organic agriculture
sastyk | September 6, 2012There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods. This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise. The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started. The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing? Is this industrial or small scale…
sastyk | June 7, 2011My current favorite news story is one by Reuters about an outbreak of e,coli in Germany attributed to organically grown bean sprouts with the ridiculous headline "E. Coli Outbreak Poses Questions for Organic Farming." Now it is absolutely true that there is a nasty outbreak of e.coli in Germany that has made thousands of of people sick, and caused 22 deaths. This is awful. But Reuters has a little accuracy problem as it leaps to attack organic agriculture:
The warm, watery, organic growing environment suspected as the source of a deadly E.coli outbreak in Germany may produce delicious,…
sastyk | April 28, 2010From the wonderful Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog (a favorite of mine) over at Research Blogging, is a fascinating summary of paper that describes the ways that most modern seed varieties, selected to be used under commercial conditions, don't do as well under organic conditions, because we haven't selected for the qualities that would enable success:
To perform well under organic conditions, varieties need to get a fast start, to outcompete weeds, and they need to be good at getting nitrogen from the soil early on in their growth. Organic farmers tend to use older varieties, in part…