Organic Farming Is Not Sustainable

Centuries of real science has determined that plants need nitrogen phosphorous, and potassium in order to prosper. In my view, the most “organic” way of providing these nutrients, if they are not already present in proper quantities in the soil, it to apply pure nitrogen phosphorous, and potassium to them. Adding any other ingredients along with them is not only wasteful, but often quite dangerous.

"I’m amazed that many conservatives don’t see what’s coming with chemical/industrial farming."

What comes is food, prosperity, and efficient use of resources. It's quite difficult to live and raise a family on five acres and a mule.

Nobody said that and no sense getting so defensive. We just heard how healthy and sustainable organic farming was when in reality it is simply expensive and unproductive. Agribusiness can feed the world if the gummit will get out of the way.

Pray America wakes up

“At least we had a shot of living like the Amish with organics.”

The Amish in east central Illinois are tending toward renting their land to conventional farmers and working in small local industries such as furniture building, producing kitchen cabinets, etc.

“Organic farming” - everything it produces is almost rotten and full of bugs.

“Many years ago, a reporter asked a scientist what people did prior to synthetic fertilizers.”

I suspect your “scientist” did not farm prior to synthetic fertilizers. Although farms cropping was diversified (animals, multiple crop varieties), there was never enough manure to fertilize much of the crop land. Crop rotation helped, but mostly yields were really poor.

“They have no problem doing away with all family-owned farms.”

Who has no problem with “doing away” with family farms?

And BTW. You don’t think family farms use fertilizer? Pesticides? Herbicides? They do if they want to have a large enough yield to make money. Or, they can “go organic” and sell their meager crops for 4 times what “non-organic” farms do, to some poor sap who thinks he/she will be more healthy and live forever.

So, do tell. What’s coming with chemical/industrial farming?

We have a small organic farmers market every Saturday right down the street from us. I stopped once. Everything looked horrible and I didn’t buy a thing.

What comes is food, prosperity, and efficient use of resources. It's quite difficult to live and raise a family on five acres and a mule.

I did not say five acres and a mule.

You can farm organically on more than 5 acres. A small business can farm many more than five acres.

Once a farming operation gets very large, i.e., into thousands of acres, it tends to be tempted to start a) borrowing money and b) using the materials, equipment and practices that the salesman brings to him.

This is the tie in with globalism, a.k.a., financial elites, a.k.a., new world order.

Top top few businesses in the agribusiness space control the direction of agribusiness in terms of materials and practice.

Much of what we eat is what makes us sick, especially when combined with a sedentary lifestyle, which, of course, is also promoted by the very same new world order.

The "secret" about food is "locked away" in the best restaurants of the world. Talk to any world class chef at length about food - then go work your way up the fine dining industry, and work your way up through their kitchens. They all know about product quality. If the quality of their meals suffers, word quickly spreads and their restaurant goes out of business.

Conservatives who want to rah-rah cheer about the great American agribusiness either a) have no clue about what quality food is or b) they know about it, and choose to promote agribusiness to the "sheeple", poor conservatives who have no clue about product quality. That's the essence of what new world order is. They think that we're quickly running out of land, so most of the sheeple will simply have to eat food where productivity gains came from cutting corners. A perfect example is beef production on feed lots versus pasturing. The supermarket gets the crappy feed lot beef. The top restaurants never ever buy the crappy supermarket beef. The best beef is routed to the best restaurants and high-end supermarkets where the elites and their staff shop. The digestive process of cattle is such that grazing is their natural process of eating. Feed lots are an unnatural way of living for cattle; crammed in like that they get sick. Antibiotics are then used to keep them from getting sick.

A great example is wine. The best wineries in France know that if you have less grapes on a vine, more flavor and, incidentally, nutrients, will wind up in each grape, with layers of complexity to the flavors. Americans are obsessed with crop yield, so they push the grape yield per vine as high as they can. This results in a wine that just does not have as good a flavor, call it simple, one-dimensional, etc. Then, we try to get "scientific" and find ways to push flavors way high; shortcuts to avoid limiting the yield. We typically wind up with artificial-tasting gaudy things without the subtle complexities that make a wine most pleasurable. We try to turn an art into science, and it shows. We wind up with robotic sort of simpleton wines.

Now we get to my field: computers. It should be robotic, scientific, right ? We should be great at that. And we are in the lead, no doubt. But because of our rigorous, rigid science ? No, because a very tiny percentage of our population is extremely smart. And our smart computer people - (this brings to mind Bode Miller, who famously won by skiing basically out of control, while his European opponents, God love them, kept trying for ever more precision) - our "geniuses" have a strong streak of independence, which is really essential to effective use of "genius". Rather than robotic followers, they will "think outside the box". This of course lets them break out of "local" solution "realms" imposed by doing things the way "we've always done them". That's wonderful, except usually such independent thinkers are squashed by the organizations they work for (just imagine the productivity if they were not). Instead, what we see mostly is Wall Street pump and dump schemes whenever any new tech company comes along where the owners give in to them, which is all too common. Very few companies with big potential stay private. Thus we have public companies that are essentially one website being valued in the tens of billions. We lead the field, but far less than we actually could ! But since public awareness of this opportunity cost is neatly avoided, few realize our lost potential.

