Well said.

And not nearly as much fun as chopping them up with scissors.

"Whether "organic" or "chemical", trying to control pests by poisoning them is flawed logic and a useless activity."

So, even controls such as BT, DE, and insecticidal soaps are considered off limits as far as organic gardening is concerned??

Kevin

Much of what organic gardeners use are chemicals so using terms such as "chemical" in a derogatory way is not the best means of trying to communicate what one means. It helps not at all that a definition of "Chemical" is "Of or relating to the properties or actions of chemicals."
Perhaps better understanding could be achieved if the term "synthetic" were used in this context.
Bacillus thuringensis would be a biologic while Insecticidal Soaps, Pyrethrins, etc. would be chemicals. I'm not sure where Diamotaceous Earth would fall.

The entire strategy of attempting to control fungi and insects with poisons is misguided, IMO.

In many cases organic growers are merely aping everything that conventional growers do except with a non-synthetic product. This leads to generally the same situations and problems, not surprisingly, namely exhausted soils and severe infestations. I've seen it in action, at the ground level, so to speak. Just keep pounding that soil with the rotovator several times a year and using the dehydrated granulated organic fertilizer and hitting everything with bt and you'll have all the same problems.

It's always the same issue: there isn't enough permaculture involved. Row-cropping is always a race to the bottom to see who puts the least value on their labor (and indirectly on the value of the nutrients being mined out of the land), and that applies equally to organic as conventional growers. In any given organic food market the bottom line is the same, who will sell for the least? Nobody is thinking about value-per-bite in terms of nutrition, or the long-term value on labor inputs to a piece of land.

All this is why the only answer is for people to grow food for eating rather than selling. Then a person can afford to take the long view. For example I turned a lot of new ground last year, so OM and fungal activity in the soil was low, and as a result had some severe insect infestations. Rather than bring out all the "organic" poisons next year I will instead put the money into inoculants for legumes, purchased minerals, and maybe even buy the wasp that predates on MBB.

Yes, when I started a veggie patch here where there used to be lawn, I never expected to have great results for a few years. I knew this because I've started many gardens/beds by reclaiming grassy areas so I knew what to expect and how long it could take. The soil was silty sand which I'm still in the process of amending and always will be as it is a never-ending process. The romance of beneficial insects is often misunderstood regarding the reasonable time frame for it. In order for predatory beneficials to show up, there has to be a food supply. Once you stop killing the "bugs," they should come to a workable balance, and/or you can tip the scales in your favor by introducing a predator of your primary pests as suggested by pnb above.

"grow food for eating rather than selling"

What a great statement!

We need to stop being so stupid and narrow about food. A lot of the "weeds" they're inundating with RU are EDIBLE. Most of those lawn weeds people are taught are a blight on their perfect grassy sward are what people used to eat. Why poison our environment to kill one food in favor of another? Some of these plants we call invasive exotics are edible. Instead of harvesting all this stuff, we've got government agencies formulating "eradication and control" programs, and universities teaching the public about "perfect lawn care." If "they" don't have machinery to make a plant into a mass-produced monoculture crop, it's a weed and they make sure to "educate" the public about it. Madness!

People need to closely monitor their food supply. When you put that responsibility in other people's hands and there is capitalism involved, they may not operate with your best interest as their goal. But if people keep buying it, they'll keep doing it, whatever "it" is. The only way to change the direction is with financial pressure. Lost profits will be the only motivator and that is why they fought so hard to defeat the CA labeling legislation. In the 61 other countries where labeling has been implemented, sales of items with GMO ingredients went way down. The only cash cow left for their frankenfood is the US.

If anyone is interested in learning more about "how they did it" before the invention of modern products, I highly recommend a book called 1491 by Charles C. Mann, the new 2011 version. It's very enlightening and if we can use the lessons of our ancestors, a lot of modern problems could be solved. If "these guys" are smart enough to come up with this GMO thing, surely they're smart enough to employ the info our ancestors learned over thousands of years. We have many more tools at our disposal, both mechanical and scientific, to mesh with their methods.

Monocultures... an unnatural state in which no plant is meant to grow. Corn is the most pertinent and perfect example. In the lower latitudes where it was invented through selective breeding, it was grown in a milpa. That's a plot of primarily the "3 sisters" plantings and other crops dispersed within. Without its' leguminous partner, the bean, corn will not grow as well or as productively, and will soon deplete the soil of nutrients. The squash with its' large leaves grows quickly and shades and covers the soil, to discourage weeds and keep it moist. The OM leftover at the end of the season, as well as that created throughout the year from harvesting tree crops and animals and other foraged food, was put back on the soil and the process repeated. For thousands of years.

If we are not growing to preserve and improve the land as well as to create food, it's not sustainable, as we've already been shown with the dust bowl. There was no organic vs. GMO then and look what happened. Everyone (European settlers) just assumed that wonderful fertile soil had always been there, and they could do anything without consequences. The primary problem of trying to grow a significant portion of our food in an area prone to drought is ongoing. The ancients knew this and that is why they created a vast prairie of drought-tolerant grass for animal grazing in what we call the heartland.

Looking at the issue strictly through the window of "what seeds should be used for our monoculture crops?" is where we are stumbling.

"We need to stop being so stupid and narrow about food."

Yea I know. Anyone against GMO. Anyone that says we can feed the world with organics- "need to stop being so stupid and narrow about food"

I'm glad I am not selling food. If I were, I would responsibly need to add a lot of organic matter, and some macro and micro nutrients while at the same time practicing good stewardship with the soil. All this can be a lot of work. On a garden we can do our little thing and smugly feel good.

MG, I agree that the large-scale organic methods common today cannot feed the world sustainably, just as conventional cannot, and is not. When more than a third of the world's population is habitually under-nourished, a tenth is on the verge or actually starving, and a quarter is malnourished through over-processed de-mineralized and too much food, then a fair assessment is that the job is not getting done properly. Nor will it ever when the poorest people have degraded environments and cannot produce enough food and the richest have no motivation to produce any even though in most cases the environment will allow it.

Purple, if you haven't already check out a documentary called "the other side of immigration". Mexican peasants talk about watching their rural communities transition from self-sustaining agrarian to dysfunctional places sustained only by money from workers in the US. They explain clearly how it was NAFTA that was responsible. They don't blame the US or our farmers, they blame their own government.

Organic methods take up a bit more land. I read somewhere that conventional potatoes yield 2.5X as much as organic grown potatoes.

"I read somewhere that conventional potatoes yield 2.5X as much as organic grown potatoes."

Statements like that are meaningless without some qualifications.

A commercial farm wanting N to get a maximum yield for a monoculture potato crop would need a lot of organic N inputs to match the "chemical" application.

A single pass through a field injecting or spreading "chemical" N vs. many passes through a field spreading organic N after having it hauled in adds to the cost of it all. In order to grow organic potatoes effectively a farmer in most areas would have to grow a soil N-feeding crop like alfalfa rather than a more profitable crop like a brassica or sugar beets (the usual rotation partner for a lot of potato farmers) in order to get a good balance of organic N in the soil to lessen external inputs.

Going all-organic on large cropping systems effects how you have to farm the land and the food supply. There's just not much high-N quality organics out there that aren't expensive, therefore you need a lot of bulk or a combination of sources that makes it work out. Luckily for the farmer, organic potatoes take in a higher price and the alfalfa can be harvested for animal feeds (though at a lower price than the brassicas/beets/etc).

That said, managing the home garden organically is usually something you can do without worrying about any of this unless you want a really large multi-acre home garden growing huge N feeders. Bringing in a truck load of manure and spreading it with your own labor (if you even need that much organic input) vs bringing in 100+ truck loads of manure and using your farm equipment + many people's labor...scale of economy, etc.

"I read somewhere that conventional potatoes yield 2.5X as much as organic grown potatoes."
Statements like that are meaningless without some qualifications."

I grew 50-60 lb of jalapeno with just under 2 dollars worth of synthetic fertilizer just this year. I put very littel time into my crop and get a huge yield. It was not like that when I grew 'organic'

There have been numerous "studies" to compare yields from "conventional" farms and "organic" farms and if a close look is made about the "organic" farms one would find that very little was done to the soil.
If you start with poor soil, and do not add drugs and steroids (synthetic fertilizers), your yields will be low.
I know several people that grow crops on large acreage that do not spread fertilizers about until they have their annual soil test report in hand so they are not, in their words, "throwing money away on stuff they do not need."

I grew about 2 bushels of jalapenos this past year - didn't weigh them, using 10 x 10 gallon containers, each with three plants, filled with pine bark from my firewood, old, recycled potting soil, a scoop of pond bottom soil for trace minerals, and two waterings with compost 'tea', made by soaking a couple of buckets full of compost in a 100 gal drum overnight. In a 110 day growing season. For what thats worth.

I live in a farming area, short growing season, where the farmers grow winter wheat, pinto beans, and alfalfa, some sunflower but not much. The ranchers grow hay and pasture. They rotate the beans and wheat, the beans fix the nitrogen for the wheat crop the next year.

Its low profit margin farming. The guys with irrigation go with alfalfa because they don't have to use their tractors as often for plowing, tilling, planting and spraying, just run through with the mowers, rakes, and bailers. The dry land farmers do the beans and wheat. The point I'm trying to make is that while they may not fit the strict description, they're pretty much organic farmers, avoiding pesticides and fertilizers because they cost too much.

I have an immediate neighbor who uses commercial fertilizers on his beef pasture. From our discussions, its slowly dawning on him that he may end up earning more money if he cuts down the number of cattle, goes into a pasture management with clover and other legumes, and quits fertilizing.

When it comes down to farming or gardening, it is about time/cost. With organic your time is taken up to get less. With both the use of organic for good soil managment and synthetic to fill in the nutritional gaps one can save lots of time.

"really large multi-acre home garden growing huge N feeders"

That pretty much describes my operation. And yeah, sourcing enough organic N is the constant problem. All the crops can be produced in a permaculture low-till fashion with little or no N inputs, but it gets really tiresome spending a lot of time harvesting small potatoes, for example (a low-N system suddenly makes the term "small potatoes" very real). The application of labor is far more effective and immediate by using lots of NPK, regardless of whether organically sourced or synthetic.

So anybody growing annual crops for selling rather than eating is going to use lots of NPK. So the solution is lots more eaters to be growers.

Gillman's book was hard to accept but I am glad I read it. It sets the matter straight for a lot of useless or dangerous old wives tales people love to recommend.

I'm not sure why you are posting here, Themastergardener1. Organics is the way to go in my opinion. Dr. Oz and countless others tell us how bad GMO's are. The poor will always be among us according to the Bible. I try to help the poor as much as I can, but giving them poisoned food does'nt help them.

"I'm not sure why you are posting here, Themastergardener1. Organics is the way to go in my opinion"

That is just your opinion.

" I try to help the poor as much as I can, but giving them poisoned food does'nt help them."

Here is a book you should read some time. :)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Truth-About-Organic-Foods/dp/0978895207

"Dr. Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize Winning Ag Scientist, says, "The Truth About Organic Foods gives consumers a through and straight-forward explanation of why organic foods offer no real health or safety bebefits. More importantly, Avery communicates why organic farming's lower yields and reliance on scarce organic fertilizers represents a potential threat to the world's forests, wetlands and grasslands. The book offers scientifically sound evidence that more-affordable conventional foods are healthy for families and also good stewardship of nature."

This post was edited by TheMasterGardener1 on Sun, Dec 23, 12 at 0:32

I also think rationally!
That book you mentioned, The Truth About Organic Foods, just another opinion that is backed up by skewered science to try to prove their points.
Try finding some research that isn't backed (some times WAY back) by chemical companies...this includes most University studies...chemical companies give grant moneies to them.

You want natural & what is good for our lands? Look at nature and what it does to build the soils & reproduce plants.
Chemicals are killing us, just slowly!

You might also want to take a look at the Rodale Farm Study results...30 yrs. comparrison of side-by-side sustainable/commerical farming.

"this includes most University studies"

As someone who's done university research on a variety of food crops you really can't apply that umbrella. It's very unfair to look at a school that gets some money in a broad-reaching grant and apply that to everything a school pushes out. Stanford is being totally crapped upon for this lately and it's not only unfair, it's ignorant. A lot of these people also seem to not notice UC-Davis exists, which has studies which are a lot more directly linked to chemical company money with some researchers. Even then, to assume everyone doing a study is being bought is extremely unfair to the people doing the studies no matter what results they find.

You know who's studies you really need to watch out for? ...independent studies. That is where you're going to find your corruption, though some think these independent studies are way more trust-worthy even though the degrees they hold are comparable, if not the same, as those with university resources.

A majority of university based studies are untainted. If it's something you really feel on the fence about it's best to investigate the body of work of the researchers, themselves, and not place a blanket judgement on everyone at a university because some other unrelated researcher took some money or the school itself used some money to fund a department building.

The pull companies have over university researchers is less political and less "real" than some would assume. A majority of these people didn't spend a decade in school looking to hook up to a chemical lobby. They did it because they love what they do and there's a genuine interest in the work.

Also, fwiw, many of these companies people fear spend a lot of talent doing their own research in-house. They don't need universities to produce political fodder.

NC, I understand what you are saying- there are so many things being studied by so many researchers that they can't possibly all be unduly influenced by industry.

However, I think over long periods of time powerful industries with a specific agenda do project a lot of influence - overwhelming, in some cases. For example, the chemical industry post WWII vs Albrecht and his school of research. Still today there are many soil experts saying that there is no evidence at all that maintaining a certain mineral balance in soil creates healthier plants that do not require poisons to control weeds and pests. And yet every grower who can afford to do so finds it to be the case, and Albrecht had reams of trials showing it to be so.

I think it's not so much that industry money directly corrupts researchers, it's that industry money determines what gets studied. In the Albrecht case, the chemical industry threw tons of money to land-grants to study how to control weeds and pests with poisons and how to use synthesized fertilizer, so that Albrecht's kind of research gradually stopped and eventually was forgotten.

ga.karen,

You dont understand the big picture. 2% of our food is grown organically for good reason. If we grew 100% organic we would need to farm half the earth land surface.

Potatoes that are grown conventionally produce 2.5x as much as an organic field.

Organic farming is a threat to our land and resources.

Please stop destroying the environment evil organic market? Please? :)

I just think there's too many people focusing on "that study about organic food" or "that study about pesticides" while ignoring the 1000000 other studies being done.

I was part of a study years ago at a university that had money shifted from a general fund from a GMO company. Not only did the GMO company have zero influence...it's a crop they wouldn't even have a desire to work with even if they had all the raw genetic material in the world to work with (which they had 0 rights to anyway unless they wanted to license it). The school, itself, moved the money to a project that needed more financial support. If anyone wanted to use that fact to dismiss the work that was being done it would be a huge shame.

Most work universities do can benefit industry, but mostly because they're the ones ready to pick up the baton and run with the findings of the research (many times paying a fee the university for the intellectual property they're using).

That said, most of this work benefits society. Variety/cultivar production for climates where a plant cannot usually be grown, disease/pest pressure tolerant plant development, research for best ways to use less inputs to manage a plant, researching assumptions and comparing old/new methods for accuracy, checking other's work/research, innovating new methods of production of plant breeding, etc.

Much research is done to reduce inputs, not put more into the ground. Much research is put into reducing farming costs and provide more variety for the farmer...which rarely benefits a chemical company unless they want to license the plant from the university to sell in a non-chemical division they may own.

One of my favorite projects going on locally right now is an intensive breeding/development project for broccoli that can be grown on the East coast in mountain areas so we don't have to ship so much of it from 1000s of miles away.

