From Jeff Cox

For more than three decades, I’ve tried my best to get the word out about the benefits of organic food production. Over all these years, the agribusiness line has not changed much: “Claims of organic superiority can’t be substantiated.” “If we farm organically, half the world will starve.” “Organically-grown food is more dangerous than conventionally grown food.” “Organic food is contaminated with E. coli bacteria.”

I even saw a chemical company flack drink what he said was a glass of water mixed with pesticide to prove its safety to the House Agriculture Committee. But over this time, the evidence for the actual superiority of organic food has steadily grown, and now the claims of industry seem pitiful and ludicrous. And I wonder how that guy who drank the pesticide is doing?

A telling report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has a reliable summation of the safety benefits of organic food production. Here are a few excerpts.

Cattle are ruminants naturally meant to eat grass, not grain. But most American cattle are “finished” on grain diets to add fat quickly. Virulent, disease-causing forms of E. coli develop in the stomachs of these cattle, but not in the rumens of grass-fed cattle. It’s one of the most important goals of organic beef production to keep the nutrient cycles closed, and so the animals are fed on diets of hay, grass, and silage. “It can be concluded,” the FAO said, “that organic farming potentially reduces the risk of E. coli infection.”

Two studies found that aflatoxin levels in organic milk were lower than in conventional milk. As organically raised livestock are fed greater proportions of hay, grass, and silage, there is reduced opportunity for mycotoxin contaminated feed (grain contaminated with the fungus) to lead to mycotoxin contaminated milk… Organic agriculture’s contributions to cleaner drinking water, for example in Lithuania’s Karst area, UK’s environmentally sensitive areas, and Germany’s water protection areas, and to higher weed, insect, and bird diversity and general environmental quality, are positive values appreciated by consumers… Organic farming enhances genetic biodiversity, including organisms living in the soil, wildlife, wild flora, and cultivated crops. Organic agriculture practices recover indigenous crop varieties and regenerate landscapes with distinct quality characteristics. The FAO Committee on Agriculture agreed in 1999 that properly managed organic farming contributes to sustainable agriculture and therefore has a legitimate place within the U.N.’s sustainable agriculture programs.

In Europe, where folks seem to be far ahead of the United States in implementing organic agriculture, more than 16,000 people were asked by the Eurobarometer polling organization whether they favored organic farming as a goal for the European Union’s agricultural policy. Seventy-two percent said yes.

Organic foods are far safer than conventional, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Food Additives and Contaminants. The study team included analysts from Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, and the Organic Materials Research Institute. The data covered more than 94,000 food samples taken through the 1990s and showed that about 80 percent of conventional food showed residues, but only 27 percent of organic samples did, and that multiple residues were ten times more common in conventional foods. Where residues were found in organic produce, they were at much lower levels than in the conventional foods. Why any residues at all in organic food? The research showed that some were long-banned but persistent pesticides such as DDT, some contamination occurred from pesticides that were wind-blown onto organic acres, and some conventional items were possibly mislabeled as organic.

Levels of minerals in organic produce were about twice those in conventional produce, according to a 1993 study by Bob Smith printed in the Journal of Applied Nutrition. And a recent review of all the available valid research comparing organic and conventional produce conducted by nutritionist Shane Heaton on behalf of the UK”s Soil Association concluded, “Collectively, the scientific evidence supports the view that organically produced foods are significantly different in terms of food safety, nutrient content, and nutritional value. Consumers who wish to improve their intake of minerals, vitamin C, and antioxidant phytonutrients while reducing their exposure to potentially harmful pesticide residues, nitrates, GMOs, and artificial additives used in food processing should, whenever possible, choose organically produced food.”

For years people scoffed at the idea that organic food could have more nutrients than conventional. “A plant doesn’t care where it gets its nutrients,” they’d say. “There’s no difference in the foods produced by these growing methods.” But Theo Clark, a chemistry professor at Truman State University in Missouri, discovered otherwise. Clark and his team of undergraduate students polled households in Miller, Missouri, to assess people’s expectations of organic oranges. Eighty-five percent believed that organic oranges would have a higher nutritional content than conventional oranges.

Clark then decided to analyze organic and conventional oranges’ vitamin C content because, as he told a Great Lakes Regional meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, “no one to our knowledge has thought to compare organic and conventionally grown oranges.” Conventional oranges looked great—twice the size of organic oranges. When Clark and his team used chemical isolation and nuclear magnetic resonance to determine the vitamin C content, though, the organic oranges had 30 percent more of the vitamin than the conventional oranges, even though they were half the size. How could that be? “We speculate that with conventional oranges, farmers use nitrogen fertilizers that cause an uptake of more water, so it sort of diluted the orange. You get a great big orange, but it’s full of water and doesn’t have as much nutritional value.”

I don’t think Clark’s theoretical explanation is complete. Organic crops get the nutrients they need in the amount they need at the time they need and in the form they need. Those plants are growing optimally, and whatever the biological limit on the amount of vitamin C—or other nutrients—they can produce, they are closing in on that limit.

A lot of this kind of information is finally breaking through now. Agribusiness can no longer stem the organic tide, or churn out disinformation about organics, and in many ways is starting to follow the old bromide, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” And so we have the spectacle of organic strawberries from California and Florida being sold in winter in the Northeast, grown by who-knows-who, but certified organic by Quality Assurance International.

It’s heartening, though, to an old organic hand like me to see the whole national food system beginning to move toward organic. After all, organic acres are absolutely better in terms of clean grow-power and diverse ecology than conventional acres. But the best acres are the ones close enough for me to see with my own eyes (”Eat Your View” is a popular bumper sticker in Europe), farmed by a human being I can talk to.

I most fondly remember the local farmers where I bought my eggs, bacon, and milk in Pennsylvania. And now here in California I meet the farmers at one of the many farmers’ markets in Sonoma County. We can talk about how the hens are laying, whether the early lettuce got nipped by the late frost, or how the wild turkeys scratch up the broccoli seedlings. Many of the wine grape growers I respect the most are either organic or biodynamic. Robert Sinsky makes his own compost fertilizer by the tens of tons, and so does Mike Benziger, John Williams at Frogs Leap, and the folks at Fetzer, Frey, Lolonis, and on and on.
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See also Jeff’s Wine Is Just A Beverage
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Jeff Cox is author of The Organic Cook’s Bible and The Organic Food Shopper’s Guide and lives in Sonoma County, California.
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