All across the heartland, the cities are sprawling forth suburbs that push out into what was rural land where beef was pastured and crops were grown. I see it every year in Sussex county, NJ. More farms are turned into housing developments. Once that happens, it's rather expensive to buy all the houses and turn the land back into a farm; it basically never happens. The local municipality gets a TON more taxes from housing than from farms.

The other import facet of agribusiness being easily controlled by globalist elite finance is the same concept they always use: business consolidation and monopoly, actually oligopoly (a few large firms that monopolize an entire market).

The family farm is constantly pushed and tempted to grow ever larger to compete.

It's EASY to push this if you cycle prices between high and low for the products farmers produce. Globalist elite finance IS the commodities markets, so they quite easily move prices higher or lower to suit their needs.

The salesmen and bankers recommend - buy this big piece of equipment like your neighbor did. But I don't have the cash. No problem, we'll arrange financing. You'll plant so much more acreage. I need to buy the land; I don't have the cash to buy all the seed and fertilizer I'll need. No problem, financing.

Pretty soon the "family farm" has swallowed up all their neighbors and is farming 100,000 acres. The farmer is "rich", though he is constantly financing his operations. He starts to participate in other financier operations: crop insurance and futures markets, to mitigate his risks. He's more than happy to lobby Washington DC to keep his "farm subsidies" in place; he needs to make every dollar he can. He's happy to support exporting his food - especially if that causes the domestic market price of his products to go up. He's happy to support using his products to make ethanol to use as fuel - especially if that results in higher domestic food prices. Higher domestic food prices mean he can sell his products for more.

International financial elites profit through both feast and famine: when crop output soars, prices tumble and it's farm consolidation time. When there's famine, commodity prices soar, and the large consolidated operations get along fine, even continuing to consolidate. The financial elites have made themselves middlemen between farmer and the consumer's table, giving themselves virtually complete control over both.

At this point - the now consolidated larger "family farmer" is trapped into putting into his soil anything that the salesmen-bankers tell him to, since he can make so much more profit in good years - but he can incur so much more loss in bad years. If today's government should make that little extra push it would need to become totalitarian - he'd be told to support the totalitarian regime - and he would. Otherwise, he'd lose his little farm "empire", which, of course, is not such a great empire when you consider the debt, expenses and risks that he has.

NJ used to be a beautiful farmland, now it's a cleanup site.

Big business does not care about poisoning people. In NJ we've seen this time and time and time again.

We have some town names that are practically synonymous with cleanup site, with many, many, many sick and dead people in the wake of "progress".

The company packs up after decades of profitable running and leaves, a superfund is created, a final writeoff made, the massive new regulations come out of it that make it impossible for small businesses to operate (when small businesses were NOT the polluters), the multinational original polluters just set up shop elsewhere in a new unsuspecting town. Not only that, but the financial elites are soon in the cleanup business, raking in huge profits as the funds are dispensed to do the remediation work.

And after all the regulations are in place, hampering further development of all sorts of areas deemed to environmentally sensitive to develop - we have law firms in NJ proudly specializing in getting done whatever new developers want done anyway. Well, those who can afford their fees, that is.

The townsfolk in our polluted towns have to deal with the cancers, etc. They get their yards dug up and replaced with new dirt, they get a hundred thousand or so for their troubles, well, the survivors do.

The big companies of America - their boards of directors - are controlled by globalist financial elites who see a gradual poisoning of the population as a good thing, a profitable operation (making sick and then selling all sorts of other poisons to attempt to lessen the symptoms, i.e., the pharmaceutical industry) which, when the "symptom relief efforts" ultimately result in death, serves their purpose of reducing the world's population anyway. And, as usual, we see businesses whose boards are controlled by the financial elites profiting all along the way at every step.

Most of the sheeple can't see this or won't admit it, because the poisoning most of them face is slow and gradual over their lifetime and there's no clear next-day effect of what they eat. They just know when they're older that they have all kinds of health problems, can't seem to lose weight, and they take all kinds of pills.

Those who attempt to eat "real" food are not trying to "live forever". They're just trying to not eat the poisons, and trying to eat food with the naturally-occuring things in them that provide for good health. It even extends into proper cooking, which many people know nothing about (any more) - most people cook the nutrients (and flavor) right out of their food.

