An apple farmer in New York has very different challenges than an apple farmer in California, for example. The downside of this decentralized approach was a lack of clarity about what "organic" meant from state to state. A movement grew to develop a national organic standard to help facilitate interstate marketing. OFPA also called for an advisory National Organic Standards Board to make recommendations regarding the substances that could be used in organic production and handling, and to help USDA write the regulations.
After years of work, final rules were written and implemented in fall Although the actual production techniques of organic food have not changed dramatically since the implementation of the national standards, "organic" now is a labeling term that indicates that food has been grown following the federal guidelines of the Organic Foods Production Act.
Companies that process organic food must be certified, too. To understand agriculture, whether organic or conventional, means understanding weeds, which some say are forcing a crossroads for farmers.
Conservationists support no-till agriculture because, among other environmental benefits, it encourages carbon sequestration—a factor in climate change. But since overturning soil helps to reduce weeds, no-till farms are vulnerable to them.
In the field that produced the hyphae and the darting spider, he had experimented with leaving plant roots in the ground after harvest to help maintain soil structure and encourage life. He used equipment to remove seeds from the plants and then let his cows graze and trample the plant material back into the soil. Like wow, what if everybody has to change? Some farmers are digging their heels further into conventional agriculture, spraying new chemicals, or even going back to tilling.
Tim Raile , a wheat farmer in Kansas, says his no-till farm worked well for about a decade, and then he noticed weeds showing resistance. He sprayed more herbicides. For now his challenge is storing his organic wheat. Having gone through several people before finding Fasteson and another farmer to take over his operation, Quinn recognizes the value—and the dearth—of qualified labor and know-how.
But with the right training for new recruits, he says, organic agriculture ultimately could help to fulfill the elusive quest for more jobs in rural America.
A conventional farm of similar size to his own typically keeps one family afloat financially, he says, with some seasonal employment opportunities; his farm supports five families year-round. With the organic sector still small by overall acreage numbers, large-scale farms like the one General Mills is transitioning may help to shift the national landscape. But you can have large-scale farms that build diversity into what they do—they just need the people to manage it. Organic certification requires a three-year rotation of crops; growing different crops each season helps to break up weed, pest, and disease cycles.
David Oien founded the company in to create that market—and the last few years have been booming, driven by the popularity of organic and plant-based foods. For Quinn, as long as consumer demand continues to grow, so too will organic cropland — along with the supporting infrastructure. On a late September night, Quinn, wearing a cowboy hat festooned with heirloom wheat, and Bailey meet for dinner at a bustling diner in Loma, a small town halfway between their farms.
More consumers, they say, need to be willing to pay more for food. All rights reserved. Environment Future of Food. We don't have enough organic farms. Why not? This article originated as part of a sponsored Future of Food series. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.
India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big Grassroots efforts are bringing solar panels to rural villages without electricity, while massive solar arrays are being built across the country.
Conversely, it would be a mistake to assume that all farmers in the global South are using organic methods, because there is evidence that pesticides banned in industrialised countries may still be available there, and there are fewer controls on the use of genetically modified organisms than are found, for example, in Europe.
Thus thinking about organic farming introduces many facets of recent interest as far as food, health, environment, and culture are concerned. It has often been observed that history reflects current concerns: the rise of the environmental movement quickly promoted work on environmental history, and globalisation has produced numerous global histories.
Given the popularity of organic food among the book-buying population, a global history of organic farming was perhaps to be expected at some point. Chapter two covers the political, intellectual and historical environment within which organic farming ideas developed. Much of the new material in them is based on the archives of the Matthaei family, at present in private hands.
Although Barton states that these papers will be deposited at St. Howard was born in , one of ten children of a substantial tenant farmer in Shropshire. Following a public school education, he studied at the Royal College of Science in Kensington and then went on to Cambridge University, where, according to Barton p. The following year, in Bombay Cathedral, he married Gabrielle Matthaei, a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, who had already published work on plant physiology in the Transactions of the Royal Society.
For the next 20 years the Howards worked at Pusa, on a wide range of agricultural questions but especially on the cultivation and breeding of wheat. Together or separately they produced, Barton tells us, 93 reports, articles and books. At Pusa he had realised that the key to healthy and productive crops was a healthy and fertile soil, but such was the specialisation and division of research work there that studies of the whole crop and its environment were impossible.
At Indore, however, he could plan and carry out the research as he wished. He had already realised that purchased inorganic fertilisers were far too expensive for most Indian farmers, and that they had too few animals to provide much manure.
He therefore set out to develop a method of composting any kind of organic material, from crop waste and weeds to fallen leaves and wood shavings, into a useful fertiliser. By the end of the s he had more or less perfected what he called the Indore Method. In The Waste Products of Agriculture: their Utilization as Humus , published in , he laid out its basic principles: essentially, the importance of mixing animal and vegetable residues, and of managing the material so that the micro-organisms that would break them down could work most effectively.
Barton devotes chapters three and four of his book to telling the story outlined in the previous two paragraphs. Chapter five is largely devoted to disproving what Barton believes to be one of the more influential and pervasive myths about Howard: that he based his ideas on the pre-modern wisdom of the East.
It was not limited to the English-speaking world. In this environment, a system that appeared to be based on traditional peasant wisdom would find ready acceptance. Rather the reverse, in fact: he suggested that the introduction of ammonium sulphate and cyanamide as nitrogen fertilizers, and copper sulphate as a fungicide, would be worthwhile and represent an improvement on then-current Indian agricultural methods.
But at the time he was writing, and engaged on the research upon which The Waste Products of Agriculture was based, Howard recognized that the average Indian farmer could not afford such purchased chemical inputs.
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