputs were returned close to the area they were harvested). However after the incredible population explosion over the last century, these methods just couldn’t keep up anymore - conventional farming was born, and it manages to feed the world, yes there were problems to begin with but now there are very strict controls over pesticide and fertliser us.

It’s just not sustainable on a large scale