Is "going organic" too political? - Page 3

Regulations for safety can be very different from regulations for other reasons, which is your point, of course. How many of us have had our garden soil tested and critiqued?

>Regulations for safety can be very different from regulations for other reasons....<

The question is, if there's not a health and safety factor, why are any regulations necessary in the general run of things? More to the point, any regulation, no matter the reason for it, should be established on measurable reasons. I'm suggesting that such is not the case; that many regs and standards are pure paternalism on the part of the government.

I've had this same argument with regulations promulgated by various fish & wildlife departments. There are only two reasons for a regulation: one is concern with health and safety issues, the other is protection of the resource. A rule established for any other reason is, by definition, a bad rule. At the federal level many regs are established only because the FWS presumes that all outdoor enthusiasts, and particularly hunters (especially waterfowlers), are outlaws.

Rules based on such presumptions seem to dominate all federal regulations from all regulatory agencies. But I digress.

FWIW, with lead specifically, the soil background levels, in America, range from 7-20 ppm, and average 10 ppm. Anything higher is presummed to be from contamination---which is one reason for the concern with the White House garden. If the levels are 4+ times the highest background levels, then the White House grounds were somehow contaminated in the past.

In actual studies involving risk factors to children injesting soil, 300 ppm are considered the danger level. One question that requires further study: What is the corrolation, if any, between ambient levels and the levels absorbed by plants (and therefore transferred to the people who eat those plants)? That is, let's say your soil, for whatever reason, contains 500 ppm of lead. If your kids actually eat the soil, they are in clear danger. But what if they merely eat the veggies you grow in that soil. What is their actual ingested level? Obviously, something less than 500 ppm.

Ambient levels are not the whole story, of course. For instance, by raising the pH of the soil you can mitigate the transference of lead into plants. Which means given the proper pH, it doesn't matter what the ambient levels are, because none of it gets into the snap beans. But, again, the standards do not take these things into account.

>How many of us have had our garden soil tested and critiqued? <

Actually, a surprisingly high number of home gardeners have had their soil tested. You cannot establish a good balance if you don't know about imbalances. Soil testing is one of the things the Extension Service does (depending on your local, either for free or for a nominal fee). And there are home testing kits available on the market as well.

And, of course, if you're trying to get certified as an organic grower, you have to have soil tests done.

KY Heirloomer,

In response to your well written post on July 31, I think it was Upton Sinclair's 1904 novel "The Jungle" that really started the whole ball rolling. The book basically was about the meat packing industry in the U.S. Sinclair was quoted about the book as : "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach".

The book started a near riot, and by the following year, Congress had rushed through the first national food law, "The pure food and drug act of 1906".

It was only then that Gov'ts (U.S. and others) actually started giving a hoot about the food industry. Prior to that it was "Caveat Emporium", coffee, tea, and spices adultarated with floor sweepings, rodent droppings; brick dust in cocoa, water in the milk, the usual stuff. Where there's a will to cheat, there's a way.

So, yes, people could surivive thousands of years without food preservation and all the legal baggage, but it WAS Caveat Emporium, and lets face it, life expectancy probably wasn't over 50 years of age anyway.

When I read the article "Organic food not nutritionally.....", I was reminded of my last strata meeting in the condo tower in which I reside. An issue was broiling about installing energy efficient lighting in the common areas, motion sensor or light sensing switches, etc which would require new wiring. The cost was very high. I, being the cynical old fart that I am, reminded the Strata that they had previously banned the practice of drying clothes outside the suites. After the groaning stopped, I then asked how many kilowatts a dryer used per load (Bldg has 48 units, each with a w/d) and how many kilowatts of energy would be saved by installing the new lighting and wiring. Gawd, those guys hate me!

So what?

Whether "Conventional" or "organic" the only difference is in the fertilizer. The whole marketing structure and transport structure is the same. In order to be protfitable, you must grow on a large scale, and distribute all over N.America. A semi tralier and tractor unit going from Fla, or Cal, or Texas to say, Washington State or Nebraska will still burn the same amount of diesel regardless of whether the product is conventionally grown or organic. The items grown still require the same amount of water and diesel fuel. And I'm unclear if organic produce is irradiated when it crosses the border.

What are we acomplishing with organics? Less fertilizers and pesticides, sure, but with the current marketing and transport practices, we're not getting ahead of the game.

It's the big businesses that scare me. As a small business guy, I see the advantages of growing on a large scale--there are many, with practicality being one of the first. A large grower/supplier has tremendous clout. The temptations to control market share, pricing, transport, and mess around with GMO are all there, and it scares the living bejesus outta me--organics or not.

>Whether "Conventional" or "organic" the only difference is in the fertilizer. The whole marketing structure and transport structure is the same.<

Only partially, Foodpump.

One of the points I've tried to make throughout this thread is that your comment (or what it represents, as there is more to it than just fertilizer) is true for the organic produce sold at mass markets. It is grown by the same factory farms that are providing the conventional produce, using essentially the same methods, and inserted into the same food distribution system. Costs of production are actually lower, but they charge more because of the "organics" label.

On the other hand, organic produce sold through other venues is totally different. That comes from small, diverse farmers, using true organic growing methods, who harvest their produce when its ripe, and deliver to local outlets. Costs of production (compared to both conventional and the factory-farm organics) is actually higher, which is why their produce costs more.

>The items grown still require the same amount of water and diesel fuel. <

And a whole list of other negatives, such as loss of nutrition, lack of flavor, maintenance of cold-storage facilities each with their own carbon footprints, etc. All of which is a major contributing factor in the growth of the locovore movement.

>In order to be protfitable, you must grow on a large scale,<

Not so! According to the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, a small farm can be self-sustaining on as little as 38 acres. By "self-sustaining" they mean that nobody has to take a job in town to support the farm.

