Natural Assumptions — My failed attempt to defend Organic Farming
I write about the risks of repeating slogans, and of how pieces of worldview are built and change. Sometimes that change starts with just a comment or two.
“Yes, Monsanto is pure evil,” I said, back in 2013, to another worried food-conscious new parent. I was defending science and nuanced thinking in the same sentence, no less. “Monsanto is pure evil,” I said, “but genetic engineering is just a tool and in itself is neither good or bad.” My University course literature had given a balanced view of many possible benefits to GM while highlighting a couple of areas of caution. My main insight on Monsanto came from the movie Food Inc., confirmed by plenty of common internet knowledge and a couple of trusted friends of mine.
I had always considered myself a rational and science-minded person so I was upset when I first heard people object to GMOs for reasons such as not wanting genes in their food (in the late nineties, when the topic was still very new and knowledge scarce) or just because ‘it wasn’t natural’, which I saw as a fear of the unknown.
Later on I was incredibly frustrated to find that a lot of people, on various internet mommy-groups, opposed standard vaccinations (going counter to the scientific evidence). So when I stumbled on a Facebook page called We love GMOs and vaccines, though I didn’t exactly think of my view on genetic engineering as ‘love’, I was happy to find a place to share my frustration. But as I started following their posts I was confronted with something that gave me pause. There were several that criticised organic farming.
I had been a loyal organic consumer for a decade. My vegan friends had talked a lot about how detrimental industrial agriculture was for the environment, and even my favourite ecology teacher back in the University mentioned how important it was to buy organic milk and meat. Living on student subsidies and saving on about everything else, I was convinced that buying ecological produce (In Finland the label actually goes under the name ‘Eco’, and the Swedish label, translated roughly to ‘Demand’, also states the food is ecologically produced. In Switzerland it’s called ‘Bio’, for biologically farmed.) was vital for the environment. Paying twice the price was more than worth it.
I couldn’t just leave the criticism unaddressed. Somebody needed to present a nuanced voice of organic farming, so that people would not group it together with anti-science sentiments. So I started digging. I read about comprehensive meta-analyses of studies where they found that organic food was no more nutritious than conventional produce — News in Standford medicine — Little evidence of health benefits from organic foods (or click for the paper behind paywall), for instance, said:
science simply cannot find any evidence that organic foods are in any way healthier than non-organic ones — and scientists have been comparing the two for over 50 years.
and in Scientific American on: Mythbusting 101 organic farming vs conventional agriculture. Interesting, I thought, but hardly devastating. That wasn’t my reason for choosing organic. I read about how organic was an industry like any other, looking for profit, with all the dirt that entails. Even Michael Pollan criticized the organic industry in his book Omnivore’s dilemma. Well sure. It couldn’t exactly be a charity, could it? Not every company was perfectly principled. It didn’t mean that the whole organic label was bad.
Then I read a Swiss animal welfare organisation statement (article in german) that organic did not necessarily reflect in greater well-being for the animals, that in Switzerland at least, it was more narrowly focused on the farming of crops (the animals were given organic feed). As a great animal lover I thought, okay, that’s a pity, for animal products I would have to look for different labels. But I would continue to support organic for the most important point, for the sake of the environment.
I continued. Then there was a study about organic pesticides being no more benign than conventional. Well that was surprising, but made sense now that I thought of it — they would all have to be some kind of chemicals that kill plants and insects. It turns out, when they looked at natural vs synthetic chemicals, researchers had come to the conclusion that natural or not does not make a big difference. As one commenter on that concluded:
Until recently, nobody bothered to look at natural chemicals (such as organic pesticides), because it was assumed that they posed little risk. But when the studies were done, the results were somewhat shocking: you find that about half of the natural chemicals studied are carcinogenic as well. This is a case where everyone (consumers, farmers, researchers) made the same, dangerous mistake. We assumed that “natural” chemicals were automatically better and safer than synthetic materials, and we were wrong. It’s important that we be more prudent in our acceptance of “natural” as being innocuous and harmless.
I further read about how the risks from pesticides for the consumer were actually very small, and that people feared them much out of proportion. What a relief. Why did so many seem to think the opposite?
