I've been a bit bamboozled by this.
I've decided it's more that poste X disagrees with poster Y, but because they can't/won't discuss the issues in private,
Poster X takes it to the whole group and general bollocks ensues.
That's my take on it anyway, but I will try really hard to keep out of threads with any accusations of organic=culty/psuedo-relgious/unscientific/fanfiful/fairydust, etc, etc.

Actually, some of the "why organic?" type threads are initiated by forum members who are already VERY organic, and have many more decades experience at being organic than you or I are likely to have.

It's ok to have those kinds of discussions, and during the winter months, those of us in the northern hemisphere need an outlet for our gardening, so here it is.

As spring approaches, these discussions will likely die off since everyone is going to be busy outside. Things are already getting really quiet around here.

It's an open public discussion board. In addition, there is a full spectrum of practice from totally conventional "chemical" growing to totally "organic" growing, with many growers in the middle area. Any and all can discuss the benefits, disadvantages, and uncertainties. It is not some monestery for the true-believer blind-faith fringe where the unbelievers, partial practicers, and the more-thoughtful and critical even among the faithful cannot enter and discuss matters.

Disussion is always good, but when disparaging terms such as "blind faith fringe" are thrown in the discussion deteriorates. If reasonably intelligent people cannot discuss things we are in trouble. Those that choose to disagree here, as long as others ideas are not refered to as ignorant or any other disparaging term people can freely disagree. It is up to each participant here to try to present their ideas in a reasonably intelligent manner without the discussion deteriorating into name calling.

When divergent discussion is freely alluded to as "trolling" then there should be little complaint about allusion to the possible existance of a "fringe."

But in any case, both were general comments and not directed at named individuals.

I have seen little or no actual "trolling" on these garden boards, though there is occasionally some good natured (and well taken) teasing and disagreement about tastes and preferences on the fruit board.

When I grow in ground I tend to use a 100% organic approach. For my container garden I do not use 100% organic. Anyone do the same?

Yes, I use organic for vegetables and most of my garden, but sometimes use non-organic fertilizers for container plants and house plants.

Here is a link that might be useful: What's Growing On?

So if we're not 100% organic we ought to refrain from participating in this forum?

Lloyd

On fruit trees (containerized or not) that have a tendency toward meso- or micronutrient deficiencies, mainly citrus, I use inorganic citrus fertilizer with the full blend of secondary elements. It is just the easiest way to make sure that I have covered them all on my naturally poor soil. On containerized pawpaws that are prone to yellowing possibly related to nutrition and which SEEM to be responding better to mychorrhiza (sp?) and organic fertilizer (alfalfa) I mainly use that. I use a lot of cotton seed meal and some soya meal on both in-ground and containerized other fruits and vegetables as well as some chemical fertilizer if I want a quick action or a release in the cold of winter. I also tend to use inorganic when I need a lot of fertilizer (on a few score of larger woody plants on poor soil). Overall I prefer organic fertilizer in containers for the slow-release advantage.

"Overall I prefer organic fertilizer in containers for the slow-release advantage."

Yea I am using a soluble organic fertilizer for my containers this year.

We all have our reasons to believe, and it's pretty easy to cherry-pick facts that support or contradict those beliefs. I don't mind dissenting voices, but they rarely sway me from my own opinion. I've seen lots of posts citing some kind of esoteric or theological influence surrounding organic agriculture, but not one concrete example of what that means, despite actively soliciting one. The bottom line is, any belief is a choice. Sometimes it is merely the choice not to think hard enough on a subject to make a choice, and so the status quo prevails, and we do what we're told. My rationale is pretty simple, I think, and based on two beliefs: that the world is entrusted to us by our children, and that biological systems are more stable than technological ones. Humans have a unique capacity to make a mess of things. Organic practices seem less likely to follow that trend.

Here is a link that might be useful: It's not about the vitamins

In my wee world, any organic is better than none, so Iwouldn't use "thou shalt/shalt not" absolutes.
I do struggle with what I read as the repeated ...accusation... that organic growers on this forum aren't using their brains.
Maybe I'm reading stuff into stuff, but I do feel quite defensive on here sometimes. I'm not saying everyone should just agree or shut up, but should I be regularly defending my choice to grow organically, on an organic forum? I know I could just shut up, but that's unlikely!

Prince Charles agrees

Here is a link that might be useful: The Future of Food

I haven't seen what I think is a religious aspect per se, but I think I may know what others mean by it. It is an edging toward a "there is only one proper way" outlook. An edging toward a "you should believe it all" opinion. An acceptance of guiding assumptions that are used in extrapolated deductions but which are more beliefs than established facts. I would propose the "poisoning the soil" notion for chemical fertilizers as an example of an unfounded and totally unnuanced starting position. It seems more a tenet of faith than an established fact and has an awful lot of successful farming arguing against it.

I think some common opinions fairly can be characterized as "taking things on faith," but here using the idiom, not the literal religious sense of "faith."

