Organic and Economy

[willheveland]

j.luetkemeyer :

Certified organic is nothing unless the method of approach is one that mimics natural processes. In other words some people meet organic standards because they practice healthy methods of growing and raising food. Others look at the standards necessary just to be able to get the premium of the label. You can argue both sides of the table all day, but what it really comes down to is do you know how the foods your eating have been grown and raised. .

I agree. Will​

 

[Rosalind]

With respect to Bossroo's original question:

This year I'm putting some garden space into chicken feed experiments. I'm putting in quinoa and amaranth (high protein grains) along with lots of greens, beetberry, flax. Also starting some worm bins to keep up their protein, and I can collect seaweed for minerals from the local beaches, grind fishmeal for them from my weekly fishing trips. This is for layers, but I've also got some turkeys on order, so we'll see how they do. If the experiments work well, they'll be expanded for next year. The cost of seed for this project, which I am calculating will yield at most 150# feed, was about $20. But, it's still a pilot project, you know? I don't expect it to be the world's most efficient thing at this stage. I just want to see if it's possible or feasible, I can optimize costs later through other means (seed saving, supplement with drop fruit from the orchard, etc).

Ever since I started buying my own groceries, I realized that I could grow my own veggies and fruit for 1/5th the cost of buying them at the store. That's organic, vine/tree-ripened, clean, heritage breed fruits & veggies, picked by non-exploited volunteers (OK, me and DH), compared to the cost of pesticide-drenched commercial varieties picked green by someone getting $8/day and ripened in a warehouse with ethylene spray and shipped to Mall Wart. Commercial tomato cost = 5X my cost of growing an even better tomato. Easy decision. I get decent cost-effectiveness out of the layers as it stands, much cheaper to raise my own eggs (even on organic feed) than to pay $3/doz for 'em. Buggered if I know why anyone pays good money at the grocery store for veggies, when they've got a yard.

I don't really trust any commercial food processors at this point. Every day there's another Salmonella / E. coli / melamine / lead recall, and it's always flippin' HUGE because no one ever tested anything while it was still sitting on the receiving dock, they just passed it along. I realize there are some good and conscientious folks out there, but until they start policing their own or letting me inspect myself...nuh-uh, think I'll pass.

Nature may have created some nasty chemicals out there--Angel of Death mushrooms, ergot amines, botulism toxins--that doesn't mean I want the stuff sprayed all over my dinner plate. I suppose growing things "organically" seemed obvious to me simply because my Mennonite and Amish relatives have been doing it for centuries. I can see how it's difficult to understand, though, if you've been taught to farm by the agriculture colleges and from relatives who have been farming by the Better Living Through Chemistry method, and you've only ever bought your food from the store. I've had lots of people tell me that I can't possibly be a locavore in the NorthEast without getting scurvy/rickets/pellagra in winter, that humans can't survive without orange juice, all sorts of weird stuff. It helps a lot if you personally know many people who live exactly that way and are perfectly healthy and even make a decent living farming like that--if you don't have ANYONE you know who does that, then everyone acts like you're insane, and you wonder if maybe you are crazy after all. It's different when you say, "buddy, my cousin does this and it works great for him, he made (however much) last year, I'm gonna give it a try myself."

 

[redoak]

My wife and I eat organic and we feed our hens organic feed and treats. We've noticed less of a variety in the grocery store in the way of organic foods. We also discussed cutting out of our budget alot of other things before switching to non-organic. This year we are increasing the size of our garden to about 8000 sqft to help feed ourselves and our chickens.

 

[dancingbear]

Rosalind, well said! I live in an area where there are a lot of Amish and Mennonite families, and I've seen their beautiful organic farms. I used to trade organic seeds with an Amish farmer, and we had a lot of interesting discussions about things like adding minerals to the soil, water conservation, etc.

 

[luvmygirlsinAK]

Quote:
When we started eating organic foods, we quit "needing" to eat such a large amount of food, because our bodies assimilated the food so much better. Same goes for our dog. I had read the same thing applies for dogs. Being skeptical, I decided to "take the plunge" anyway, and bought the extremely expensive organic dog food. Our dog food bill actually went down because her body assimilates the food much better, and she eats waaaay less, even in the winter when temperatures reached _50 F. We started right out giving organic feed to the chickens, so we have no comparisons there, however, I can tell you about a huge comparison involving the horrible, horrible smell from chickens that we either bought, or were given to us that were eating commercial chicken feed before they came to us. Each and every time, I could hardly stand the smell from their horrendously awful smelling poop, until our organic feed went through their systems, about a week and a half to two weeks process.

