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Tias posted:I live in a well developed farming nation (Denmark), and it's my clear impression that organic tastes better and doesn't contain herbicides that are toxic to humans - but itt a lot of respected posters claim the label is bullshit? Yay, farming and food production chat! I work in Brussels as an agri-lobbyist and crop protection is among my policy briefs  Organic is on occasion much more toxic and hideous for the environment than synthetic compounds are. The best example is copper, which is one of the main fungicides used in EU organic agriculture (and probably US too), especially in organic vineyards, as a fungicide. Copper, unlike synthetics, does not disperse or dissolve naturally in the soil and therefore poses a long-term threat to soil health. In some areas, heavy copper use has rendered farmland unusable to anything but organic crop production as converting it back to pasture for cows or sheep would be too toxic for the animals - the copper would get into the grass and poison the animals. There's so much utterly nonsensical hysteria in Europe at the moment regarding synthetic pesticides that it drives me mad - organic uses similar compounds but they just say it's better "because it's natural". Well, so is the anopheles mosquito but no-one likes them, or septorium/brown rust wheat infections that cause fusarium molds. All pesticides are toxic - they have to be in order to work - but the organic ones (if you were so dumb as to drink a pint of them) will kill you just as fast as the synthetics. Probably a lot faster actually. Don't ever believe that "organic" is the same thing as "no pesticides" - they've marketed that very cleverly but there's no basis in fact for about 99.5% of EU organic agriculture. They just use the same stuff but different, and those pesticides are nearly always made by the same companies that the anti-pesticide crowd now hates so much. Mind you, there's a good number of studies that show organic to be better for the direct agri-environment (if we discount the whole displaced-extra-production-due-to-lower-yields discussion) and that's probably a reason to buy it, but there's absolutely no sense in buying organic because you don't want or like pesticides. Marenghi posted:Why is the discussion of subsidies limited to industrial farms. Where I live small farmers are entitled to subsidies just as much as large farms. In the EU larger farmers get more subsidies because the basic payment is per hectare; the more land you have, the more subsidies you get. I know the US has switched to an insurance-based model of 'protecting' farmers, but I'm not too familiar. Junior G-man fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jun 13, 2016 |
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Jun 13, 2016 16:34
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Tias posted:I guess I've been deceived, then. It's just, looking at the public discourse here, it's generally perceived as objective truth that organic produce is less toxic( being made without glyphosate, for example), taste better and is better for the earth. Don't get me started on the EU glyphosate discussion. It is without a doubt the most moronic EU-based discussion of the year. By a long margin.
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Jun 13, 2016 21:03
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