Whatever the motivations, the result is that now even the supermarketsÑgiant enterprises dedicated not to food and health but to profitsÑare featuring organic foods. No longer are naturally grown fruits and veggies only found, wilted and sad-looking, in the dusty corners of health-food stores, behind the vitamins and mineral supplements. Organic is mainstream. (Does that make you nervous?)
But what does organic mean? And what are the benefits of organic food production?
To begin with, organic means something more than simply the avoidance of certain kinds of petroleum-based insecticides, herbicides and fertilizers. Basically, it involves a general approach to food production founded in philosophy rather than a specific set of techniques, though the techniques that we think of as organic flow from that attitude. An organic producer tries to emulate nature as closely as possible in what s/he does.
When I build a set of bins and fill them with various mixtures of food wastes, manures, plant materials, etc., turn them every three days or so and end up after three weeks with a batch of compost, I'm reproducing a natural process in speeded-up form. That's what the organic approach is: natural processes using natural materials.
Consider soil, for instance; soil contains various substances that contribute to plant development. We know them as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, iron and a myriad of other materials, some of which only contribute very small trace amounts to the overall plant growth process.
From the early decades of the last century, and particularly since the 1940s, producers have added large amounts of the more important nutrients to the soil in chemical form, with the result that yields have increased. It is this increase in production that the practitioners of large-scale agriculture point to as justification for their technique. They don't mention the downside.
By treating the soil in that way, they have created a crisis. It hasn't fully developed yet, but we're well on the way; look at the signs, the main one being the loss of enormous amounts of topsoil. The soil of large growing areas in this country, once incredibly rich and productive, has become, essentially, a granular medium for the chemical nutrients added in ever-increasing quantities for the support of crops. Any wind that comes along just picks it up and blows it away. Sooner or later it's going to run out. Just as overgrazing by goats made the western region of EgyptÑonce called the breadbasket of RomeÑinto a desert, so chemical agriculture will lead to the desertification of some of our most fertile croplands.
That's not the only consequence. While it's true that chemical agriculture has resulted in vastly increased yields of protein crops in particular, the quality of those crops has declined significantly. The plants, lacking many of the trace elements that they need for full vigor, produce nutrients that are less complete, that provide us with less food value when we eat them.
The organic producer works with nature and gets better results. In the natural state, most soils contain some but not all of the elements the plants need. Not all of them are immediately available to the plant, as they are locked up in combination with other substances. The plant can thrive if it can break up some of those combinations but it needs a little help to do that. The best help it can get comes from humus, organic material added to the soil, which functions in ways not completely understood to catalyze the release of nutrients from the soil, making them available for plant metabolism.
If specific nutrients are lacking, we can provide them, not by adding them in chemical form, but by integrating them into the soil in their natural form, as manure, plant matter or compost, all of which provide humus as well as nutrition. That's the way to build soil that has body, that has a soft, spongy texture, soil that won't blow away, soil that can support itself as well as any civilization that depends on it.
Soil, of course, is basic. So our natural approachÑour organic approach Ñhas to begin by treating our soil in a natural way.
Next issue, I'll discuss how the organic approach deals with plant and animal pests.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2003
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited