It depends on how dedicated you are to being organic. Do you want to be certified as an organic grower or just grow your own plants and veggies without chemical input? Or somewhere in between?

There is commercial certified organic compost available if you look for it. The issues with persistent herbicides are often a bit overstated. These pesticides are highly regulated, not available to homeowners and typically are prohibited from any yard waste composting operations. If the compost includes materials from stables and feedlots, the risk increases as these herbicides are often used to keep weeds down in pasture lands and tainted material is consumed by the livestock and in turn is present in their manure.

One way to be as organic as you can is to make your own compost. If you control what goes in, you can be assured what comes out :-)) This is what organic farmers do. And there are all manner of organic fertilizers that are free of any association with GMO's.

I tend to be a little middle of the road on this topic. I use no synthetic/chemical based fertilizers and pesticides on anything growing in the ground. Organic fertilizers tend to not be all that efficient in a container growing situation, so I diverge slightly from hard and fast organics there. I have no issue with using non-certified compost as I don't believe there is enough of a concern about any residual contamination and persistent herbicides have been eliminated from commercial compost in my state. I also don't have an issue with using seeds that are not certified organic or purchasing starts with the same designation as it is my belief that how I grow them determines their true organic nature for me.

Whether some one wants to be a certified organic grower does not apply to the question and concerns about pesticides is valid for anyone that is, or wants to be, a truly an organic grower. That Genetically Engineered corn is now 90 percent of all corn due to the failure of the proponents to foresee that pollination would happen and contaminate crops not meant to be part of that indicates a part of the problem. That, contrary to the manufacturers assurances, the EPA ground water people have found traces of glyphosates in drinking water far distant from the source of pollution is without question. Most of the animal manures will be contaminated by antibiotics because most of that manure comes from animal factories.

I do not have an answer for Jeff because those poisons are quite persistent, and present, everywhere today, in our water, in our air, in most of the products we use, and they are not going away anytime soon. Just do the best you can with what you can get and work on getting rules and regulations in place to limit our exposure to them.

There are a lot of people that believe the old GE slogan "Live Better Chemically".

kimmq is kimmsr

I live in Ontario, Canada so it may be different here, but the organic food you buy from a grocery store is not likely all organic from start to finish. The reason I know this is we rent our cropland to an certified organic neighbor. When applying manure to the fields he told me that the regulations are a little lax because it's near impossible to find strictly organic manure. So the pig manure simply had to be from pigs that were allowed to turn at least 360 degrees. They can still be confined in small spaces, they can still be given drugs, they can still be fed a non-organic diet (which corn is one of the most popular for market animals). Even with farmers that supply meat for the organic market, some medications are still allowed. Also sometimes there are animals where the health of that animal warrants giving antibiotics or other medications. Unless that animal is completely segregated from the rest of the group and manure is not combined, there will be some of that in the manure.

The degree one wants to achieve or adhere to in their own organic gardening practices or in their life is up to them so don't presume to tell me that I have to blindly follow certified organic practices or I am not an organic gardener. Or anyone else. There are degrees and aspects in this process that some choose to follow and others may find overly restrictive or excessively awkward to their lifestyle. The choice is theirs and unlike some I could name, I don't presume to tell them they are doing it wrong or that they're not really 'organic' if they make different choices than I do. Blind adherence to dogma results in a lot more of what's wrong in this world than the input of a few chemicals.

I choose to follow the definition that is posted here in the Organic Gardening FAQ's: "ORGANIC GARDENING - the science and art of gardening by
incorporating the entire landscape design and environment to improve and
maximize the garden soil's health, structure, texture, as well as
maximize the production and health of developing plants without using synthetic commercial fertilizers, pesticides, or fungicides." Others may choose to follow a more rigid definition or one that is somewhat less well-defined. And that is their choice and they should not be chided or criticized for it by some self-important little demagogue who has somehow decided he is the authority on all things organic.

btw, the GE slogan was "Live Better Electrically"...............chemicals had nothing to do with it. Yet another misstatement by the master of erroneous statements.

It was DuPont

or was it Timmy Leary?