Things organic foodies are wrong about
This week I got frustrated by so many false claims about organic and conventional agriculture, that I had to write this up to keep from exploding.
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Obviously this is a topic I’ve written on many times before (here and here for example), but this week I got hammered by so many false claims, just in my daily life, that I had to boil over and vent. Here are 7 that I heard this week.
Organic foods are grown without pesticides or fertilizers. Nope, in fact, acre for acre, organic farms use substantially more chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The reason for this is that organic alternatives are less efficient than modern synthetics (which is why we developed the modern synthetics) so more of them is needed. There is absolute nothing in the organic certification that prohibits this, contrary to what so many people think. What’s restricted is the source of those chemicals, which is really dumb, in this writer’s opinion. Nitrogen is nitrogen whether it was extracted from the atmosphere or recovered from sewage sludge.