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- threecollie
- Embracing agricultural diversity, one species at a time. All rights reserved
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6 comments:
Interesting.
I buy local whenever I can, which means farmers' market for veg, fruit and meat, and some local butchers....much is certified organic but mainly I buy it because it TASTES BETTER, a completely non-noble reason! Especially meat and eggs; I won't eat the pallid stuff they sell as chicken at the grocery store.
I think the premise - that buying organic is inherently snobby and consumers who do are being pretentious - is a bit flawed, though.
I fall somewhere in the middle, happy to use 10-10-10 in combination with organic techniques such as no pesticides.
Moderation in all things seems to work most of the time.
I was happy to use no pesticides until last year's garden got decimated by squash bugs and slugs! "Organic" methods didn't work well at all so I sprayed the crap out of everything with pesticide. :)
That worked, better living through chemistry etc. Haha.
Carina, I would be the first to agree that homegrown (even someone else's homegrown) tastes better. As someone with several hundred pounds of home-raised, milk-fed Belgian Blue beef in the freezer I speak from experience. She wasn't raised organically though. The corn she ate was sprayed with chemicals to kill weeds and nourished with purchased fertilizer. On the other hand we use every bit of manure and rotational planting that we can find a way to. Partly because it is good for the ground....and partly because it is good for the pocketbook. lol We were able to completely do away with the need for boughten fertilizer on a number of fields in the past couple of years. Nothing noble about it, it is just the money. We are always delighted if some growing technique actually permits us to keep some of it.
FC Hear, hear, I am like Carina. I grow my veggies mostly organically, just because I have all the bunny and horse manure I could possibly use and I like to compost etc. However, when scale insects began to decimate my (potted, this is NY after all) palm trees I sprayed em.
I tend to agree that a lot of this organic stuff is kind of the same fakery we see with so-called fair trade lattes that rich liberals drink in Coffee Shops in Burlington, Vermont and complain about how much damage those ATVs make in the forest preserve.
If those people want to spend more money for such things, then fine. That's more money for somebody. Still you have to wonder about people that drive their three ton SUV to Walmart to buy organics to haul back to their house in suburbia.
There are certainly some problems with agriculture, particularly bigger farms. Algea blooms on Lake Champlain from excess nitrogen use in the valley are a serious issue.
We have pretty tough DEC regulations on mid- and large-CAFOs to say nothing of the really tough VT DNR regs on manure application and other sources of nitrogen run-off. Likewise, the list of EPA banned pestides and herbisides goes on for pages and pages.
Finally: it's should be noted that a 100 head dairy and a 1,200 head dairy like the now infamous Marks' Farm. While the later is highly regulated, certainly the potential for pollution is far greater. If your really worried about farm pollution, then you probably should be doing more to change the economic forces that are forcing the consolidation of farms and the delema that forces farmers to constantly produce more and more.
Andy, thank you for a well worded comment. Nobody even thought about farm pollution until there were thousand cow dairies. And there would be lot more small farms if they were more profitable. However, I simply don't believe that organic equals either profitable or is somehow more moral than conventional. I have heard a number of ag professionals say that they figure that "going organic" is all too often a last ditch effort before "going out of business."
3:56 PM
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