Our
agricultural crops illustrate the fact that an evolution of species for
speculative economic values only through man’s management has increased pests,
diseases and extinction rather than their healthy and fecund survival”
— William Albrecht
There
are more definitions of organic farming than there are organic farmers;
chemical-free, spray-free, natural, ecological etc. This is as much due to
unawareness of the history of farming as it is of organic farming practises
themselves. Understanding the forces that gave rise to several different
approaches to crop production and animal husbandry in turn gives rise to the realisation
that there can be no simple definition of such a complex activity.
Let
us first put farming where it belongs. It is the single most important pursuit
of humankind. Without farming, we would have insufficient food, clothing and
shelter to support the world’s population. Without farming, there would be no
cities, civilisations or computers revolutionising the way we perceive the
universe and communicate with each other.
In
the beginning, we had hunter-gathering. Humans lived in small nomadic groups scattered
over large areas. Until recently, it was believed to be a harsh existence of
unremitting toil. Accurate anthropological observation of the few remaining
hunter-gatherer societies does not support this view. It is apparent that such
groups spent only a small proportion of the day obtaining food. The balance
between the population and food supply was maintained not just by nature
(disease, death from predators, drought-induced famine etc), but also by human
intervention. For instance, excess female infants were killed.
This
method of population control existed until quite recently in agrarian
societies. Some societies practised it directly by slaughtering newborn
daughters until a son was born. Later, this developed into women explaining
away the death of a female infant by starvation as, “it was sick and wouldn’t
eat”. While the feminist movement would have us believe that this was a system
devised by men for the oppression of women, it was in fact an essential part of
the fabric of a society that of necessity lived within the limits of its
resources.
In
hunter gatherer societies, there was a division of labour between male and
female. The men hunted for animals, the women gathered wild fruits, vegetables
and grains. From this observation, it seems likely that agriculture, the
controlled growing of fruit, vegetables and grains, was invented by women. This
most important development some ten thousand years ago, was the dominant force
in human progress until three hundred years ago. Population growth beyond the
limits that Nature set had become possible.
Men,
however, were still hunters. When they were not sharing the labour of working
in the fields, they managed to hunt several species of animal to the point of
extinction in more settled areas, such as Britain. These species included
wolves and bears. It is interesting to note that there is no recorded human
death caused by a healthy wolf in the history of the United States following
European settlement. Clearly, hunting was performed more for cultural reasons,
rather than food, or safety.
There
is a belief, or assumption, that agriculture was an unmitigated success.
Unfortunately, we can see from looking at its birthplace, North Africa and the
Middle East, that it has left devastation in its wake. Humankind had gone from
a belief that Nature set the limits, to a belief that those limits could be
expanded by human activity. When the population of Mesopotamia expanded to the
limit of the agricultural food supply, irrigation was introduced to increase
the amount of food. This eventually led to the birth of a desert and the demise
of agriculture in that region. It looks ever more likely that the Sahara, the
largest desert on the planet, was at least partially created by human
agricultural activity.
The
solution devised to overcome this problem was migration. Much of recorded
history is an account of migration, caused by both population pressure and the
need for finding replacement for worn out land. In Roman times, Israel was “a
land flowing with milk and honey” and North Africa was “the granary of the
World”. Both are now suffering badly from desertification.
This
is not to say that all agricultural activity was so singularly unsuccessful. In
southern China, there is land that has been farmed intensively and continuously
for four thousand years, supporting several times the number of people per
hectare than anywhere else on the planet. The Nile delta, with its annual
injection of silt from the mountains of Ethiopia, remained productive for even
longer. It is only the building of the Aswan dam that poses a threat to the
continued fertility of the region, due to its holding back the farmland’s
annual injection of fresh silt.
Until
Jethro Tull devised his horse-hoeing husbandry, farming methods had changed
little since Roman times. Tull’s invention of the seed drill to place cereal
seeds in straight lines enabled the use of the horse-drawn hoe for weed control
and a consequent increase in food production per man-hour. “Turnip” Townsend’s
Norfolk four-course crop rotation reduced the amount of land in fallow and
enabled more animals to be over-wintered. This too increased food and fibre
production, and the population of Britain boomed, setting the stage for the
rapid expansion of industry.
The
Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century gave rise to a belief that
given sufficient time, anything could be understood sufficiently well to be
brought totally under man’s control. Humanity had come to the conclusion that
there are no limits. As well as dramatically increasing the range and volume of
manufactured goods, the Industrial Revolution gave birth to modern science. The
scientist believed that simple causes only give rise to simple consequences and
that complex systems are made up of a number of simple subsystems. By
understanding a sufficient number of simple subsystems, a complex system could
be modelled and understood.