Further, there was a study that said organic farming actually contributed more to pollution of groundwater, and then a meta-analysis of more than a hundred studies saying organic had more ammonia and nitrogen run-off per product unit, leading to more eutrophication as well as acidification potential. Ouch. That was not what I would have thought. But considering the imprecise mode of fertilisation (spreading out manure), that too did make sense. Most importantly, also confirmed by several sources (and here and here), I found out that the big issue with organic farming was the yield — forgoing the more efficient synthetic methods meant having one third (or between a half and one fifth) less of end product. Nature News:
Crop yields from organic farming are as much as 34 percent lower than those from comparable conventional farming practices, the analysis finds. Organic agriculture performs particularly poorly for vegetables and some cereal crops such as wheat, which make up the lion’s share of the food consumed around the world.
Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow, suggesting that the yield differences are in large part attributable to nitrogen deficiencies in organic systems, says Seufert.
This in turn meant that scaling up organic farming, we would need to find a third more land to make up for its inefficiency.
When I looked at these studies one by one, my immediate reaction was: surely now that these results were available, where necessary, organic farming practices could be adapted so that they would continue to provide consumers with the best environmentally friendly sources of food. But that relied on an assumption I held that I had so far not even thought of checking.
I thought organic farming was based on evidence, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t designed by studying what would be best for the environment. On the contrary, to my surprise I found its roots were actually in biodynamic agriculture — a method that emphasizes spiritual and mystical perspectives on farming. What? How could I have missed such a point for a decade? The picture I was beginning to piece together was that being ‘organic’ was based on the idea that modern farming — industrial agriculture — was bad, and the old ways of farming were better. That whatever natural was, that was better.
So anything created specifically in a lab, with intention, aim, and knowledge — anything synthetic — had to be bad. Genetic engineering (which I had thought would go hand-in-hand with many of the ecological intentions of organic farming) had to be especially bad. And companies working on modern agricultural approaches were simply the worst.
I couldn’t believe what I had just read.
While I was in the midst of what I call my organic crisis, I saw another post that was at odds with my world view. But this one was over the top. A YouTube video called “I love Monsanto”. I clicked on the link in disbelief as I had never seen those three words in the same sentence before. Obviously it was an attention-seeking stunt, and it worked.
The man in the video, Dusty, went through one Monsanto-claim after another, and punched them full of holes. And quite easily too. He urged his watchers not to take his word but to read up on the claims themselves. I did. Alleged lawsuits, bad treatment of employees, terminator seeds, Indian farmer suicides, abusing and controlling farmers, patents, notorious history, being evil, falsifying research, and on and on. I came up empty. There was nothing terrible left that I could accuse Monsanto of. I even skimmed back and forth in the movie Food Inc., and looked for supporting sources online, but instead of finding ammunition, I found more holes. With a few emotional testimonies and dramatised footage the movie painted a worldview which made all its following insinuations plausible. I couldn’t believe I had not seen the gaps in its presentation on the first viewing. Why didn’t they interview any science experts or organisations? What about the FDA? Union representatives? Farming organisations? Lawyers? Immigration officials? Where was the actual evidence?
I was embarrassed and angry over how easily I had been fooled. Not only had I parroted silly slogans such as ‘Monsanto is evil’, but I had long and determinedly supported a branch of agriculture that I thought was making the world better. It dawned on me that the only improvements in fact being made were the ones in the minds of myself and the other organic supporters — thinking better of ourselves for making such ethical choices. I had shunned others for using the ‘natural’ argument, but with my wallet I had supported the idea that ‘natural’ methods were best in a mysterious way that was above and beyond evidence.
I began to question if there even was a ‘natural way to farm’? If natural was defined by, say, the exclusion of human activities, then surely there was nothing natural to farming. On the other hand, if we accepted humans as a part of nature, and our continued innovations as part of *our nature*, then all farming was natural. Saying that more traditional farming practices would be inherently better than those using more advanced technology wasn’t a concept that could be settled by a romantical appeal to nature. Only careful definitions of ‘better’, followed by observations, testing, and evaluation of evidence could tell us something about that.
Another thing which may or may not be considered natural, is how incredibly many humans there are on this planet today. My reading has made me accept that innovations like synthetic pesticides, fertilisers, and enhanced crops are important in the quest of keeping everybody fed. I have even begun to accept that Monsanto — gasp — could play a part in making the world better. As I see it, the best kind of agriculture going forward should be a scientifically oriented one. It should be free to combine the best methods whether they be derived from old traditions or created in the lab, using what makes most sense, in order to arrive at efficient and environmentally friendly ways of farming. And what has made me happy indeed, is realising that this is already being done — just look at Integrated Pest Management, crops adapted to withstand harsher environments, and Conservation tillage or No-till.
