I really began thinking about this in Brazil. The people we met were lucky to have enough rice and beans to eat; I can't imagine them ever trying to afford organic. Since we've returned I've felt guilt every time I buy organic. I want the best for my family, but how will the people we met ever afford the best for their families? It's just not fair. :(

Sometimes I feel like if anything ever comes between dh and I, it will be this stupid farm. I so wish he would sell and move to a small organic farm. The stupid sprayer guy is here. We couldn't play outside yesterday, can't play outside today. This morning at 7:30 he came to my door and said "you should probably get those chickens in the coop and keep them out of the cornfield. You'll want to keep them out for awhile" Great. So I had to get 20 friggin chickens back into the coop who did NOT want to go there. Then, he didn't even know HOW long I needed to keep them off. "well, with Round-up it's 30 days, but with this stuff I don't know" WTH????? Oh, and this cornfield is about 100 feet from my kid's swingset, about 20 feet from my garden! :mad: :mad:
I'm so mad. I was blubbering like a fool this morning, poor Lydia was all freaked out.

Well two things... I would move if I were you. It sounds like that is what you are leaning towards too... I mean it must be illegal what they are doing over there... you are SO close!

And the other thing... I don't think that commercially we will be able to support everyone to eat organic. I really don't. At some point there is going to HAVE to be a major trend of families bartering and trading for food again. Growing things, stocking up, canning, and whatever else we will need to do to make this planet work. I garden... I have exactly 20 by 40 feet of full sun land... and I have torn out ALL the sod and put in a garden. I have herbs, edible flowers, picking flowers, and veggies. Even a couple of fruits... AND I have four hanging baskets or large pots on the back poarch... all with food or something else I would BUY at the store. If everyone that could would do this I think that we could easily start sending enough food to other countries that can not grow a garden outside.... and when famon came (usually because of drout and will happen often with the weather changing I am sure) we would be able to send 10 time more relief... not only that but we would be able to store things during the winter, and use ALL of what we have wasted for compost...

YES... the world could be sustainable... but it is going to take such a huge change in focus for most of the world (mainly the "developed countries") that I am honestly not sure if it comes in time... but I would be happy to be a one woman revolution if I needed... my passion will make it through armagedon! lmao!

My dream is to be compleatly sustainable... to make compost to fertilize my garden, to have two cows for meat and milk, to have chickens for eggs, to have a large garden to grow everything I need and learn how to preserve it all... including medicinal herbs and flowers that I would use for teas and tinctures... to learn to barter with neighbors and friends to get other things: say one person has a daliah farm... she barters during harvest time for canned goods from other families... she lives through winter, and we get cut flowers which make our lives brighter. You always have more than you need when gardening... it is not an exact science... I mean, besides the technologies that I have come to love (computer, running water, eletric lights, and a few others that I know my life would be more difficult with out) I would disapear from this world and live in a little house.

(I hope I am not being offensive here) I admire the Amish SO MUCH... but my dh would have nothing of it. And we are not religious. I want to start an Amish like community that is filled with less religious but commited people. I want to live in a house, not a dirt hut... but I also want to have a HUGE field of corn or salad greens or hell ANYTHING, in which I use to trade for others passions... and a sewing circle in which we make blankets and clothes for our families (with ele of course :) I want to make things to last as long as possible) and I want to teach my dd to cook from scratch and admire the art of food. OMG I want this so badly that I may end up giving up my families home for it.

Love Val

The sad thing is, Val, it's our **** farm. My name is on the LLC too, even though I have nothing to do with it. I know dh will never, never leave. He would never go organic. Too much trouble when the farm is this big (700 milking) and he says he wouldn't enjoy a small farm. Not progressive enough for him. :rolleyes: I hate it here. I hate everything about it. I want to change my attitude, I want to make the best of it, but things like this happen, and I just get so pissed off. And I have probably a good 40 more years of living like this.
Can ya tell I'm feeling a wee bit bitter today?

And about the food, people are just too **** lazy to do all that. Not the people in Brazil, they work their asses off, but the people here, who have all kinds of resources available to them, they'd rather sit on their ass on the couch and watch TV while they eat their Doritos and drink their Budweiser. :mad:

Hi Renee!
You know I could sit down and write about this for hours, but right now I don't have much time (just grabbin a bite for lunch and headed back outside.) But I wanted to ask what your sprayer-guy put down today. Was it 2-4-D? If it was then you want to treat it the same as you would a roundup application and keep critters and kids away from the area at least 30 days. Have you had it spayed before? It will not be good for your garden, at all.
Oh, and YES, we can feed the world organically, it just takes time and patience....2 things Americans have learned to live without. See my sig...When everything is gone people will stop and say "how stupid we were to poison the Earth with all those chemicals." But probably nothing will happen until nothing can be done. We want everything More, Faster, Bigger, Better, Brighter, Easier, and we want it now....without regaurd as to HOW it gets to us or HOW it was made. So many people are SO far removed from how basic needs are met when you hae to do things yourself. I'm not sure how to change that. :(

I would highly recommend reading the works of John Jeavons. His "Grow Biointensive" works address this very issue. He asserts, I believe he is correct, that not only CAN we feed the entire world organically, but that organically is the ONLY WAY that we can hope to feel the worlds growing population.

It is very convincing work with very easy and practical applications, along with 30+ years of practice and research behind it. DH has been studying biodynamic farming, from which Jeavons' methods are based on. We are doing our garden this year using his books How to Grow More Vegatbles* * than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagin and Backyard Homestead Mini-Farm .