I agree, to a point, that "poisoning the soil" has the potential to be inflammatory; we are not after all, talking about Chernobyl or Bhopal. The key is sustainability. What has been "successful farming" in the conventional sense has relied on continued inputs of petroleum-based chemicals. This has caused damage to the natural soil biota, to the point that certain biological systems that previously maintained an equilibrium of plant nutrition no longer function. We are generally considered to be past the point of "peak oil," so those resources will be increasingly costly. Without a new technology to replace petroleum-dependent methods, we face the potential of food supplies becoming more limited and costly while at the same time human population continues to rise and an increasing rate. A part of the motivation for GE crops is to address the recognition that we will need to devote a large percentage of our remaining fossil fuel reserves toward developing other crucial technologies to replace them... as things stand now, we can't build solar panels without fossil fuels. Conventional farmers already spend enormous amounts of capital on fuel and synthetic inputs. Those costs are being assumed by consumers in rising food costs. America already pays an unrealistically low price for gasoline in comparison to all but the largest oil-producing countries - even our own oily politicians recognized the need to promote alternatives. Large scale organic production is also currently petroleum-dependent, but far less than conventional. The continued transition towards organically managed cropland is clear evidence that financial and environmental sustainability will be the primary impetuses toward adopting organic methods.

(had to look that one up)

"It is the difficulty in making sustainable farming more profitable for producers and sustainable food more affordable for consumers."

Therein lies the crux of the problem.

Lloyd

There is research around, not just from that suspect Rodale Institute, that shows yields from organic farms are equal to those of farms worked with synthetics in any year and most often at lower cost, and in years of drought the yeilds from organic farms have been higher.
Those that state people will starve to death if we switch to organic farming are not paying attention to good research.

Organic requires moving of compost and heavy material, still pollution sorry to say, ever more sometimes.
Dumping oil in the ground does nothing, driving in huge v8 cars does nothing, farming synthetic does nothing!!!!!

It is the rate we do it.

If we stopped farming synthetic the world would still be polluted. If we stoped over populating and placed very strict laws to do so, the world would be a great place.

The argument about synthetic fertilizers being necessary to sustain the world's population may or may not be sound, but there is so much more going on. Tons of grain goes into meat production and people overeat. Growing crops for ethanol production consumes fossil fuels, exchanging diesel fuel for ethanol. Subsidies on certain crops means vast production of unnecessary items for profit. The approach to food production, unfortunately, sometimes appears more in line with 'what we can get away with,' rather than 'the best, most nutritious product for the consumer.'

Yea well said. I think using something man made is just fine. I think we should use our smarts in a good way and slow down all together in general. That is just what we need to do is just slow down.

In a thread that bemoans the idea of talking about the fearmongering religious blind-faith sustainable political foolishness, we sure got back into it real quick. :)

Olio of thoughts...
Likely few minds are changed quickly by the postings here. The key word here is quickly. Let's be kind so that the following paragraph doesn't rule here.
On political forums the people are tending to be embedded in their foxholes. As I see it, liberals want to change the world with more control of lives and conservatives then resist.
As far as oil goes, we use a lot of it, but more green alternatives seem mostly so far kind of inefficient on any large scale.

bill said, " Large scale organic production is also currently petroleum-dependent, but far less than conventional.
Bill, Could you flesh out that statement?

"Conventional" agriculture depends on the systematic application of synthetic materials, many of which are petroleum based - that is currently changing, in part because of increasing oil prices and decreasing subsidies. Some studies have estimated that:

"The biggest culprit of fossil fuel usage in industrial farming is not transporting food or fueling machinery; it�s chemicals. As much as forty percent of energy used in the food system goes towards the production of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Fertilizers are synthesized from atmospheric nitrogen and natural gas, a process that takes a significant amount of energy. Producing and distributing them requires an average of 5.5 gallons of fossil fuels per acre.

Large scale organic producers have similar fuel usage to conventional in terms of distribution of inputs (on-farm machinery use) and distribution of product, but not the high fossil fuel use associated with the creation of those inputs. Most small-scale organic producers (though not all, I among them) have relatively local markets, but by their nature operations of substantial acreage are producing more food than can be consumed by a local (less than 100 miles) population, so distribution becomes a major fuel use that smaller producers don't face.

Because many organic food producers are motivated by the desire to reduce their effect on the environment, new technologies are being developed to reduce in-field petroleum use even further. There are at least 2 companies working on solar-electric tractors for wide-bed production systems, and the design of highly efficient and adaptable machines like the BCS walking tractor system makes mechanization on a small scale affordable and worthwhile for small farms.

The "locavore" movement is a consumer-based effort to achieve the same goals, reducing transportation and storage costs, maintaining viable small farms in rural areas where large-scale agriculture doesn't work, and preserving (and now creating) existing agricultural land in close proximity to urban populations. What is happening in Detroit right now is one good example, Will Allens' work in Milwaulkee and Chicago was similarly motivated, and has since grown into a national non-profit with several training centers across the country.