Organic food

So expensive that obesity will end

My long-winded response in post #29.

Stalin was a big proponent of organic farming.

organ farming?

That was Mao, who also liked organic farming.

So did Pol Pot who emptied the cities and made everyone a farmer or a soldier to watch them.

Inefficient as heck.

Poppy Cock. Pure BS. My granny and grandpa sustained just fine on their little 20 acre farm. Only a fool would use just manure compost.

Growing your own food is a heck of a lot better for you and the envioronment than the typical factory farm.

My mother in law planted a garden and canned her winter food almost all her life. She lived to be 95. Didn’t get sick till she quit gardening.

Stalin was a big proponent of organic farming.

That's an association fallacy, a type of ad hominem fallacy, akin to "reductio ad Hitlerum"; let's call it "reductio ad Stalinum".

A policy is not proven wrong or bad based on the fact that Stalin - or anyone in particular - supported the policy.

Conversely, a policy is not proven right or good based on the fact because someone of good reputation supported the policy.

Your wine example is perfect. Sure, lower yields of grapes on the vine can lead to better wines. Wines that are out of the price range of what most people can afford. My wine “sweet spot” is about 10 bucks a bottle. I enjoy it. Is it the worlds greatest wine? Why Hell No. But there is no way in hell I would drink a 100 dollar bottle of Bordeaux for my primary wine. Would I like too. Maybe, probably not. I would feel guilty about spending that much on something that is pleasurable but in the end, ends up in the toilet.

Same with food. Food has to be grown for the masses too. I can’t go to Frank Stitts restaurant for breakfast, lunch and supper. Maybe you can.

It’s a question of how far do we go to boost yields.

There’s nothing wrong with an everyday wine and a special wine.

The prices of high-end wines are pushed ridiculously high, as are the prices for art, houses, antique cars, rare books, cigars, etc.

You’ll notice the globlist banking family elites have an incredible fixation on such things, which are a staple of their typical investment portfolio.

Just take some good auction houses and throw in hundreds of posers with a lot of money and empty morals, and you’ve got the makings of a hot market. The elites are very wise to this fact and very much appreciate the investment aspects of the “finer things in life”, where the contents of their homes can be sold for a fortune to quickly tranlate into cash, inherited, donated, insured against loss, etc.

Back on the subject at hand, if we boost yields naturally, it is wise and efficient.

When we start to hybrid, we should take care to not go wrong with our breeding. There is such a thing as causing a problem for ourselves after we breed plants or livestock that have serious problems; call it overbred, misbred, whatever.

When we start cloning and manipulating DNA in the lab or using complex chemical formulations as fertilizer or pesticide, we’re going even farther afield where we don’t know the complete and total effects we are having.

I love how those who do not work in a particular field of science, and have basically no detailed knowledge of it, jump up and down and scream about how safe the science is and how much the scientists in that field know and can be trusted.

Then, when you read the firsthand research in the field, the word unknown pops up all over the place. The actual scientific research says that they don’t know far more than than they do know. But somehow the six o’clock knews translates their research for public consumption as “they know everything and this is as safe as riding a bike”.

We wind up producing great plants that make freakishly large produce, have skin that’s so hard no bug can eat through it, etc., but we could be creating problems in the ecosystem and problems in our food where the full effect won’t materialize for decades, not to mention flat taste. Flat taste is typically what the American palate desires, out of habit. We tend to eat large quantities and eat fast, like a pig in a trough. We don’t have time therefore to taste any subtle tastes. Certain herbs have much more flavor fresh than dried, but many Americans don’t really have this appreciation. Many of us are just not that discerning in our eating. But since the food really doesn’t “pack a punch” of flavor, the “full” sense is not signalled in the brain, and the yearning for more flavor keeps us shovelling food in our mouth. Braised beef is my pet peeve. Most Americans simply do not use STOCK when they cook, they braise something like beef in water. This cooks OUT much of the flavor - and as any good chef will say, also nutrients - from the beef into the water. Stock is where we take bones and scraps and boil them with vegetables and herbs, extracting everything we can from them. What a powerful thing stock is. To braise, we brown the beef to form a sealing layer on the outside so as it heats the juices remain inside. And we then cook it in stock - which cooks IN the flavor of the stock into the beef. At the end, one can reduce the stock even more until it is concentrated and thick. WOW ! You wind up with a meal where a little bit of that beef with its sauce - and you feel full. And like you ate a vitamin tablet. It’s not expensive, in fact its cooking for the CHEAPER cuts of meat, which become fork tender as the slow cooking breaks down the tough fibers of the meat. You eat like a king, but on the cheap because you did things correctly. Your body gets the “full” signal and you stop wanting to keep shoving carbohydrates down your gullet. So many people just shove potatoes or pasta down, never really being satisfied. We are told that fat is our enemy - when really carbs are our enemy. The fats, on the other hand, metabolize in our body such that they yield things essential to good health. And with proper cooking, fats (not huge amounts, for example, fats other than butter are typically eliminated from sauces) are a key part of triggering the “full” signal to the brain. Voila, we’re eating less in total.

