ORGANIC? MAYBE NOT...

It's easy to find folks promoting organic. Abundant are claims that organic farming reduces environmental pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. We're also told organic is more nutritious, better tasting, and safer than non-organic too. But is any of that so or is it all just marketing? That seems worth figuring out.

If I go looking beyond the headlines and sales pitches I find a very different story that the one on offer. As far as I can tell, if all farms on the planet transitioned to organic we would have an unparalleled ecological and human catastrophe. That sounds crazy, right? Well, there are actually several reasons for this.

First, a 2015 meta-analysis of a hundred studies spanning four decades showed organic farming of fruits and vegetables less energy efficient than conventional farming. Organic only proved superior in terms of energy efficiency when farming livestock. However, most folks promoting organic aren’t typically pushing for less fruit and veg production and far more meat.

Second, there’s also the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. This same meta-analysis revealed that, except for one implementation, organic farming was worse than other forms for generating greenhouse gasses. That one use case: monocropping. Right, nobody is arguing we should transition to organic to increase the world’s abundance of monocrops.

Third, while organic farming employs fewer heavy pesticides, it has a habit of resulting in far more and far worse destruction of our waterways. That’s because the manure and compost inputs needed for organic may cause terrible nitrogen pollution resulting in eutrophication – a devastating problem for which we don’t have simple solutions.

Fourth, and maybe worst of all, organic farming yields less food than conventional farming. That’s a problem, a big problem. To produce even close to the same amount of food as other methods would require considerably more land. And where would that land come from? Well, as no one is making more land, our primary option around the globe is deforestation. And I don't know anyone in the organic game or advocating for it who want to see far more deforestation. Sure, we all agree that we can and should waste less food and raise fewer cows and pigs on oats and corn, and that these would compensate for some of the difference, however that doesn't appear to be enough.

So, I don’t see how all of these factors aren’t in strong opposition to the ethos of most organic farmers and the environmentally-minded consumers who would buy their goods. That said, I’d love to know why you purchase organic.

On the list of commonly stated benefits, all we really have left is better tasting foods. That's huge. But is slightly improved taste worth all of these additional ecological costs? And, actually – given that we know, with wine for example, folks love to report increased satisfaction with increased cost, even if the product is identical – is there any reason to think that reports of improved experience come from the flavour of one's organic tomatoes and not the different appearance, additional cost, labour, or context of going to the farmer's market? I remain very skeptical.

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RESOURCES

"Measuring the environmental effects of organic farming: A meta-analysis of structural variables in empirical research" - Lee, Choe, & Park https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479715301663

"How context alters value: The brain’s valuation and affective regulation system link price cues to experienced taste pleasantness" - Schmidt et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08080-0