There are so many reasons to grow our food organically it would take a much longer piece than this article to go into all of them. However, let's just look at a few.
The Health of the Grower is at Stake
A few years ago, Rodale Institute discovered that small farmers, most of them family farmers who had inherited their land and their occupations, were sick. Even more worrisome, their families were sick also. The reason? They were not only eating foods grown with the heavy chemical inputs required to remain competitive, especially with the big corporate farmers, but they were living in the environment where all these chemicals were permeating the air and the soil. If you are a gardener, you want to be healthier because you grow your own foods, not being made sick by doing so.
It's a More Scientific Way to Deal with Pests
An early organic gardener, Sir Albert Howard, said that a pest attack was how he knew where to improve the fertility of his soil. What needed to be fixed was the soil, not the predators. This is not just pie-in-the-sky thinking. Try it! You’ll be surprised. It makes sense from a scientific standpoint. When you kill the pests, you also kill the good guys, the beneficial predators that kill the pests. Healthy people will not get sick when they are exposed to the same infecting agents as those who are not strong. The same is true with plants. Keep your plants healthy, and the pests won't damage them.
What About Weeds?
Same thing! A week is not very different from a pest. A soil scientist can tell what the soil needs simply by looking at what weeds are growing in it. Don't fight the weeds; you’ll lose! They grow for several reasons–the first one to cover soil that's vulnerable to erosion. Nature wants the soil covered. So cover it with a mulch! Another reason weeds grow in your garden is that because of the kind of plant they are, they are going to down to subsoil for fresh minerals when the topsoil runs out of them. You can fix that with composting. However, it's sometimes a good idea to leave a few to open up the soil to help your vegetables. Also, earthworms will grow better in such an environment. If you’re afraid they’ll steal nutrients from your plants, then you need to do better by your plants–your soil is not fertile enough for vegetables. Pay attention to the weeds. Give your soil the attention it needs and the weeds will not come around.
Food Quality
We've had enough food scares in recent years to send us scurrying to grow our own. The quality of the food we eat and its safety are the reasons most of us grow our own. Anyone who has grown a tomato organically doesn't need to be convinced. Ambrosia! Supermarkets will go out of business if more people enjoy that experience. And tomatoes are just the beginning. Nothing beats the fresh taste of vegetables and fruits straight from your own organic garden. It's not just the fact that they are picked and eaten at the best possible moment; it's also because the kind of vegetables you can grow in your own garden are different. The vegetables grown commercially must take into account shelf-life, but if you grow your own, that consideration doesn't enter into the equation. A common reaction: “I haven't tasted food like this since I was a child.” More than 30 studies have compared the nutrient content of organic crops as compared to conventional ones. The overall result: organic crops rank higher in nutritional qualities.
The Security of Knowing Where the Food Comes From
We don't know where the food we get in the market comes from! A group of agriculturists went Central America a few years ago on a commission from the US Agriculture Department to assist farmers but also to evaluate the foods that were being shipped to other countries including the United States. When they looked at melons being grown for purposes of shipping to other countries, they observed that the chemical inputs were so intense that the melons could “glow in the dark.” We don't want to eat that kind of food because we know that the consequences will be bad. We've read many stories in recent years about the flimsiness of the regulations on foods coming into our country, and we have little confidence that the food we eat will not make us sick–seriously so. How many melons have we eaten from countries with little or no regulation on quality that probably fit the description of the Central American fruit? The solution? Simple. Let's grow our own and learn to do it with no chemical inputs.
By TTS Cofounder Botanical Chef Omid Jaffari
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