Here I examine why you might think about choosing organic foods. Taste, Nutrition, Sustainability, Simplicity, A balanced Economy, Reducing Pollution, The Social Impacts, and Organic going Mainstream.....
Organic foods are free of funky tasting synthetic chemicals. Nature is full of a broad range of chemical substances from which food manufactures can choose from to make healthy safe flavorful foods.
Foods grown organically are grown in a way that delivers balanced, full, delicious flavors. The worlds best restaurants and best chefs almost exclusively cook with organic ingredients.
Open pasture grass fed organic beef for example tastes superior in every dimension to grain fed hormone injected antibiotic filled meat from conventional concentrated animal feed lot operations.
Strawberries grown organically are free of dozens of chemicals that are sprayed on conventional strawberries. The berry flavors from organic strawberries are delicious, with full taste depth to delight.
Research has shown that organically produced foods are more nutritious than conventionally produced foods. Nutrient density is greater in organically produced foods because organic farming focuses on soil health.
Healthy organic soils produce healthy plants, and animals that eat healthy plants from healthy soils produce healthy meat products, eggs and milk. Its all about the dirt.
Organic farming focuses on making sure the dirt is healthy, which in turn makes sure the plants grown in that dirt are healthy and disease free. Dirt is an ecosystem of living matter that can be easily disturbed by synthetic chemicals. Organic dirt thrives as a living organism to support the lives of plants grown in safe soils!
Organic farming is an essential part of sustainable agriculture. For all of human history until the down of industrial chemistry, all agriculture was organic.
Today, the completely synthetic fertilizers and pesticides used on conventional crops are made from finite and increasingly limited crude oil.
The application of these synthetic chemicals produces unsustainable imbalances in the soil ecology, salting and runoff for example. Soils that have imbalances from these chemical toxins produce plants that are weaker and lower in nutrients and more prone to diseases and pests. The industrial chemical sector has responded to the disease and pest and weed challenges of conventional chemical farming with thousands of new chemical agents.
More recently questionable genetic engineering and Genetically Modified Organism or GMO's are used to address disease and pest problems. The GMO industry spends billions lobbying to keep GMO labels off of your foods because they know that if you knew the truth, your would stop buying their GMO experimental foods. While GMO has addressed some of the chemical problem with conventional chemical agriculture, more problems are created with GMO.
The simple answer is organic! We can use technology and engineering now to make high tech organic agriculture a reality. We can produce organic foods sustainably that are competitively priced.
Organic farming is about using nature to do the work simply they way it has been done since time immemorial. We can use technology to help maintain the balance, engineer the layout, cross breed and intelligently design adaptive ecological soil systems that create strong, robust, disease and pest resistant, productive plants.
The key to solving pest problems is ecological management. All pests have a predator: be that other insects, bacterial, viral of fungal in nature. We can use our increasing knowledge of biology and ecology to design integrative shared use farms.
Our friends the Honey Bee's for example will thrive and pollinate for free in a clean and safe environment free of pesticides. Pollinators like bee's perform billions worth of free labor in agriculture.
Unfortunately, pesticides, hundreds of them used in conventional chemical agriculture, are toxic to the Bee's and other friendly pollinators. Crude standard applications of pesticides makes more than 99% of the pesticide applied miss their target pest species. Only 1% of the pesticides applied hit the noxious pests while the other %99 applied poison the lands, airs and waters where our friendly insect friends like Lady Bugs and Bee's live. Pesticides were originally modeled after chemical weapons... that alone should speak volumes! New pesticides are designed to be absorbed into the plants (systemic pesticides), which distributes the toxic pesticide into the plants tissues, that slowly poison soils, insects, people and animals who interact with and eat the plants. Biodynamic organic farming is the solution!
Jobs, Balance, Healthy
Organic farming uses methods that increase balance and harmony between people, farms, soils, plants, insects and nature. The large cheap industrial machine deplete aquifer foreign oil powered monocrops of nearly slave labor chemical agriculture are fundamentally extreme and out of balance.
Regional medium scale organic agriculture creates more jobs, better foods, and a sustainable future that is balanced and healthy. We can support our communities by building organic local gardens. We can visit the farms and talk to the farmers. We can learn and grow as people.