Organic labels on the other hand are not adapting. Actually, it appears they are spending considerable sums of money to mislead the public about science (see here, here and here). That is not something I can approve of. And I am not ready to give up one third more land to support the appealing idea of ‘being natural’. That is land which isn’t there. Land which comprises the last dwindling habitats for wild-life — the actual nature.
I am still searching for that label that would say ‘buying this will make the world a better place’. And if I do find one, I will do a proper background-check to see if I can verify its claims. I’ve realised that I am in no way immune to basing my views on unchecked assumptions, and I shouldn’t judge others for making the same mistake. Having to change a deep-seated world view can be exhausting and painful. I am thankful for this experience and see it as a reminder to stay respectful of others, no matter what beliefs they may hold. We can help each other in remaining open for opportunities to learn.
Iida Ruishalme
- Writer and a science communicator, M.Sc. in Biology from Sweden.
- Website: Thoughtscapism.
- Contributor to Genetic Literacy Project and Biofortified.
- For more, see Facebook page or Twitter: @Thoughtscapism. I also keep a collection of my infographics on Pinterest, and periodically answer science questions on Quora.
Responses to this piece resulted in follow-up pieces:
- Organic vs Conventional Food — No nutritional or health benefits from eating organic food after several comprehensive scientific reviews of the topic.
- On Farming, Animals, and the Environment — Does organic deliver?
- Delving Deeper into the Roots of Organic — What started it?
- Am I Biased? Are You? is where I look at the research on the nutritional content of organic and conventional food as a case study and reflect on how bias might affect our views of a topic.
Some of the main studies and articles referenced are listed below in the order of appearance from the piece above:
1 News in Standford medicine — Little evidence of health benefits from organic foods
“The most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of existing studies comparing organic and conventional foods.” Paper (behind paywall)
2 Scientific American: Mythbusting 101 organic farming vs conventional agriculture
“science simply cannot find any evidence that organic foods are in any way healthier than non-organic ones — and scientists have been comparing the two for over 50 years.”
“As far as I’m concerned, the biggest myth when it comes to organic farming is that you have to choose sides. Guess what? You don’t. You can appreciate the upsides of rotating crops and how GMOs might improve output and nutrition.”
3 Article criticising the marketing practices of organic industries.
“The organic and natural products special interests are spending more than $2.5 billion a year in no-holds-barred advocacy, and hundreds of millions more in unreported marketing activities to disparage farming methods and promulgate fraudulent health claims about the foods we eat — to no other purpose than to increase sales of their own exorbitantly priced offerings.”
4 Pollan’s criticism of the organic industry in the book Omnivore’s dilemma summarised in Wikipedia
“For Pollan, the marketing geniuses at Whole Foods peddle an irresistible commodity: self-satisfaction. He quotes a marketing consultant waxing creepily about how the store offers consumers the opportunity to “engage in authentic experiences” and “return to a utopian past with positive aspects of modernity intact.
Yet the virtues on sale often prove spectral, Pollan shows. The “free-range” chicken on offer, it turns out, hails from a confinement operation with a tiny yard, largely unused by the short-lived birds. And after giving gigantic organic vegetable outfits a long and sympathetic hearing, he subjects them to a devastating energy analysis. Pollan finds that while a one-pound box of California-produced organic lettuce contains 80 food calories, it requires 4,600 calories of fossil fuel to process and ship to the East Coast. He adds that the figure would be only “about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.” It’s hard to dispute Pollan’s assessment of large-scale organic agriculture: it’s “floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.””
“These data bring into caution the widely held assumption that organic pesticides are more environmentally benign than synthetic ones. All pesticides must be evaluated using an empirically-based risk assessment, because generalizations based on chemical origin do not hold true in all cases.”
7 Berkeley grad students commentary on the Ames study of (organic) pesticide carcinogenicity
“Until recently, nobody bothered to look at natural chemicals (such as organic pesticides), because it was assumed that they posed little risk. But when the studies were done, the results were somewhat shocking: you find that about half of the natural chemicals studied are carcinogenic as well.
This is a case where everyone (consumers, farmers, researchers) made the same, dangerous mistake. We assumed that “natural” chemicals were automatically better and safer than synthetic materials, and we were wrong. It’s important that we be more prudent in our acceptance of “natural” as being innocuous and harmless.”