I worked on a project (that's decades old) that is working to develop raspberry/blackberry cultivars that can be grown in warmer climates. There's many lines developed before I was part of it, and more coming out now and later, which are expanding the food supply. This lessens the amount of time it needs to travel...and ultimately, it's cost. Even on the West coast these cultivars are pushing the price of berries down because there's a lot more land availability to put these crops in production.

Long story short, most of this university research has very little to do with satisfying the concerns of chemical companies compared to expanding food availability and giving the farmer options for less inputs.

Most chemical companies employ an army of in-house research/development (myself included) that need little to no university input. It's much easier to control your own intellectual property and the speed of it's development rather than relying on the university process...which can be quite erratic in both focus and funding. Very few university researches want to tie their entire career down to a single study/focus serving a single entity. Sure, there's some out there who constantly hit the funding well up of a single industry/company to do their research, but there's few of them compared to the pool of talent on whole.

Example...

Here's a bit on that East coast broccoli project I referred to...

http://www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/broccoli/eparticipants.php

This is a huge muti-university effort to bring a viable East coast broccoli industry back to this part of the country by developing varieties that can produce market quality broc. that can withstand temperature flux which ordinarily scare farmers from even wanting to touch this crop.

This kind of research could cut 15-25% of the broc. currently being shipped from 1000s of miles away while giving these farmers a "new" cash crop to consider.

I would say most people would have a hard time demonizing or being skeptical of the work these people are doing.

Yes, you're going to see industry co-operation along with the developers. You'll notice Sygenta and Monsanto as companies trialing these varieties. It's worth mentioning that they neither own, directly guide, and (most importantly) are not injecting GMO influence into the process. These companies own many traditional hybrid breeding units outside of the GMO work they do.

It would be very unfair to notice these 2 companies and dismiss the work being done on this project solely because of that connection...especially since their input is very minor and they are mostly providing trial planting/monitoring data. What's in it for them? ...if successful they own traditional seed units which would gladly license and sell them to traditional farmers in bulk without having to do a huge amount of research developing this on their own.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Sun, Dec 23, 12 at 16:42

"Posted by pnbrown z6.5 MA (My Page) on Thu, Dec 6, 12 at 21:54

"I read somewhere that conventional potatoes yield 2.5X as much as organic grown potatoes."
Statements like that are meaningless without some qualifications."

pnbrown,

That is like saying dont listen to any scientist until you run the test! ;)

Using consistent logic to evaluate results.

No, but really, my yield has increased a lot now that I use synthetics. The time any money I spend doing it has decreased and my harvest has increased. Well, My yield has gone up so I spend WAY more time, harvesting!

This post was edited by TheMasterGardener1 on Tue, Dec 25, 12 at 10:37

Of course they have. Potatoes respond wonderfully to plenty of fertilizer, organic or salt form. It's as simple as that.

Your argument about there not being enough organic fertilizer goes down the figurative toilet if the nutrients going into actual toilets were recovered. Plenty to produce all the food in the world.

pnbrown,

I see what you mean. I agree.

Pat, The Chinese and to some extent the Japanese used [until recent times] to collect the house waste in containers daily and it wound up on the soil sooner or later. Even if this was feasible now here, the drugs being used would contaminate it now.

I thought urban sewage sludge is routinely dried, minimally processed, and spread on wheat fields? I believe Denver does that.

Sewage sludge depends on the city (and partnerships) that manage it in an area.

Some cities treat it as waste, some minimally process and make it available for large field plantings, some process it heavily with sawdust/wood and market their own compost with it, etc...

Baltimore has been selling theirs as ORGRO, Eckology, and Biocom...mostly to sod producers and nurseries in the North-East US.

How does one grow potatoes organically?

Potatoes, unlike corn, do not "get better" with heavy applications of fertilizer.

I have to agree nutirtion is nutrition. There for if the organic crop had just as much nutrition as the conventional crop did the organic crop would in fact yield just as much.