Self-sustainability is not achieved, however, by trying to compete with the factory farms.

Reminds me of some comments made by a guy on another list. He has a 78 acre farm he inherited that is surrounded by monsters. Of the two farms that touch his property, one is 4,000 acres, the other slightly larger. Both those factory farms engage in the monocultural rotation of corn and soy typical of the American and Canadian plains.

He constantly whined about how he couldn't make money from that farm. And I kept pointing out that so long as he insisted on growing the same corn they were, that he got no sympathy from me. There's no way he could ever match the economies of scale enjoyed by the other two farms. His costs of growing would always be higher, and the profit margins lower.

On the other hand, if he changed direction there was hope. 78 acres, for instance, could be a very strong base for a CSA. Or a highly profitable captive farm of an upscale resort. Or any of a dozen other alternatives.

He kept coming up with untested reasons why none of the alternatives would work. Me, I think he was just one of those people who was only happy when whining. But if he continued growing corn (this was several years ago), I have no doubt that one of those factory farms now owns that 78 acres.

> I think it was Upton Sinclair's 1904 novel "The Jungle" that really started the whole ball rolling.<

I could argue, based on recent events with tainted and recalled meats, that the ball never rolled very far. But I'll leave that to somebody else.

Upton Sinclair was just one of a group of writers collectively known as muckrackers. They wrote primarily from about the turn of the century into the '30s. Because it is used as an example in school, The Jungle is the most well known of the muckracking books, but there are others that actually had more of an impact.

The muckrackers fell out of favor because they were, by and large, socialists. And Socialism was confused with communisim, and the muckrackers fell into that social rubric during the days of the red scare.

Muckracking was used by writers on and off after that. But it wasn't until Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed was published that it returned as a viable former of public policy.

Bringing this all home to the discussion. Assuming The Jungle actually was single-handedly responsible for the pure food and drug act (evidence indicates it was the final nail in that coffin, btw, not the only cause), what do we have? As a result of people suddenly being made aware of health hazards in the meat packing industry, the government steps in to establish standards.

In the early 20th century standards for allowable levels of rodent hair and feces were established. Today we still have allowable levels, which are considerably lower. But what level of rodent hair and feces is actually dangerous to our health? And how do the standards relate to that?

What I'm saying is that nowhere along the line was any real work done to establish toxicity levels. Instead, the reasoning goes: Rodent hair and feces is obviously unhealthy in our food. In practical terms, a certain amount of these contaminents will enter the food supply. So let's control that level based on our ability to detect them.

As I've said before, as our ability to detect ever decreasing amounts improves so, too, do the standards change to reflect that. But I have yet to see any justification of allowable levels based on toxicity studies.

Thanks.

So if I understand correctly, the only way we can feed ourselves with healthy, nutritional produce with the minimum carbon footprint, is to grow the maximum amount of varieties on small farms, as close to urban centers as possible?

Makes a whole lot of sense, we've been doing it for quite some time now...

I'm just programmed to see the trees and not the forest--I see mega-growers, transport co.'s, seed and fertilizer conglomerates, and especially purveyors fighting hard to keep things the way they are.

Don't get me wrong, I buy as much locally as I can, especially for my business. I'm just wondering what kind of push it will take to encourage people to go back to small farming--as close to urban centers as possible, and to curb the demand for tomatoes, romaine lettuce and strawberries in January...

>is to grow the maximum amount of varieties on small farms, as close to urban centers as possible?<

That would be the goal. Unfortunately, from a practical viewpoint, it's a doubtful scenario at best.

If you're as old as me, you remember the term "truck farmer." That's how things were done through the second half of the 19th century and more than the first half of the 20th. Cities were ringed by farms, and ripe produce was trucked in daily. Depending on conditions, it was either delivered to a terminal market (the most usual) for further distribution, a central market, or directly to retailers.

As an example, New Jersey's state motto, "The Garden State," refers to the fact that it essentially fed New York City it's produce.

Over time several factors mitigated against this practice. One, of course, was the suburban sprawl. Folks do need places to live, there's no getting around that. Rather quickly after WWII, subdivisions became the number one cash crop in America. This made it too costly to use the land for farming, as the taxes alone can kill you. The further out suburbia spread, the further out farms had to move, sometimes all but disappearing from their traditional location. I think, for instance, of the Long Island potato farms.

Another influence was the concept of America being the breadbasket of the world. Putting aside whether or not that ever was true, the only way it could be done was through economies of scale. Monoculture and large farms were the norm long before our concern with 1,500 mile tomatoes. But even there, practices have changed. Used to be even wheat and corn farms were relatively small. A couple of hundred acres on average, and family operated. At harvest time, the combine owner/operators became gypsies, moving in a steady convoy south to north. When they were due in an area farmers dropped their fences, and the combines ran nonstop from Kansas to Alberta.

Accepted as a truism was that you could not afford to own the land and own the equipment both.

With the advent of the factory farms, that became mute. If you are harvesting 20-,
30-, 50,000 acres at one time, equipment cost is quickly amortized.

Add in the post-war concentration of hybrids, and synthetic chemical use, and acricultural technology advances, and the fact that transportation is the smallest element contributing to retail cost, and there's just no reversing the current food distribution system. Especially since most people actually like the idea of "fresh" strawberries in January, and aren't willing to give us such luxuries.

What we are discovering, however, is that small farms, using alternative marketing methods, can fill at least part of our food needs. Farmers markets and CSAs are growing at an exponential rate, for instance. And groups like SMAC are showing how even close to cities, with high-cost land, small acrage can be profitably used for acricultural purposes.

But, alas, all these efforts will never produce but a small percentage of our food requirements.

Interesting e-mail I got, and I thought of this thread:
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