8 Synthetic vs Natural pesticides
“They found that about half of natural chemicals tested positive for carcinogencity, the same proportion as the synthetic chemicals. Fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices contained their own pesticides that caused cancer in rodents. The toxins were found in apples, bananas, beets, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, grapes, melons, oranges, parsley, peaches — the list went on and on.
We have estimated that on average Americans ingest roughly 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides and their breakdown products. Americans eat about 1,500 mg of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than the 0.09 mg they consume of synthetic pesticide residues.
“Everything you eat in the supermarket is absolutely chock full of carcinogens,” Dr. Ames told me. “But most cancers are not due to parts per billion of pesticides. They’re due to causes like smoking, bad diets and, obesity.”
The paper discussed in the above piece
9 Study on pesticide levels in food
“The California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) announced that once again, the majority of produce it tested annually had little or no detectable pesticide residues and posed no health risk to the public. 95 percent of all California-grown produce, sampled by DPR in 2013, was in compliance with the allowable limits.”
10 Organic pollutes ground water more than conventional
Above discussed paper (PDF)
11 A 2012 analysis of more than 100 studies of farming methods across Europe
“Getting the same unit production from organic farming tended to lead to “higher ammonia emissions, nitrogen leaching and nitrous oxide emissions.”
And while organic farming tends to use less energy, it also leads to “higher land use, eutrophication potential” — that’s the dead zones mentioned above — “and acidification potential per product unit.”
The meta-review (discussed above).
12 Nature news article on yields in organic farming
“Crop yields from organic farming are as much as 34% lower than those from comparable conventional farming practices, the analysis finds. Organic agriculture performs particularly poorly for vegetables and some cereal crops such as wheat, which make up the lion’s share of the food consumed around the world.
Cereals and vegetables need lots of nitrogen to grow, suggesting that the yield differences are in large part attributable to nitrogen deficiencies in organic systems, says Seufert.”
13 Article on the unsustainability of organic farming
“In recent decades, conventional agriculture has become more environmentally friendly and sustainable than ever before. But that reflects science-based research and old-fashioned technological ingenuity on the part of farmers, plant breeders, and agribusiness companies, not irrational opposition to modern insecticides, herbicides, genetic engineering, and “industrial agriculture.”
14 Searching for the roots of organic agriculture
15 Wikipedia on organic farming
“Depending on whose definition is used, organic farming uses fertilizers and pesticides (which include herbicides, insecticides and fungicides) if they are considered natural (such as bone meal from animals or pyrethrin from flowers), but it excludes or strictly limits the use of various methods (including synthetic petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides; plant growth regulators such as hormones; antibiotic use in livestock; genetically modified organisms; human sewage sludge; and nanomaterials.)”
17 Cult of Dusty “I love Monsanto”
18 Discussion (with more linked sources) on myths about Monsanto
19 Study about the farmer suicides in India
20 Article on myths such as sterile seeds, suing farmers and more
21 About corporate funded studies — can we trust the research?
22 View from an Iowa farm: In choosing seeds, ‘I’m no pawn of Monsanto’
23 Addressing questions about the views portrayed in the film Food Inc
24 Monsanto’s response to Food Inc
26 The Promise of GMOs: Conservation Tillage and What is No-Till?
27 Why we will need genetically modified foods
28 Realclearscience — article criticising claims by Whole foods
“Whole Foods — the most (in)famous face of the organic industry — maintains on its website a list created by the Organic Trade Association called the “Top 10 Reasons To Go Organic” Many of the statements are misleading or completely false.”
29 A column on the marketing tactics of organic farming
“Tens of millions of organic marketing dollars flow annually to activist organizations such as the Environmental Working Group which spread misinformation and fear. Unsupported, provably counterfactual claims are so habitual to the industry that they are even included in official statements: “Not only is organic safer, healthier and more nutritious,” claims the Organic Consumer Association in testimony to USDA, but buying organic will “reduce food-borne illness and diet-related diseases.
The Organic Seal does not and cannot signify any health or safety criteria whatsoever. It merely certifies that products were produced using less modern inputs.
“Let me be clear about one thing,” said USDA Secretary Dan Glickman when organic certification was being considered. “The organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.”
Yet USDA’s own research shows consumers buy higher priced organic products because they mistakenly believe them safer and more nutritious.
The science is clear on this point: As numerous studies, USDA monitoring, and a massive “meta-analysis” recently conducted at Stanford University confirm, organic foods are no more nutritious, nor do they carry any fewer health risks, than conventional foods. In fact, a good case could be made that conventional food may be considerably safer.”