The only problem is the organic crop IS lacking in nutrition. If it was not, it would really cost A LOT to grow.

How do you guys measure "better"?

I never said better?

The crop yield and nutrition levels would make a particular crop 'better'.

How do you guys measure "better"?

TASTE

Better = plant health and fruit quality.

Water is the number one item to make things better.

Taste is correct, IMO. Which highly correlates with the brix scale.

Brix studies are highly controversial...especially those dealing with tomatoes. If you're going to compare supermarket ethylene ripened toms to plant ripened toms you're going to get skewed brix results...the plants simply do it better than forcing the ripening, and it does have to do with better micronutrient availability.

That said, there's a lot of high brix/low acid testing brix advocates that want people to put a foolish amount of micronutrients in their soil rather than building a soil structure/quality that can better hold and exchange micronutrients. There's a big industry building around selling people extremely expensive bags of micronutrients the past decade which wash their way through the soil profile and/or are over-amended to make up for poor soil.

Build your soil quality (holding/exchange capability), apply less, benefit more. They're micronutrients...you don't need a lot, you just need them to hang around.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Fri, Dec 28, 12 at 16:21

I can make a fruit grow with a very high brix and that does not mean it has a wider range of nutrients. What a high brix tells us is that the fruit has a high sugar content, nothing more.

When I focus on a wider range of nutrients in the soil, that's what makes the biggest difference in both taste and nutrients in the fruit.

A lot of the current "brix movement" (which dates back to the early/mid 1900s, really) focuses on micronutrient amendments to raise brix values.

You can raise brix values of some crops simply by withholding moisture (or precisely controlling minimum water requirements) during fruiting, therefore concentrating the sugars/solids without nutrients even entering the equation.

The most important part of getting a high brix product, of course, is the genetics of the crop you choose. A lot of stuff in the supermarket selected for growth by a farmer based on it's storage/shipping quality tends to be of lower taste/brix quality than most stuff we can grow at home.

This post was edited by nc-crn on Fri, Dec 28, 12 at 19:22

However you slice it, higher brix is more nutrition per bite.

And I certainly agree, just adding expensive minerals to a soil without knowing whether it's going to leach right out again isn't smart.

"A lot of stuff in the supermarket selected for growth by a farmer based on it's storage/shipping quality tends to be of lower taste/brix quality than most stuff we can grow at home."

The main reason why supermarkets have a lower brix score is because the food is picked too soon.

pnbrown,

"However you slice it, higher brix is more nutrition per bite."

Can you prove that?

I don't know. What would you accept as proof? Isn't more "sugar" more nutrition than less sugar? Wouldn't you live a lot longer on a glass of water per day with a teaspoon of molasses in it vs a glass of just water?

We could ash-test a 2-brix tomato (not uncommon these days in stores) vs an 8-brix one, if we had the necessary equipment. Are you claiming that a 2-brix tomato could have equal nutrition to an 8-brix one? Which would mean that the only difference between them would be taste. Which would mean that eons of evolution gave us an exquisite sense of taste to tell us basically nothing about food.

"And I certainly agree, just adding expensive minerals to a soil without knowing whether it's going to leach right out again isn't smart.

This then begs the question, Just what is smart?...sitting on your hands?

No, Wayne, what I meant is that one should know the soil type in question, and what factors may need amending to prevent undue leaching of added minerals.

I don't know. What would you accept as proof? Isn't more "sugar" more nutrition than less sugar?

A refractometer only measures carbohydrates, not protein, minerals or anything else. If you want to believe a higher brix score means more nutritious because of a higher sugar content, well you must be right.

But it is a true statement, isn't it? Less isn't more, in the case of brix, or sugar, or carbohydrates.

Here is another question: which is more nutritious, long-chain sugars or short-chain? A teaspoon of molasses, or of refined corn syrup (hint: the latter was not used as a health tonic for cattle)?

Related: why, when one looks at a solution of molasses at a given brix concentration, is the field very hazy, but at the same concentration of simple sugar the field is very clear?