With years of hype and hubbub behind it, organic farming has risen to celebrity status through its association with the new buzzword of the post-Inconvenient Truth world: sustainability. Still, the question lingers: is organic farming really doing the environment and society a favour? Mandy Lo investigates
With the many organic-themed restaurants and grocery stores springing up in downtown Toronto, organic food and farming is often in the limelight, as it was in Saturday’s The Real Dirt on Food conference at U of T. But for an event dedicated to getting down and dirty with organics, the conference failed to raise scientific and social questions that we need answered. What effects does organic farming have on the social – and the natural – world?
Much research has shown that conventional farming methods hurt the environment and may have unpredictable effects on human health. Conventional fertilization relies on overloading industrially-produced ammonium and nitrates into fields, a large portion of which leaches to nearby lakes and rivers, causing eutrophication – the eventual depletion of oxygen from water, leading to decreased biodiversity. The addition of chemical pesticides and herbicides to crops in conventional farming protects crops from pests, but herbicide and insecticide resistance often results. As well, none are sure what effects prolonged intake of such chemicals could have on human health. With global food demands on the rise, food providers need more effective and sustainable methods of agriculture.
“Agriculture is the main human interface between people and the environment…and we need a new kind of agriculture because we are contributing in a big way to the environmental destruction with the kind of agriculture we are practicing today,” said Dr. Jennifer Sumner, OISE’s coordinator in U of T’s collaborative program in environmental studies.
“[Organic farming] is a completely different way of farming that is very environmentally-sensitive and looks at the farm as a holistic system that is in embedded in the environment, rather than looking at the farm as a business opportunity or looking at the farm as a way to extract as much as you can out of the soil or the animal or the plant.”
Organic farming avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides on plants and growth hormones and antibiotics on livestock. Rather than adding fertilizers, organic farmers maintain soil fertility using crop rotation, animal manure and “green manure” – crops with nitrogen-fixing ability that can add nutrients and organic matter to the soil. To combat pests, they use a form of crop diversification: simply planting alternate rows of two plant varieties. Since these methods do not involve adding extra chemicals to the soil or to the crops that end up as food, they are often viewed as a more sustainable method of farming compared to conventional farming.
Studies that tout the benefits of organic farming can be found everywhere in the media and the research community. One notable finding came from a 15-year study from the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania in which the legumes that were part of the crop rotation system were fed to cattle and their manure was used to provide nutrients to the crops. This study showed a drastic increase in the soil fertility compared to industrial fertilizers.
While organic farming seems to be better for the environment, is organic food better for human consumption? The health benefits of organic foods grown on fertilizer-free soil are still unknown due to a lack of funding. One thing that seems to be certain is that there are fewer pesticides in organic foods compared to food produced by conventional farming. Sumner retold an anecdote from Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, where an interview with a mass spectrometry scientist from General Mills revealed that, while 60 per cent of foods from conventional farming contains pesticides, organic crops contain little to no pesticides.
Opponents of organic farming often dispute its merits by accusing it of low crop yields and therefore requiring more land and resources to grow enough crops. They argue that organic farming may not produce enough to feed the world.
While scientists disagree on whether organic farming increases or decreases yield, Sumner cautioned that organic farming should not be simply viewed as a solution to world hunger and that the issue of yield hides the fact that world hunger is a problem of food distribution, not quantity.
“We have certainly enough food to feed everybody in the world, but there is hunger in the world. There is hunger in the world not because we are not growing enough food, but because we have a distribution problem. People are hungry because they don’t have access to land to grow food and they don’t have access to money to buy food.”
Presently, organic farming is practiced in 3,600 farms in Canada, which accounts for 1.5 per cent of the country’s farms, according to a study completed by the Canadian Organic Growers and sponsored by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The trend of switching to organic farming is on the rise. Most organic farms grow crops like grains and oilseeds, but various fruits and vegetables, vineyards, herbs, mushrooms, livestock and maple syrup are also produced organically in Canada.
Meanwhile, Canadian organic farmers are facing technical and economic obstacles. Organic farming requires more knowledge about the farm as a self-sustaining system, a deeper understanding of how its constituents contribute to the system, and can be harder to manage than following labels on fertilizers and pesticides packages.
There is also inadequate support from the various levels of government to push organic farming forward. Farmers transitioning into organic farming face huge economic obstacles, since it takes three years to clear their fields of chemicals, and they cannot market their food as organic until then. While governments in the EU support farmers during this three-year period, Canada does not have a policy to help transitioning farmers.
“The agricultural policy [in Canada] tends to reward larger farmers and push small to medium farmers off the land. We need an agricultural policy that helps smaller and medium farms not to feed the world, but to feed their community and the region,” Sumner noted.
Sumner believes more research into the production and health benefits of organics will help Canada devise agricultural policies that promote organic farming, and may revolutionize the agricultural sector from the ground up.
