We're often given this image of organic food as being all that is right with the food industry, while factory farms are all that is wrong with the food industry, but are the two really so separate? Our research has uncovered an intimate connection between the two.
Organic farms are prohibited from using synthetic fertilizers, and instead must rely on natural sources. While there's a variety of options, one of the cheapest and most abundant sources of organic fertilizer is animal manure. Organic food is big business now, and there's little concern for where the fertilizer comes from, so long as it's cheap. While it's not true for every single organic product, many, if not most, use manure from factory farms to fertilize their crops.
Many people will look at this and say, manure from factory farms is full of antibiotics and hormones, how can it be considered organic? Well, the US Department of Agriculture, the ones who make the rules about what "organic" means, doesn't seem to care about synthetic chemicals in fertilizers. They even recently allowed for the antibiotic tetracycline to be used directly in organic apples and pears [link].
Studies have shown that plants absorb the chemicals from the fertilizers, and the exact same poisons used to increase production in factory farms are found within organic produce [link]. Many choose organic produce because they believe it to be separate from the systems that exploit animals, but when one starts to dig deeper, it appears the organic industry is very much dependent upon the very systems it was originally intended to rise above.
Comments
its all a racket
Grow your own veggies as much as you can, it seems to be the only choice we have to eat healthy right now
Secondary Confirmation
A mother of a friend works in the fertilizer industry, and had told me the same thing for years. She says it all goes into the same pile, and gets put into different bags. There is no way to tell which is which, conventional manure and organic manure. It is a lie, organic manure.
contaminated manure
wow. Manure has been used as a fertilizer for so long that it never occurred to me to wonder if it was still a good source. When I had my "organic" backyard garden, my friend and I used manure. (!!!!!!!)
But isn't it so that if the soil were not depleted then it would be fertile and not require fertilizer? That if we rotated crops as used to be done the plants themselves would nourish the soil? Or if we planted in areas that have not been used for gardens for a long time the soil there would be fertile on its own?
This is a more complex issue than I ever realized.
Blessings,
Astreia
Industrialized agriculture
Industrialized agriculture pretty much requires fertilizer, and that's how the vast majority of our food is grown. Crop rotation can only do so much. Our farming methods also ruin the local ecosystems and disrupt the balance of the Planet, wether or not they're organic. It also contributes to the dead zones in our oceans.
Dead zones
Dead zones in our oceans? I know there are areas in the oceans where mother earth is trying to metabolize the plastic, and areas where sonar is being used and deafening animals who use sound to navigate, and area where they are still doing "testing" - but what are the dead zones due to agriculture? Is it from the chemicals washing into the ocean from the agricultural and meat-farming industries? Or is this something I know nothing about? Can you give us more information?
Blessings,
Astreia
Basicly, all the nutrient
Basicly, all the nutrient runoff from farms, along with all the other crap dumped into our water supply, is washed out into the oceans where it creates huge algal blooms. This sucks all the oxygen out of the water, and kills off large amounts of marine life. It's been happening in many different places, though for the most part it's being ignored.
Thank you
Thank you for enlightening me on this. I've been concerned about the groundwater, but I didn't know about the algal blooms.
Blessings,
Astreia