The things we are doing is to build a year round greenhouse, attached to our house, and will at least grow our own animal organic wheat sprouts, just as if they were free ranging, and we also have a composting worm farm that we intend to be giving the chickens the extras from. (The worms get organic food, as well, because we eat organic.) Belonging to a co-op has been the best thing we could have ever done in order to feed our family with organic food.

Willheveland: If your organic veggies that you are growing are giving you less yield, you are doing something wrong. Try composting tea, from a worm farm. There are many ways to do organic, and it will not only increase your garden yield, but will also mean you don't crave as much food to eat at the table. The growth from the organic composting methods should cause your vegetables to grow huge and beautifully, far bigger and faster than regular gardening, if you are doing it correctly. And the taste, oh my, there is no comparison when a properly organically raised food is eaten!! Have you ever tried an organic juicing orange from a reputable organic farmer? Simply out of this world in flavor!! We're talking no comparison here to oranges grown with pesticides that have to be injected with orange food flavoring so as to disguise the awful tastes of the pesticides!!!!!!

Another reason to continue to eat organic, is examples such as my mother and other friends, who would not be able to eat oranges, or even apples because of allergies. They hadn't been able to eat them for over 20 years, until they tried organic fruits from our co-op. They were just allergic to all the pesticides, not the fruit!!! My sister-in-law used to sell berries to Smuckers. They required that she spray those berries no less than 22 times before they could be picked to sell to them. Many people don't realize that when you say 22 times, that isn't even counting that the amounts of pesticides depending on the item can be up to 40 or more types of pesticides sprayed on it.....22 times!

 

[Rosalind]

I've tried growing organic veggies with regular veggies in my garden.The organic production is a joke compared to regular.

The answer is complicated, depending on where you live and what the soil is like.

Basically, a lot of soil currently used to produce crops (including garden soils of many suburbs) is not very fertile and was never in a good climate for that purpose. The last society to try growing pumpkins and corn through repeated droughts was the Anasazi. They're all dead now for a reason, you know?

In many suburbs, all the topsoil was removed by the developer to build houses, and then back-filled with "clean fill dirt" which can be anything from broken bits of concrete to clay, but is almost universally lacking in carbonaceous matter (dead leaves, bacteria, fungi, etc.). In many parts of the Midwest, like the African savannahs, the carbon & nitrogen cycles were derived from ruminants eating and pooping out perennial grasses, and that cycle has been disrupted for so long that the soil is now a bunch of lifeless dust that suffers from erosion problems. You can grow things "non-organic" in such a soil only because you are effectively growing in a hydroponic system. Think "hydroponic system with sand/silt and extra bugs," and that is more or less what you are doing. In which case you might as well just run an organic hydroponic system--it will save you big $$$ in the long run on water, fertilizer and pesticide costs. Naturally, when you take away all the nutrients from your hydroponic solution, the plants get weak and more susceptible to disease, have poor yields.

Organic gardening relies on having awesome soil with lots of nutrients in it already, with all those nutrients running through their natural cycles via a healthy population of bacteria & fungi. Soil with lots of carbonaceous material in it holds water pretty well, and doesn't require nearly as much irrigation. Prepping soil for organic gardening is a time-consuming and often smelly process, because you need to add bacteria & fungi back into the dirt and make sure they stay--means adding a lot of poo, mulch, compost, leafmold. And then you have to do clever things to manage pests, like planting in a potager style to maximize insect predation, using row covers at the right times, creating areas to support ladybugs and mantises and so forth, setting traps out, being careful about which varieties you grow. It's not as simple as the non-organic method.

Organic gardening is one thing. It's easy enough to make these changes, because by and large home gardeners are used to having a total failure of one crop for weather reasons, and they make it up with another crop. Home gardeners can experiment in relative safety until they find the combination of management schemes that works in their particular microclimate. For monoculture farms that wish to go organic, it's a completely different situation. One failure to do something complicated is a HUGE failure and loss. As many farmers have since found out (including most of the local farmers in the NorthEast and ag. writers like Joel Salatin), monocropping is not the way to go if you want to manage your farm organically. There's risk inherent in the monocropping model, and it's far better in general to have lots of different crops going simultaneously on any farm, so that the failure of one crop is buffered by the success of a different one. However, this is not what many farmers do in practice, for a great many reasons. For a lot of reasons, I wish the monocropping model would be relegated to the scrap-heap as an untenably risky way of managing a food supply--one of those reasons being, it stands directly in the way of organic agriculture.​

 

[OrpingtonDad]

One of my son's has a severe peanut allergy. I'm not talking about a rash, but full blown anaphylactic shock from something as simple as a touch. He doesn't even have to eat a peanut, just being touched by the residue in a sensitive area (face, neck, etc..). In December 2006 one of my children was diagnosed with a rare and virulent Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. He has survived until now, and is in remission. Last week my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She is a non-smoker, and has no family history of the disease.

