I attended a conference on organic apple growing about 8 years ago. Things may have improved since then, but at that time the amount of copper and sulphur sprays needed to manage an orchard under a full organic regime seemed to me (as a non-scientist) to be if anything less healthy than the produce from conventionally managed orchards.

The fix is in. Organic food is much healthier because it is said again and again and again.

There was a recent article in the NY Times which was also picked up by HortIdeas about research indicating that organophosphate exposure reduced the IQ of children- even prenatal exposure.

The study involved children of farm workers in Salinas CA and inner city NY residents where organophosphates are used to control roaches so those were almost certainly the source of exposure but both articles suggested eating organic food as a means to reduce exposure to organophosphates.

Science doesn't matter to a lot of people, whether their views are on the political left or right. We are emotional creatures who often use our logic to justify our emotional response- not to seek the truth.

Even though I strongly doubt that organophosphate residue in food poses a risk I'm beginning to believe that they should be taken off the market, if only to protect farm workers and apartment dwellers who don't have any say about the pesticides used by the people their landlords contract.

I saw a show a while back where these guys gave people two pieces of banana, one that was organic and one that wasn't, and poeple almost always said the organic one tasted better...but what they didn't know was that they were eating two halves of the same not organic banana. I guess the guys who did this one did the same thing but with organic stuff. I'm not surprised by the results. Most people think artificial is a chemical property, and the organic vendors have got a very good PR campaign going, a very good one. Your average person, I think, sees the more expensive organic stuff, hears the hype, and just assumes it's true. It is a bit disappointing though. You would hope society would be more able to keep a more level head about marketing gimmicks.

Businesses would never spray anything on a plant that was harmful to you of course!!

This is how I like to eat my lunch and go swimming

Here is a link that might be useful: Enjoying the Fresh Air

It's like I told one (I want to say pinhead here) "person". What's healthier, me eating no fruit or me eating and/or drinking 500lbs of apples, because that's the choice of organic or chemical for me because I won't buy 500lbs of organic apples and sure can't grow them.

With the big "explosion" of "organic" at the retail level the last few years, I wonder how much of it really is organic and how much of it is conventionally grown or at least not grown to organic standards but being passed off as organic.

Anyway, when I grow it, I control what goes in it and on it. If I choose to spray it with nothing and eat it bugs and all, my choice. If I choose to spray it with enough chemicals to take out every bug in Michigan, again, at least its my choice.

Interesting thread...

There is no question about it, local chemical-free whole food is the healthiest and the cheapest, no matter what it's sale price. The financial, health-related, environmental, and other costs involved in conventional industrial agriculture being able to produce low-quality food at low prices bears on all of us.

Anyone who thinks that chemicals are necessary for growing food needs to learn more about the ecology of the monocrop, among other things.

Cheers...

fabaceae_native,
What is this chemical free method to control plum curculio that can be done on a scale to provide food for the masses?
There are probably over 30 million tons of apples produced for sale in the world. You can't do that without chemicals and monoculture.

If you spread those apples out so everyone grew their own they would need lawns. You'd end up with more sprawl and the most evil monoculture of all called lawns.

Ideals sound good on paper but rarely work in the real world. They're something to strive for not claim is the only way.

Yeah, let's go back to the organic controversy. The more I hear organic advocates express themselves the more I get set on the idea that the idea that all man made chemicals are bad, bad, bad is pure silliness. Especially when the theory is that they are only bad when applied to agricultural uses (talk about arbitrary).

However I'm grateful for the organic movement- which I was a part of for about 20 years, back towards the middle of the last century- at least it inspires more research on less toxic production methods. Poison is bad but essential at this point to efficiently produce fruit, in the humid regions at least. But less toxic pest control is always a step forward.

Well it wasn't my intention to ignite a conventional vs. organic debate, but I think it's fair game on any serious food growing forum.

I thought the article was interesting because it showed organic has been so successfully marketed. It's benefits are deemed preferential by the populace, irregardless of the facts.

Whether organic is practically "doable" at any serious level of scale, in areas of rain, is another question.

On that topic, I've followed the organic arguments for years and the solutions (either implicit or explicit) boil down to:

- Grow food in arid climates (generally west of the continental divide). The flip side is that adequate water in those areas can be an issue.

- Grow food that has natural immunity of local pests. The disadvantage for the lower Midwest and South is that there are precious few foods that fit this bill. Those that do are generally considered inferior by the populace (Our extraordinarily high standard of living has moved the standard of taste to high levels. People in the developed world won't reduce their standards of food unless they are forced.)

- Eliminate monoculture, thereby estimating pests. The idea is that if many grow a multitude of different food stuffs, large acreages of monoculture, that encourage pest pressures not found in small plantings, will be reduced thereby reducing pest pressure.

However, diversity plantings were common prior to the green revolution, yet still resulted in low yields, somewhat due to high pest pressure (I'm speaking from a lower Midwest perspective here.) I still maintain an increasing dedication of backyard acreage to food production will eventually result in pest pressure common in today's commercial orchards, whether the backyard plantings are monoculture or diverse. It's possible widespread diverse plantings could result in more pest pressure because there is no break in host crops (i.e. In monoculture, host crops can break the pest cycle via crop rotation. In small widespread diverse plantings pests always have a host available.)

Theory aside, here's my own experience. Most food grown here requires some type of spray to have any level of customer acceptance.

Secondly, people demand a reasonable level of value for the purchase of their food.

As a personal example, I charge $2/lb. for high quality (non-organic) tree ripe peaches. Even at this price I lose sales because of the expense.

My options for growing organic would be to try continuous applications of Surround, which I'm not willing to do for fear of adding too much aluminum to the soil, or try to bag each peach with a cotton drawstring bag (not tested on a commercial basis, but anecdotal trials from a serious home grower on this forum indicate promise).

In short, I could not charge my customers enough to pay for the labor to bag each peach in a cotton bag. I can't imagine how much labor it would require to bag (and unbag) all the peaches. To get paid a reasonable wage for that labor would require $6, $8, $10/lb.? Nobody in this area would be willing to pay those prices.

We have less than 1/2 acre of peach trees which only provides a small part time income, yet the time required to bag all those peaches would be huge, and consume all current sales income from that crop.

My wife and I have recently purchased a small 10 acre parcel which we plan to plant mostly to peach trees. I can't even fathom the amount of labor it would take to bag peaches from 100s of trees.

I'm all for organic culture if future technology makes it "doable" in my climate. But I think it's illogical to insist organic technology is the only way. I hope (and look for) conventional techniques/pesticides to become safer (as has been the case) with improvements in research/technology, as well as improvements in the efficacy of organic culture/pesticides.

I am sure many people here will agree that freshly picked ("local") and fully ripened are by far the most important parameters by which fruits (or vegetables) should be judged.
I will prefer any fruit off the tree to anything in the stores. It kills me when I eat my last tomatoes in mid-November, 6 weeks after frost, and they still taste better than store-bought.

Which apple variety comes next (if given a choice, we will eat only Northern Spys, but certainly we would eat other varieties if we lived farther South), and organic is a very distant third.