Vegetables - we tend to overcook, and we tend to not select them very well. We look for size and color, even if they are obviously freakishly artificial looking. Invariably we wind up with vegetables that don’t taste very good. What really taught me was when our garden as a kid I ate some spinach right in the garden. It was ridiculously good, shockingly good. Raw spinach. I never was in love with spinach prior to that. It was the 70s, we bought it frozen or in a can. Flat, bitter, really nasty. After eating organically grown fresh young spinach, wow.

Back to our “science” - we see this all the time with our “science”. We’re producing a product like crazy for a few decades, generating billions in sales, then we finally admit that we’ve been causing problems all along.

Many of these problems are very subtle, and it’s not the DIRECT effects that are a big problem, it’s the effects of those effects, and the effects of those resulting effects, in a chain reaction.

A great example is our immune system. It’s just now that everyone is getting into probiotics. They never, ever in all my school career ever said anything about gut flora. I was shocked to find out we have have little microbes in our gut. Not to mention that they attack each other, and some are “good guys” and some are “bad guys”. Our FOODS AND MEDICINES both have an effect on these microbes, including upsetting the balance of good to bad, up to even basically wiping them out.

Will we immediately die when our gut flora are not in a good balance ? Nope. We can live for decades.

Will we have health problems if our gut flora are not in a good balance ? Yup.

Will we have any clue that the root of the problems is gut flora related ? Nope, sorry, we’ll be mystified. They won’t even tell us, for example, if we have a problem that’s coming from inflammation. Inflammation, what’s that ? Rather than the doctor repetitively asking why, finding out a cause, asking why again, etc., until he gets to the root cause. The doctor sees symptoms, prescribes the pill he’s supposed to for those symptoms.

My ex worked at a restaurant. The restaurant was owned by a woman who had packed it in at the height of her career as an executive at a large, multinational healthcare firm. Why did she pack it in ? She found the firm had technology that would be a very cheap and effective solution for diabetics - and the firm purposely squashed the technology. The last thing they wanted to do was anything resembling a cure for diabetes. Anyone in high level jobs in the healthcare industry and food industry would be blowing their career if they don’t go with the flow. Just look at the side effects of medicines that are noted right in the advertisements for the medicines. It’s so bad it’s comical - why would I take a pill to help me quit smoking if there was a chance I would develop suicidal thoughts and kill myself ? If I develop suicidal thoughts, I’m supposed to call my doctor ? What moronic statement. If I develop suicidal thoughts, I’m going to be tending to want to kill myself, not tending to want to save myself by calling for help.

I live in NJ. I know firsthand that big corporations, especially those that are publicly held, have zero care at all if materials in their stock seep into the ground or water and kill people years later.

Oddly enough, NJ is also the garden state. I had a garden growing up. The place grows fantastic vegetables. Of course, selling direct to the consumer, tomatoes, for example, a medium-sized one is maybe a dollar in the store. On the wholesale market, I could buy a 25-pound box for $9. At a dollar a tomato, I could make a few thousand dollars just with tiny patch of tomatoes in the yard. There’s no reason why - as much as possible - every State doesn’t grow as much of its own food as possible and sell direct farmer to consumer. Can you see the benefits, i.e., local control, aligned interests, etc., that result from that scenario ? Of course, States could export and import according to what they produce, seasons, etc. Much of the tomato crop, of course, is canned. Can you see how the financial elites would rather that NJ grow absolutely NOTHING, and rely 100% on the food markets to buy everything NJ eats ? You’d have 8.4 million people even more reliant on big corps than they already are.

Where are the beautiful open spaces in NJ ? The wealthy areas. Where are the endless housing developments and strip malls - where the sheeple live. NJ still has very good farmland left. But to keep it, the decision has to be made to develop cities and towns and reserve farmland as separate. Yes, we’d be sacrificing some profit we could make by developing the farmland. But there is an awful lot of room to double, triple, quadruple the size of towns and cities in NJ by building UP. In fact, in some of the nicest towns you see beautiful old 2,3,4 story buildings with some character. Towns have to be made nice, and people have to have jobs where they can earn.

The sprawl of housing and malls makes towns with no defined center, no sense of “town”, just endless boring houses that were built en masse by large building contractors. There’s no individuality, no character nothing interesting in any of it. Every year we are more turned into drones. There’s a lot of good folks here, but they can’t do much to stop the big money and power.

Did Monsanto fund this "study"?