It
is only recently that these beliefs have come to be questioned. There are
limits. Simple causes more often than not give rise to complex results*. The sheer number of simple subsystems
in large complex systems mitigates against any possibility of understanding
them by fragmentary analysis. One example that comes immediately to mind is
economics. Probably more effort has been put into understanding this subject
than any other during the last few decades. While economics uses the tools of
science, it has proved unequal to the task of predicting the outcome of
political decision-making. One disillusioned economist compared our economic system
and economic decisions to a man kicking a rabbit. The direction the rabbit
chooses to run is unpredictable. The number of variables is just too large.
Similarly,
the managed ecosystems of farms have a lamentable tendency to exhibit
unpredictable behaviour. No matter how many of the subsystems become
understood, the outcome of manipulating them often fails to realise
expectations. Nobody in the 1950s could have predicted the economic devastation
that would be caused for some Australian farmers in the 1980s by the
indiscriminate use of organochlorine pesticides. The pesticides used to kill
the cotton boll weevil in the Lower Rio Grande area of North America also
killed the weevil’s predators. The population of two previously innocuous pests
(immune to the pesticides) swelled to fill the vacancy left by the demise of
the weevil and consequently made cotton growing impossible in the region.*
Consequences
such as these can take years to reveal themselves, sometimes long after the
original cause has been forgotten. While the catastrophic result of the Lower
Rio Grande is obvious, more subtle differences can arise with lesser, but still
significant consequences. Herbicides commonly used on cereal crops in the name
of efficiency are known to reduce overall crop yield by as much as 30%. The
herbicide glyphosate appears to inhibit trace element availability in the soil
and the consequences of this are more likely to reveal themselves as
nutritional problems in the consumers of the produce (livestock, or human), but
that is the subject of two other chapters of this book.
There
are 2,000 or so different species of microorganisms in a living soil.*0 The exact function and purpose of only
a very few have been discovered and the number of possible interactions between
them boggle the mind. It looks very much like we will never be able to
understand such a living system with any great precision. This is less
problematic than it might seem. We are not suggesting that we throw the
scientific baby out with the economic bath water. Science, within its
limitations, has given us a body of data that, combined with observation of
obviously successful farming systems, should enable us to improve our farming
and its sustainability. We really have two choices; either we continue to ignore
the effects of soil biology and the wider ecology of the farming environment,
or we accept that they are a vital component of farming.
One
myth that really needs debunking is the belief that organic farming is
“chemical-free”. There are many chemicals used by organic farmers, including
copper sulphate (bluestone), phosphorous acid, sodium silicate (waterglass),
soap (potassium, or sodium stearate), calcium hydroxide (lime) and sodium
carbonate (washing soda). The difference between these chemicals and those used
by conventional farmers is that they all have been used for a long enough time
for their safety to have been established beyond reasonable doubt. The issue of
safety from the organic farming point of view is less one of safety for the
farmer, or consumer, but one of safety for the biological systems on which the
organic farmer relies and the conventional farmer has been taught to ignore.
There
is a widespread belief that organic farming is conventional farming minus the
chemicals and artificial fertilisers, natural materials substituting for both.
While pyrethrum is a natural pesticide, just like the synthetic malathion, its
effects are not confined to the target pests. Both biocides kill predators and
pests indiscriminately. Consequently, the use of either disrupts the balance
between pest and predator, leading to an enhanced environment for pests at the
expense of predators. I am not arguing here for the elimination of pyrethrum
from the list of organically acceptable inputs, but for a better understanding
of the consequences of pesticide use, synthetic or natural.
The
public perception of organic farming being chemical-free has led to increasing
demand for organic produce in the belief that it and the organic production
system are chemical-free. The organic movement, by perpetuating this myth, has
diminished its credibility. Many modern agricultural chemicals degrade rapidly,
particularly in an environment conducive to microbiological proliferation.
While research in this area is in its infancy, there now appears to be a
distinct likelihood that conventional farming can deliver produce at least as
“clean” as organic farming production standards demand. The Green Movement, by
promoting the desirability of chemical-free produce and the Organic Movement,
by accepting this, have completely missed the point of the organic farming
technology developed since the turn of the century. A little more history will
clarify this.
The
great German chemist, Justus von Liebig, applied his considerable intellect to
understanding plant nutrition. He discovered through many pot trials that
plants depended on a handful of elements in the soil, most notably nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium. Furthermore, he discovered that he could feed these
substances to plants in water-soluble form and achieve yields much higher than
usual.
Liebig
postulated that the element in shortest supply was the limiting factor in crop
yield and that all of the elements removed with the crop must be replaced.
These simple, common-sense concepts have been taught in agricultural and
horticultural institutions ever since. Shortly before he died, Liebig wrote
about his later discovery, his theory did not work out in practise.
