How did early farming effect the environment?

Is organic farming actually better for me and the environment or is it just a clever marketing strategy?

• I am genuinely curious about organic farming. The difference between organic farming and regular farming is that they don't use pesticides or other such sprays or treatments on ...show more

• Answer:

  Yes it is. the big difference is how the soil is treated. The most important thing a well managed organic far grows is soil. The soil on an organic farm is teeming with all sorts of life-up top a billion critters per teaspoon of soil. On a conventional farm because of the use of synthetic fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides the soil is basically dead-you get perhaps 1000 microscopic critters per teaspoon of soil. And because of this the soil on organic farms has a lot more organic matter and has a far greater capacity to hold water which means in drought conditions plants on organic farms tend to do much better and produce better than convention and GMO crops. Also soil high in OM sequesters carbon from the atmosphere far better than the almost lifeless soils with low OM that you find on most conventional farms (the no till farms have better soil). The Rodale institute has had an on going study that has compared conventional and organic soy and wheat (IIRC) production over a 25+ year period and has found that the organic crops generally out produce the conventional http://www.rodaleinstitute.org You find less soil erosion on organic farms because a good farm manager will not leave soil unplanted so most of the time fields either have a market crop or a cover crop (a crop grown to be turned into the soil thus improving tilth and increasing OM) As far as livestock it is night and day, organic is much better (with a growing body of peer reviewed science backing this up). Animals in CFO's are caged, never see sunlight, are fed cheap food and are given a lot of drugs (mainly anitbiotics and hormones) to keep the animals alive and growing. They cut the tails off of pigs and milk cows, the beak off of chickens among other abuses in the factory farm system. These animals live in noxious fumes from their own dirty bedding as they do not clean the barn very often, may yearly. All this makes for low quality and dangerous meat Organic livestock on the other hand, is fed organic grain free of GMO's. They get no drugs (but they can be administered if say a cow gets a cut and it gets infected, yes antibiotic will be used and the cow dried up and removed from the organic herd until a year after the last does was given passes. with meat animals they are removed from the herd or flock and not sold as organic.). the animals are required have access to the out doors and pasture. The animals are never caged. The animals get no drugs. handlers are not allow to cut off beaks, tails, etc.. This makes for a higher quality meat high in Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids as well as collagen. You can see, feel and taste the difference Not all organic is equal, though. The huge industrial organic farms are little better than their conventional counterparts. They use less damaging inputs and do take better care of the soil than the conventional farm usually but not always. http://www.organicconsumers.org keeps tabs on big organic farms and corporations that do cheat (and there is more and more as more and more money is put into the equation). But the small organic and biodynamic farms (http://www.biodynamics.com/) are not green washing at all. We believe that what we are doing (and after decades we finally have some good science backing up our claims-see http://www.ofrf.org for abstracts) is better for the planet. We were organic a long time before the USDA and than the major food corporations got into the game. the real deep organic food is found locally at farmers markets, via CSA's and at locally owned co-ops and health food stores. These farms are usually under 25 acres, sell direct to their customers and put out a far superior product to anything you find in the industrial food stream. http://www.localharvest.org has the best data base of such farms on the web. Now one thing organic farms do use pesticides and do treat their crops-do not confuse organic with benign neglect. there are classes of organic pesticide-insecticides, fungicides and a few herbicides, though most weed control is done via cultivation, hand pulling, flaming and mulching. Check out this site for the list of approved organic inputs http://www.omri.org. if organic farms really used no pesticides the cost of the food would be around 30x higher. Oh and speaking of cost-conventional foods (with the exception of fruits and vegetables with get no USDA subsidies) would be 10x higher in cost if they were not so heavily subsidized by our tax dollars. you should see the movie Food Inc http://www.foodincmovie.com/ (which will be on PBS' POV in late April) as that is a real eye opener as to how dangerous and dirty the conventional food supply really is and shows well the many prodfound differences between the two kinds of agriculture.