THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 138, July 26, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF ALL-ORGANIC FARMING:
ORGANIC FOODS, LIKE HUMVEES, ARE ECO-WASTEFUL
By Dennis T. Avery
POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM & THE ORGANIC FOOD MOVEMENT: DOES THE USE OF NITROGEN FERTILIZER IN
AGRICULTURE INCREASE THE EARTH'S GREENHOUSE GASES & CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING? WOULD ALL-ORGANIC
FARMING IMPROVE THE EARTH'S ENVIRONMENT, OR WOULD IT LEAD TO INCREASED SOIL EROSION & LOWER CROP YIELDS
PER ACRE OF LAND CULTIVATED? CHALLENGING THE IDEOLOGY EXPOUNDED & PROPAGANDA DISSEMINATED BY
POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS
FULL STORY:
Organic food consumers are as careless of the environment as the drivers piloting those massive Humvees around our city
streets. Both are wasting money and natural resources to gain snob appeal — with no other benefits.
Almost everyone realizes that the $100,000 Humvees that get 9 miles per gallon are in the cities to impress the waitresses at
the local sports bar. Few of those vehicles ever take to the rough off-road environment for which the U.S. Army designed
them. If the Humvees did get driven over rocks and stumps in the wilderness, the resulting dents and scratches would
offend the parking valets at the fancy restaurants.
Organic food is also a snob-appeal ploy. Organic food is a politically acceptable way to brag to your neighbors that you can
afford to pay double for your food, and smile about it. You can claim to care more deeply about your children and the
environment.
Unfortunately for the organic customers, no consistent, significant nutritional advantages in organic food have ever been
documented during the more than 75 years since a German racial purist named Rudoph Steiner first dreamed up the organic
concept in the 1920s. Instead, plant researchers tell us the variety of carrot you plant makes more nutritional difference than
whether or not it is grown organically. So long as the carrots and broccoli have nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, and 26 trace
minerals in their soil, they will produce the nutrition dictated by their DNA.
The environmental impact of organic food is actually dreadful. It takes organic farmers roughly twice as much land to
produce a ton of food, primarily because they refuse to use nitrogen fertilizer to replace the nitrogen taken from the soil by
their growing crops. That means huge tracts of land must be used to “grow nitrogen,” either as cattle pasture or planted to
non-food legumes such as clover and hairy vetch.
Humans are already using 37 percent of the Earth’s land area for farming, and we’ll need at least double today’s farm output
to feed a peak human population of 8 or 9 billion in 2050. Thus, an all-organic farming mandate for the planet would mean
clearing all 16 million square miles of remaining forest to plant more low-yield crops.
Most of that newly cleared forest is rough land that would erode swiftly, once there were no tree roots to hold the steep soils.
Farming steeper slopes to get half the yield per acre would at least triple the world’s soil erosion. The latest low-till farming,
which uses herbicides to control weeds instead of plowing, has one-tenth the soil erosion of an organic farm. Thus,
all-organic farming would be more environmentally destructive than replacing the planet’s whole current fleet of 500 million
cars with Humvees.
What about the carbon dioxide from producing nitrogen fertilizer with natural gas? Virtually all of our recent warming occurred before
1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2 Meanwhile, ice and seabed cores have shown us a moderate, natural
1500-year climate cycle which has pervaded the last 1 million years of Earth’s history. The CO2 theorists must not only
document that our planet is warming, but demonstrate that the warming is something other than part of the natural cycle. The
Medieval Warming ended in 1300, and the Little Ice Age ended in 1850.
Even Cornell University, which tends toward supporting the trendy and politically correct, says organic farming is somewhat
worse for the environment than conventional farming because of the fertilizer problem, and because it relies more heavily on
pest-killing compounds that permanently poison soils, such as copper and sulfur.
We doubt that many organic consumers will ever trade their high-mileage cars for bulky and expensive Humvees. So, why in
the world are they buying the organic foods?
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and is the Director of the Institute's Center for
Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). Formerly he was a senior analyst for the United States
Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421. Email: cgfi@rica.net
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