I am not normally the chicken little type, and I'll admit it is possible that we may have just had a horrible run of luck. However, I think I'll be paying a great eal more attention to what we eat from this point on. The USDA's own data shows that while yeilds have steadily increased over the past few decades, vitamins and minerals in crops have decreased significantly. Pesticides are measured by acceptable levels. For that matter, countries from which we import much of our produce continue to utilize chemicals that we have banned in the US, and we consume the end product.

While modern agriculture and chemicals may not have caused my families afflictions, I cannot believe it has helped. Organic may not yeild as much, and it may not solve my problems, but I think I'll be giving it a far more serious attempt from this point forward.

 

[AHappychick]

My neighbor has a son who is struggling with inoperable brain cancer. Before that they always ate healthy but not organically. In his search for all things to help his son or at least slow the cancer down After hours of talking to others, a nutritionist and countless all-nighters at the computer) he started feeding his son and his family only organic now. He talks to me sometimes knowing that I am an avid organic eater and gardener. In addition he has cut out almost all sugar from his sons diet not even fruit the closest thing he gets is red peppers and 2 Newman's own organic oreos once a week. He says even the most natural sugars are like fuel for cancer. He is doing many other things as well but after almost a year his son who was given only a few months is still alive and the cancer is not moving as quickly as they thought it would. He is convinced that the food changes have contributed to that. There are many things we cannot control in our lives and the chemicals and bad stuff we get from all sorts of environmental factors, but we can try to cut out some of it. I do that by using cleaning products like Shaklee (http://www.shaklee.net/susanbd) and eating organically in my home.

I am very sorry to hear of what you are going through that must be very scary I pray that your son stays in remission and that your wife comes through this quickly and without a lot of pain. Do you live near any transformers or anything else that makes you wonder?

 

[willheveland]

Luvmygirls and Rosalind

I really haven't done much experimenting with the organic gardening thing.I certainly don't prep my soil as you suggested.My soil at my property is terrible.I live on a hill thats mostly hardpan soil,there isn't 2 inches of topsoil on the ground.For gardening I use raised beds.I have very good soil for this.I compost,use mulch,and get my manure from a freinds hobby farm that the manure pile is over 40 years old.It's as black as potting soil.I don't buy any fertilizers or pesticides.If something is on the plants I dust them with ag lime instead of things like Seven.Last year my main squeeze and I were kidding each other about the organic thing.She's for it and I'm skeptical.We bought some Burpee seeds including organic ones to be planted in a separate bed to do a side by side comparison.We just noticed less fruit blossoms on the organic.The foliage was comparible but the hybrid seeds had at least 4x the blossoms.There is no doubt that the consept of organic would be healthier.I just don't like paying the price on the tag because of the organic label.To me it's like buying used cars with low miles on them from people who have disconnected the odometer.I know that not all people will do this but if there is a market for cars with low miles people will find ways to get it.I feel the same about the organic label.
If a person selling organic meat comes down with a sick animal,how do we know he didn't administer antibiotics to get the animal to processing in order not to lose money.
If they are raising organic chickens and 10 out of 50 become ill.Will they seperate the 10 or will the add antibiotics to the water of all 50.It comes down to the individuals.That's mainly what I question.That's why I'm alittle skeptical.I have more respect for the natural than organic label. thanks for your reply Will
(my main squeeze in our garden)

 

[Bossroo]

I too have a peanut alergy... even the smell of it makes me want to puke. No one in my family has a peanut alergy. My 72 year old cousin was the picture of health. In high school, he played linebacker in football... beat out Dick Butkus for the position. He was an engineer designing highways and bridges. He also was an avid health nut all of his life, excersed daily and ate organic long before the organic craze as he grew his own on his gentleman's farm. Last Feb. 2 , my cousin was rushed to the hospital with what he thaught was a heart attack. After extensive tests they said his heart was healthy, however they found that he had stomach ulcers and cancer of the stomach. No one in our family has ever had any type of ulcer much less a cancer. The doctors had to remove his complete stomach and 3 feet of intestines. He then developed an infection at the surgery site and was put into induced coma. He died on Feb. 12 eve. I miss him dearly.