Keep the conversation alive. If we focus more on quality and less on quantity in our foods, the growing problem with obesity would be addressed.
Nutritionally dense organic foods satiate people better. Slow down and savor the flavor, enjoy each bite and make food, nutrition and fitness more important in your life! God talks all about farming and food in the bible, read on! We can choose to change this situation by simply choosing organic!
Chemical Complexity is Crazy
Many of the complex chemicals sprayed on conventional agriculture form persistent organic pollutants or POP's when they react with each other in real world application settings. Theses POP's are toxic immune system disrupting chemicals that accumulate and linger in the human body, and the bodies of all others plants, animals, insects and fungi exposed to them. These herbicides, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals used in agriculture are toxic to bees, birds, dogs, cats, children, adults, elderly people.
While many chemicals applied to agriculture are engineering to bio-degrade, the sheer quantities applied and number of different chemicals applied creates a toxic soup of reactive chemicals species that interact with one another. The truth is, the field chemistry in conventional chemical agriculture is so complex it is beyod our understanding.
What we know for sure is that the soup of synthetic chemicals sprayed by the millions of tons all over our foods crops is ultimately bad for the health of the soils, bad for the health of the plants, and bad for the health of everything that eats the plants including us and the animals that eat the plants that we eat! Cancer, Arthritis, Inflammatory diseases, Allergies, Asthma; sickness and suffering: all of this can be avoided by advancing to modern high technology sustainable organic agriculture.
Industrial farming has alienated the operators and owners of these farms from their farms, farmers and customers. Right now, the choices being made for farms are being made by white collar accountants and business management people who have never seen a farm. These business people are disconnected from their farms, farmers, products and customers; all they see are numbers on spreadsheets: ignorant, they make choices that are good for their short term profits, but bad for their farms, farmers and customers. Satan seeks to create division between people.
Organic farming reconnects customers to the farms. Organic is all about increasing awareness, fair product labeling, ethical farm practices and sustainable agriculture. We can reconnect with one another and with our foods by choosing organic.
Consumers who buy these "cheap" conventional chemically crazy foods end up paying the high cost of lower prices in their health care problems. High fructose corn syrup, corn farming and the whole corn ethanol industry for example: one example after the other of externalization of costs, unethical choices, greed, disconnection and avoidable sickness. Industrial corn is toxic for consumption, but it is ground up and sold below production cost to animal concentration camps where cows live never seeing so much as a single blade of grass. These cows are stressed out for their entire lives, fat sick and nearly dead! The meat from these cows is loaded with toxic pathogens: the industry answer was pink slime, chlorine and ammonia.... but even with these sterilizing chemicals the conventional meet is filled with pathogens: make sure to cook it completely! Toxic, sick: these systems of "cheap" meat are plagued with toxic symptoms from top to bottom!
As consumers become more savy, educated and aware, the more consumers are demanding organic foods. While some people are annoyed with the word organic, perhaps it would make better sense to label all non-organic foods as "Produced with Synthetic Chemicals" or PSC. It is hard to find the truth on the packages because the industry has lobbied to keep consumers in the dark. Watch a film like "Food Inc." and learn the truth! Farmer Joel has the right idea! Tyson foods needs to wake up!
Even Walmart is getting on with the Organic Bandwagon. As consumer demand for organic foods increase, large corporate food retailers are changing their tune. More companies are responding to customer demand, offering increasing access to competitively priced mainstream organic products.
Look at Organic milk for example. A few years ago it was hard to find and very expensive. Now organic milk can be found almost anywhere for as low as $4USD 2012 / gal.
Organic grass feed beef is becoming more affordable. All organic products are becoming more accessible and more affordable.
Even where a person cannot afford to go with organic, many other very competitively priced foods are hormone and antibiotic free. While these are not completely organic, they are healthier to consumer, and improve the welfare of the farm animals, famers and soils!
Many food manufacturers are phasing out the use of synthetic preservatives, artificial dyes and flavors. You can find products that are hormone and antibiotic free that are very competitively priced.
More people are recognizing the The high long term costs of super low chemical conventional food prices. Things are changing for the positive because more people are "thinking about it"