Going organic or being organic are sometimes terms in farming circle synonymous with whacky, out-moded, alternative or just plain weird thinking.

Open to debate - quantity or quality?

Since the advent of artificial, chemical fertilisers, mainstream agriculture has been dissociated from its ancient roots and cultures.

But how did humankind grow crops before the advent of huge bags of fertiliser from a factory? There are as many answers as there are methods of growing.

For plants to grow they require energy. The requirements and conditions of growth are both highly subtle and deeply complex.

But at its simplest, after any crop has been taken off the land, the soil upon which it was nourished has been depleted as a result of giving itself to the plants.

Over millennia human kind learned to nurture the soil, and treat it in such a way that it was able to recharge its fertility between crops. This required observation, trial and error – ultimately successful or else the human species would no longer be here.

As the industrial revolution gathered pace the burgeoning population began to place ever increasing demands on agriculture for food. 

During the 20th century the horror of two world wars caused a huge acceleration in the application of synthetic chemicals as fertiliser. 

Application was handsomely rewarded with quantity, and the deterioration in quality was only partially noticed, or overlooked.

Gradually however, the more observant and attuned farmers began to question the changes, and lack of fertility, and this process culminated with the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in the 1960s.

Ms Carson was a biologist who had worked her way up through the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to become chief editor of publications, before devoting herself to full-time writing.

By 1957 the US Dept of Agriculture (USDA) was proposing widespread spraying of DDT and other pesticides.

This was the trigger for Ms Carson’s work, and although she had little to do with the organic movement as such, Silent Spring was ironically the awakening for many of the power science had over nature, and its potential misuse.

At its very simplest organic agriculture is cultivation in the absence of artificial (chemical) fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.

The term ‘organic farming’ only appeared in 1940 in a book by Walter James ‘Look to the Land’. James had a farm in Kent in England, at which he had applied the theories of Rudolf Steiner, and coined the phrase from the idea of the farm being an organism.

Today the organic movement is controversial, and inevitably political. It has critics and detractors, who for one thing believe that organic farms require more land to produce the same amount of food as conventional farms.

There are arguments over ‘yield’, and whether organic farms use more or less waste (e.g. plastic packaging material) and therefore potentially use greater amounts of energy to produce food. 

An organic farm will not be releasing chemical, and potentially toxic residue, therefore almost certainly it will sustain a more diverse ecosystem, though of course that could include numbers of organisms deemed to be ‘pests’!

A number of studies have taken place over the years to determine the energy efficiency of farms, and one in 2003 by a UK Government body concluded that organic farming “can produce positive environmental benefits”.

However one universal cost all agriculture must bear is that of fuel – at least in the absence of horse or ox power.

Due to the need to keep on top of the weeds in the absence of herbicides, organic methods tend to burn more diesel in tractor hours in the paddocks – but even this is open to debate.