I agree with you, Wayne, that few minds are likely to be changed here. I am what some would label a purist, though I know others find fault with my methods in that I ship my produce to markets far removed from my little town. I also recognize the advantages that industrial agriculture have brought to this country and the world. I agree with you, too, that the world is in the midst of some dramatic changes, many of them the result of the exact medium we are using here, the instantaneous world-wide access to information. We all get our information from different sources, and have to pick where to find it and what to believe, and naturally we won't all agree. The important thing is that we can remain agreeable in the discussion.

Here is a link that might be useful: Will Allen

Thank you Bill for your thoughtful and kind response. I know we wont see everything eye to eye as we all come from different backgrounds and outlooks.

It's a real shame that issues get so politicalized and as I said we can kind of get in our foxholes, but human unregenerated nature is, well, kind of scratchy and self seeking.

I raise a lot of my own food and am still eating off of stored potatoes, sweetpotatoes, carrots, frozen lima beans and frozen strawberries. I don't like to drive around to several locales hunting down foods. I like one stop shopping. The miles spent on picking up foods at farmer's markets and the other outlets add up it seems to me.

Bill, I still have one question. How would a large scale organic farm fertilize besides green crops? My main word is large...like 200 acres, say.

This is exactly where "large-scale" and "organic" begin to conflict. Historically, fertility at that scale was achieved by a rotation of crops, livestock, and fallowing, and some farms are trying to re-create that (Salatin being a favorite example) but the economic and management complications are daunting. During the process of establishing the Organic Foods Production Act in the late '90s, there was a lot of debate about whether and how to set limits on the size of an "organic" operation precisely because the requirements for that kind of scale were seen as contrary to the principles of sustainability, but the lobbying efforts of some of the larger food producers who were then contemplating expanding into organic production (think Heinz, Kraft, Dean, and Gerber, for starters) effectively killed the debate. The current state of the art at that scale, while still adhering to a fairly strict interpretation of the standards, involves not only cover crops between harvestable plantings, but nurse crops, underplanting, foliar feeding, and the old standards of fallowing and rotation. I would like to see a re-allocation of agricultural subsidies to help support rotational fallowing. According to the Cato Institute:

"USDA conservation programs dispense about $3 billion annually (out of a total annual subsidy that has ranged from $15 to $35 Billion annually in the past decade) to the nation's farmers. The largest conservation subsidy program is the Conservation Reserve Program, which was created in 1985 to idle millions of acres of farmland. Under CRP, farmers are paid not to grow crops, but to cultivate ground cover such as grass or trees on retired acres. A large share of land idled under the CRP is owned by retired farmers, thus one does not even have to be a working farmer to get these subsidies... a substantial amount of these payments are made to owners of land that is no longer even used for farming. The Washington Post estimated that between 2000 and 2006 the USDA handed out $1.3 billion in direct payments to people who don't farm. The newspaper pointed to thousands of acres of land previously used for rice growing in Texas. The land is now used for suburban housing and other purposes, but the landowners continue to receive federal farm subsidies."

We should be using that, and other misused agricultural subsidies, to promote doing something productive, instead of promoting doing nothing. Fallow land has a long-term and not immediately obvious benefit for farmers, most of whom can't afford the expense of having large acreages out of production for several crop cycles. That is a major obstacle for large independent farms who would like to transition to organic production.

Conservation acres put into grass instead of crops around me seem to have been mostly strips of land bordering streams. These were encouraged as a buffer against chemicals entering the ditches and streams directly.

I am assuming that raw phosphate rock, and lime are likely utilized as fertilizer and legumes to some extent for nitrogen on organic farms. I realize that manures and composts could run short on the "back" forties as the manures surely did years ago on the home farm. My dad once bought into part of a railroad carload of raw phosphate rock powder. Is the argument against super phosphate mostly on the principle of things, the "fast" feeding it gives that stimulates growth, or soil damage?

Sir Albert Howard lammented the continual removal of food and fiber from the farms without return from the cities, and right there is the crux.

As I understand the decision on superphosphate, it concerns the process that is used to create it (sulfuric acid), its' potential toxicity if misused, and its' short duration in the soil. Rock phosphates are slow release, but long duration.

I just reread the book "Quacks" (CW Warner, 1934) and there sure is some unflattering similarity in evidence, presentation, and supposed experiments with other (let them go unnamed here) belief-based pseudosciences. And a lot of similarity in marginal to outright frauds for sale as preventatives and cures by sharpers (scammers in the more-modern parlance).

This really is too bad. Intellectually and commercially honest organic gardening has so much useful insight and experience to add to modern gardening and even small-scale farming, and a bit even to large-scale farming. The widespread scent of kookiness gives others pause though. In a way it is like yogurt, vegetable-based diet, or maybe even acupuncture of say five decades ago. When just the "cure-all" zealots praised and used them, their more-limited but actual benefits were unrecognized by the masses. So too with organic gardening I'm afraid.

I think you are right. The desire to sell products contributes to this greatly. We see numerous sites touting the benefits of one practice and/or the fallacies/dangers of another, and then selling just the right product to solve all of the problems.

There is some recent work that discusses the importance of improving agricultural practices (efficient use of acreage, reduction of energy losses, importance of fallow land) to continue feeding the growing population.