You can also read about his work at www.growbiointensive.org
from the website:
sustainable mini-farming meets these goals. It is currently being used in 110 countries, proving its effectiveness for meeting the needs of individuals in a wide range of climates, soils and cultures. With "GROW BIOINTENSIVE" sustainable mini-farming, a farmer can produce 2 to 6 times the yield compared to commercial agriculture, while using 67%-88% less water, 99% less energy and 50%-100% less purchased organic fertilizer per unit of yield compared with commercial agriculture. It is a method that allows gardeners and farmers to transform scarcity into abundance.

HTH!

{{{HUGS}}} Renee. A good question. The only reason organic is expensive-is that it is only 3 % of The American National Food production and purchase. That is a lot, but not even a drop in the bucket.

Conventional Food in America is really cheap for many political reasons. Factory farms I imagine work in a huge complicated money system with the Chemical companies/seed companies and the political candidates.

Food is not so cheap in the rest of the world...organic or not.

yup-people are lazy, sitting on their couches, drinking thir Buds and eating their Fritos. It makes me want to cry when I think about it too hard.

I am a firm believer in buying anything organic that you can. Keep the demand there. Ask for it in restaurants...support local farmers markets, talk to family and friends about it. Just like anything else...change is slow. People don't change overnight. But I remember long ago when Meryl Streep led a campaign against (Alar?) spray on apples...and the campaign won. She was a great example to me.

I know it must seem insane for you to purchase organic stuff when your chickens and your child cann't play in your sprayed yard...but I must say...who knows what the future holds.

UGH! what a ramble :rolleyes:

PS-a dozen organic eggs costs me $7.00 in New Zealand. I still buy them...and I am planning my own garden for next Spring-it is fall here right now.

i remember reading somewhere..... that if americans used all the front yards for food then we'd have enough for the states.

theoretically, i think the world can be fed organically, but it would not the same as the world we are in now, and many people are addicted to the way it is. the actual food production is not the problem, it is all the politics going all the way to personal responsibility. and it also might require a different thinking about human manure.

ironically people don't eat vegetables that are bland and fibrous when it is not hard to grow some thing tasty and plentiful. haha, i'm saying this when i haven't planted the tomato seedlings because the mosquitoes keep attacking me.

As I am not a farmer, and I have no control on how DH runs things......I don't know. How's that for an answer.

Also, there are different ways of approaching the problem. There weren't so many people prior to Columbus- there literally wasn't enough food, in enough quantity or variety. Think of Italian tomato sauce- that's American. Europeans thought Americans were lazy farmers b/c the yield from corn was so very high that they didn' t need to cultivate so intensively, or so anxiously. Africans called American yams sacred, and revised their stories to include them- it's on the record. Most of France starved, or froze, on a regular basis.

And, the increase of people- it hasn't been a "natural" progression. State policies, clean water, religious policies, things like that. I think it's rather telling that at least two plants associated with female- controlled birth control have been used to extinction.

So, if you are looking for "natural" and "good common sense," no, I don't think organic farming has anything to do with anything. However, if it is entirely possible for a population to eat well, and organically, have at it. The Roman empire, on the Italian peninsula, turned primarily to truck farms, and luxury farming. Wheat farming, the staple foods, was for the provinces. It's still that way. The Italian farms bred broccoli, and cauliflower, and mixed varietals- Cubby Broccoli, the producer of James Bond movies- his grandfather invented broccoli. So maybe mindful farming, lots of it, not just land grant college experimental plots, will help us come up with new and better foods.

I don't get yards with some stupid grass on it, either. DH keeps making noise about buying a house, but he doesn't believe me when I tell him I need a yard. My grandfather, who raised us, had a quarter acre organic garden in the seventies. It kills me that I have to pay for zuchini, or bell peppers. We had rows of them. DH keeps showing me these awful postage stamps in the northern part of the city- read s.a.l.i.n.e. dirt, too much heat, and no room. Two blocks from here there are three farms. The houses all sit on an acre, plus.

So, what do you control? I just threw out a copy of Diet for a Small Planet (thank you ds2, I like soaking wet books) which had a chapter on all the different family farm, organic farm, and sustainable farming non- profits. They all had newsletters, and pamphlets, and so on.....Would that help? It's by ......okay, brain freeze. Diet for a small planet, by Frances Lappe (?)

Having said that, conventional farming practices destroy the soil. Egypt was the bread basket of the Mediterrranean- can you imagine? Libya, too. Central Russia fed Asia- it's a salted wasteland now. The center of the USA is currently in a drought, with major topsoil damage. So, what does he want to pass on to his children?

Ari

a lovely post.

I have read about studies that showed that organic farming does not result in significantly lower yields that conventional, so the amount of food is not a problem. One of the main reasons why organic food costs so much more is that it isn't subsidized by the government the way conventional farming is.
There is no reason to feel guilty about buying organic food. You are not only doing what is best for your family. Every time you but organic you are supporting organic farmers and reducing the amount of poisons being sprayed on the earth. That's what's best for everyone.

This might not quite answer your question, but it seems relevant.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/index.php?page=article&id=2132

Another thing to think about is sustainablity. Conventional food growning just can't last. Whats the point of having surplus food now when in 20 years everyone will starve? Organic food hits more in the sustainable area.

i didn't even have to read the article, though i may later....i can taste the difference. and people wonder why kids won't eat their vegetables....