What are some cons of organic farming?
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Question by Oliver Brown: What are some cons of organic farming?
I am doing a case study on organic farming, and was wondering of some cons of organic farming, no answers copied off websites… thanks a lot!
What do you think? Answer below!
6 Responses to What are some cons of organic farming?
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higher chance of pesticides.
Organic food is not as big as non organics because not chemically treated.
Scott Daugherty
October 9, 2011 at 4:35 am
Organic farming is less eficient and therefore limiting food production to only organic methods would cause massive starvation. Organic farming is a rich persons luxury. When your starving you dont care if the chicken was raised in a cage or was free range.
Matt
October 9, 2011 at 4:56 am
1. A farm typically cannot go organic immediately. The process into pure organic farming will have to be done gradually with every successive year with increasingly less reliance on agrochemicals.
2. Often lesser crop yields compared to non-organic farming, although with enough time and dedication from the farmer, there is no reason why organic yields can’t be equal if not higher than non-organic yields.
3. Because organic farms do not use chemical control of weeds and pests, organic farms require more labor than non-organic farms. Because of the high labor requirement, organic farms are smaller than conventional ones and production is small scale.
4. Organic farming often involves more than 1 crop or 1 animal, so maintenance, control, management, and supervision in organic farms are more difficult and require more skill and intelligence from the farmers than that for non-organic farms.
5. Organic farming often use methods suitable only in local conditions that cannot be guaranteed to work elsewhere. In other words, organic farmers may find methods applied in other organic farms fail to work in their farms.
Update:
To member “むж효ج”, the practice of organic farming is NOT the absence of science. Because no agrochemicals are used, organic farmers rely on science for alternative ways to control pests and diseases. One example is IPM (Integrated Pest Management) a science-based collection of methods to use other organisms to control our pests. Use of bacterial toxin from Bacillus thuringensis to kill insects is also science-based. Other science-based methods used by organic farms include the practice of crop rotation, intercropping, organic mulches, composting, mixed farming, agroforestry, use of legumes to fix N, and other more.
cbsteh
October 9, 2011 at 4:59 am
Organic food is not actually healthier or better for the environment. Thus, the main con of organic farming is that we are wasting resources to produce and market organic food. It would be way better for our health and environment to embrace “integrated pest management,” which seeks to minimize pesticide use, and to use science to increase on-farm efficieny.
Some food for thought:
1. Organic food is not actually free from pesticides. Organic standards allow the use of natural pesticides. The thing is, chemicals are chemicals and can be harmful, regardless of whether they are natural or man-made. Rotenone, for example, is an organic pesticide which may have some links to Parkinson’s disease:
http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/hydro/roten…
2. Organic food has just as much if not more bacteria than conventional food. Here is just one example:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/R…
3. A few hundred years ago, most people “raised their own food.” We romanticize this idea while forgetting that people use to die before age 40 from exhaustion.
katie
October 9, 2011 at 5:49 am
The other answers are good so far, but I’ll add this. IMO the biggest flaw with organic is that it is an inflexible dogma. It isn’t science, it is dogma. It isn’t like someone sat down and ran a bunch of studies and, lo and behold, the techniques perceived as natural came out ahead of the ones perceived as unnatural every time in every way. Some guy just said, ‘Hey, natural is better, end of story!’ Anyone should recognize that as one of the most common fallacies, the appeal to nature. And that fallacy still dominates organic farming. If you produce a synthetic pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer, no matter how safe for human health or the environment, no matter how sustainable, no matter how beneficial, economical, or generally good, it can never be organic, simply because no plant happens to naturally produce it. That, quite frankly, is stupid. Or what if you take a plant and genetically modify it somehow, to be resistant to insects, or drought, or viral attack, or fungal attack, or make it use nitrogen more efficiently, or be more nutritious? That would be great, right? You could use less pesticides, or fertilizers, or fumigants, or whatever, and that would be a win for the environment, and a boast to sustainability. Well, that can never be organic either. Why? It isn’t perceived as natural. I’m pretty sure you can’t even use irradiation to prevent food borne illness in organic food. That’s messed up there.
So, the biggest con of organic farming is that is is basically nature worship, where nature is a god, and science is a devil. That is a recipe for disaster which goes against the enlightenment values that built our technologically advanced civilization. It’s a silly little marketing gimmick that has no business in the modern world and only exists to act as an ignorance tax on those with no understanding of biology and chemistry.
むж효ج
October 9, 2011 at 6:04 am
Organic farming is the best way if any body think about health of people. agro chemicals are a main reason for bad health of the people.
we have proofs.
http://print.dailymirror.lk/opinion1/46604.html
Organic farming is the best way for a better, healthy world.
Maduka Piyumali
October 9, 2011 at 6:59 am