What I Learned at California’s Seaside Ranches

Pesticide-free foods could curb American healthcare costs.

Brian G. Schuster
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read
Photo by David Di Veroli on Unsplash

I recently caught a sheep, chased a few turkeys into their coop, took apart a water pump, and caged dozens of tomato plants, all to see what it’s like to grow food organically. It’s certainly not the easiest way to produce food. It takes sweat and it takes grit.

Chickens are small, but fast.

To many people, the extra effort that goes into organic gardening, farming, and livestock production just doesn’t seem worth it. Why weed by hand when you could just spray a bit of Roundup on those weeds to get rid of them for a few months? As one organic ranch owner told me, he once tried pesticides on a particularly troublesome patch of weeds. Only a few days later, one of his pigs died from feeding on the sprayed patch. He hasn’t used Roundup since.

It makes me wonder, what happens when humans eat conventional produce treated with synthetic pesticides? Studies have shown that rinsing fruit and vegetables doesn’t cut it. Many synthetic pesticides are absorbed into the inner tissues of plants. They’re present in conventional grains and the many processed foods (including bread and cereal) derived from those grains.

At Flipjack ranch, I learned first-hand that plum plants grown the old-fashioned way can yield delicious fruit. Their plants are grown for the quality of taste and nutrition, not for volume maximization that has become the norm in conventional commercial farming.

Diatomaceous earth, an abrasive powdered rock, can keep slugs and snails from eating organic vegetables because it literally cuts up their bodies. It also deters insects by drying out the waxy layer of their exoskeletons. At Love Apple Farms, I learned that some plants known as dynamic accumulators are capable of pulling valuable nutrients and minerals from deep beneath the topsoil into their roots. A common plant used for this purpose, comfrey, can be harvested and left for compost as a natural fertilizer to make the nutrients available for plants with shallow root systems.

Flipjack Ranch

WWOOF USA, which stands for Worldwide Opportunities in Organic Farming, offers people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to learn more about organic farming by immersing them in the process. Many farm owners give their farmhands a place to stay and food to eat.

Small gardens aren’t going to feed Earth’s 7.4 billion people, but commercial-scale organic farming can. Off-the-grid ranchers show that there are people out there that care about nutrition, and they’ve successfully built businesses around that common interest. These hard-working ranch owners know that healthcare isn’t just about getting decent health insurance — health starts with a decent diet. A decent diet isn’t just balanced; it’s also free of contaminants.

Considering the frequent news about the Congressional struggle to improve healthcare policy, it’s no surprise that many startups and health-conscious consumers are turning to agriculture to get to the root of well-being. Research shows that synthetic pesticides are linked to autoimmune diseases including celiac disease and diabetes, as well as several cancers, birth defects, reproductive disorders, and more.

Commercial-scale organic farming has come a long way from its origins. Self-driving tractors with machine vision can now automatically destroy weeds. Natural fungicides and insecticides can be efficiently extracted from plants that harbor their own native compounds for pest defense. Farm-side bats can be raised and protected to eat a farm’s troublesome insects. Genetic engineering can make crops unappealing to pests. These innovations and many more are enabling the organic row crops that could feed every person on this planet.

Although the opportunities are large, worries remain present in the organic farming community. The Biodynamic certification developed by the Demeter Association maintains strict standards for food cultivation as national legal standards evolve, but it makes me wonder if the USDA organic requirements need additional scrutiny. Should USDA organic standards ban GMOs if there’s already a separate label for GMO-free foods? Separating the requirements could reduce organic food prices and keep consumers satisfied.

The Washington Post found massive shipments of ‘organic’ corn and soybeans that weren’t actually organic. In addition to taking a second look at its standards, the US Department of Agriculture would also benefit from ramping up enforcement to ensure that the USDA organic label continues to live up to its name.

Are some of the newer chemicals added to the list of USDA organic-approved substances still keeping the intent of the organic program alive? Pyrethrins, for example, are formed naturally in chrysanthemum flowers and kill insects by attacking their nervous systems. These biodegradable insecticides have minimal impact on human health because they have low toxicity in human tissue, are quickly excreted, and don’t linger in the environment.

A class of closely related man-made pesticides known as pyrethroids constitute a significant portion of household and agricultural pesticides due to their potency and environmental persistence. Pioneers in the crop protection industry, including the early chemists at Monsanto, had respectable goals because they wanted to develop chemicals that could help farmers feed more people with less space. In their heyday, these pesticides nearly eliminated famines in the developed world and gave food to starving families.

However, as the crop protection industry has matured, it has grown beyond its pioneers’ wildest dreams. Ecology teaches us that every population has a carrying capacity (K), the specific number of that species that can survive with a given amount of natural resources. Humans are no exception, yet we continue to push our limits because we have the ability to develop technologies and tools that raise Earth’s carrying capacity.

As exciting and as useful as they are, some of these technologies (Snapchat) have no impact on the Earth’s carrying capacity and will not radically change living standards. Other technologies have fundamentally raised the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans: the steam engine, the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen production, and even fire for cooking.

In a third category, there are technologies that might raise humans’ carrying capacity on Earth but are self-limiting. These self-limiting technologies trade short-term gain for long-term negative effects on humans. Because their effects aren’t always immediately clear, their inventors, discoverers, and early adopters bear little blame. Late adopters with access to better information do bear blame. Fossil fuels and their impact on the climate could be considered one example. Synthetic pesticides and their impact on human health are another. Our collective intelligence enables us to identify these self-limiting technologies and mitigate their negative impacts while still pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on Earth.

Agriculture has entered a new era where we have the technology to feed every human without ultra-potent synthetic pesticides.


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Brian G. Schuster

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Student of the world. NC State / Stanford.