Advantages and Disadvantages Organic Farming: Good Things, Barriers and Environmental Effects
Advantages and Disadvantages Organic Farming
Despite the good things about organic farming why do most farmers still operate by industrialized agriculture?
Here we explore the pros and cons organic farming presents for consumers and producers, as well as examining the environmental effects of organic farming.
Right>> An ecological organic garden where the vegetables sow themselves!
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GOOD THINGS ABOUT ORGANIC FARMING
CONSUMER BENEFITS:
Nutrition
The nutritional value of food is largely a function of its vitamin and mineral content. In this regard, organically grown food is dramatically superior in mineral content to that grown by modern conventional methods.
Because it fosters the life of the soil organic farming reaps the benefits soil life offers in greatly facilitated plant access to soil nutrients.
Healthy plants mean healthy people, and such better nourished plants provide better nourishment to people and animals alike.
Poison-free
A major benefit to consumers of organic food is that it is free of contamination with health harming chemicals such as pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.
As you would expect of populations fed on chemically grown foods, there has been a profound upward trend in the incidence of diseases associated with exposure to toxic chemicals in industrialized societies.
Take cancer for example. Representative data on the number of new cancer cases in New South Wales, Australia has been collected by the New South Wales Central Cancer Registry.
Adjusted to take account of our aging population, their graph (above) shows that between 1972 and 2004 the incidence of new cancer cases per year (average for both sexes) has risen from 323 to 488 per 100,000 people. This is an increase of over 50% in just 32 years. advantages and disadvantages organic farming
Food Tastes Better Animals and people have the sense of taste to allow them to discern the quality of the food they ingest.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that organically grown food tastes better than that conventionally grown. The tastiness of fruit and vegetables is directly related to its sugar content, which in turn is a function of the quality of nutrition that the plant itself has enjoyed.
This quality of fruit and vegetable can be empirically measured by subjecting its juice to Brix analysis, which is a measure of its specific gravity (density). The Brix score is widely used in testing fruit and vegetables for their quality prior to export.
Food Keeps Longer
Organically grown plants are nourished naturally, rendering the structural and metabolic integrity of their cellular structure superior to those conventionally grown. As a result, organically grown foods can be stored longer and do not show the latter’s susceptibility to rapid mold and rotting.
GROWER BENEFITS:
A healthy plant grown organically in properly balanced soil resists most diseases and insect pests.
This was proven by US doctor and soil nutrition pioneer Dr Northern who conducted many experiments to test the hypothesis during the 1930’s.
Disease and Pest Resistance
For instance, in an orange grove infested with scale, he restored the mineral balance to part of the soil and the trees growing in that part became clean while the rest remained diseased.
By the same means he grew healthy rosebushes between rows that were riddled by insects, and tomato and cucumber plants, both healthy and diseased, where the vines intertwined. Northern observed that the bugs ate up the diseased and refused to touch the healthy plants!
Weed Competitiveness
Weeds are nature’s band-aids, placed by the wisdom of creation to heal and restore damaged soils. When farmers husband the life of the soil, as they do in organic agriculture, the improved conditions dissuade many weeds and favor their crops. The crops, being healthier, are also better able to compete with those weeds that are present.
Lower Input Costs
By definition, organic farming does not incur the use of expensive agrichemicals – they are not permitted! The greater resistance of their crops to pests and the diseases save farmers significantly in expensive insecticides, fungicides and other pesticides.
Fertilizers are either created in situ by green manuring and leguminous crop rotation or on-farm via composting and worm farming. Biodynamic farmers use a low cost microbial solution sprayed onto their crops.
The creation of living, fertile soil conditions through early corrective soil re-mineralization and strategic Keyline chisel ploughing are significant establishment costs that, however, reap ongoing benefits to production at minimal maintenance.
Drought Resistance
Organically grown plants are more drought tolerant. This was dramatically illustrated to me several years ago when I was fortunate to attend a workshop with Australian organic gardening guru Peter Bennett. A slide he sho