Unfortunately this work has never, to the best of my knowledge, been translated
into English.
The
barrel shows Liebig’s theory diagrammatically. If the potential yield of the
soil is represented by a full barrel of water and the individual staves the
quantity of individual fertility elements in the soil, then the barrel can only
be filled to the height of the shortest stave.
Following
the publication of Liebig’s ideas on crop fertilisation, John Lawes invented
what he called superphosphate. He discovered that turning animal bones into
fertiliser with sulphuric acid was much less expensive than grinding them up,
since sulphuric acid was a cheap by-product of the Industrial Revolution’s
chemical industry. This acidified phosphate gave crop yield increases for
little financial outlay. When the supply of bones became insufficient, rock
phosphate, the petrified residues of bird excreta, was an even cheaper
substitute. Interestingly, Lawes’ original directions for using superphosphate
recommended reverting it with lime to neutralise its acidity.
The
second major impact of modern industry on agriculture came after the First
World War. The conflict gave rise to a big demand for explosives based on
nitrogen. Large factories were built to convert atmospheric nitrogen into
ammonia and nitrates. When the battle ceased, there was an understandable
reluctance to cease production. Although it was “the war to end all wars”, the
potential for future conflict meant that the factories needed to remain
productive. The factories were converted to nitrogenous fertiliser manufacture
which made the shareholders happy and governments feel more comfortable.
The
two decades between the First and Second World Wars is when the revolt against
scientific agriculture began in earnest. Scientific agriculture was seen by
certain farmers to have lost something in the pursuit of increased production.
Animal health was in decline with new diseases and crop health also was
suffering from new pests and diseases. Lucerne fields that had yielded well for
decades needed to be ploughed up and resown after less than ten years. To some
farmers and scientists this was a clear indication of the failure of modern,
intensive methods of production. To others, it was a marketing opportunity to
sell “cures” for these problems.
In
India, Sir Albert Howard was studying the role of certain fungi and humus
(compost) in plant health. This work gave rise to a concept he called organic
farming. This wasn’t simply a return to the conventional farming of the past,
but built on new concepts of plant nutrition and the relationships between
crops and livestock. “Progressive” farmers were simplifying their farms, after
the fashion of factories; artificial fertiliser inputs at one end and produce
and “waste” coming out the other. Howard believed there was more benefit to be
gained from using animal manures and crop residues to build soil fertility. The
concept of the organic farm included that of mixed farming, where the
byproducts of one part of the farm were the inputs for another. Rather than
burning straw, it was used as animal bedding. The mixture of dung and
urine-soaked straw was then composted with crop residues to become fertiliser
for crops.
Howard
had found that some plants he was studying relied on a symbiotic root fungus
(mycorrhiza) for their phosphorus needs. In return for supplying the plant with
phosphorus, the fungus took its carbohydrates from the plant. These fungi
needed particular soil conditions for their survival and the plants on which
they thrived often required the fungi for their survival. The soil conditions
they favoured were high in humus and biological activity. The source of humus
was decomposed crop residues and animal manures, the very materials that
factory farming was assiduously burning, or dumping, often in the belief that
they were a source of disease.
Howard
further discovered in his experiments with humus manufacture and use
(composting), that its presence in the soil conferred many benefits. Perhaps
the most important from the point of view of the farmer beset by pests and
diseases, was the relative absence of these problems in compost-grown plants.
Tomatoes grown with compost were more resistant to Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Plants
infected with TMV were placed among the plants in the trials. Even tomatoes
grown using compost made from plants infected with the disease were unaffected.
When
Howard was eventually allowed to experiment with feeding compost-grown crops to
cattle, he found that they were resistant to infection by foot and mouth
disease, even where infected cattle were allowed to rub noses with those in his
feeding trial. It must be pointed out that the strain of FMD was much less
virulent than that which caused so many problems to British farmers in the
1960s.
Howard
returned to England and began publishing his ideas. They gave rise to the Soil
Association which he co-founded with Lady Eve Balfour. The Soil Association was
formed to scientifically investigate the differences between scientific and
organic agriculture. This work was published in Balfour’s book, “The Haughley
Experiment” which these days is printed as a single volume with her earlier
book, “The Living Soil”.
The
work at Haughley clearly showed marked differences between systems that used
chemical fertilisers, with or without crop and animal manure residues. Although
chemical fertilisers increased grass yield, the output of milk per cow was
less. Crop yield increases were insufficient to pay the cost of the artificial
fertiliser used. One anomaly that showed up was egg production appeared to be
dependent on amount, rather than quality of feed.
In
Germany, Rudolf Steiner founded a school of philosophy, Anthroposophy. Some of
his followers were farmers and they brought their agricultural problems to
Steiner for his advice. In response, he eventually gave them a series of
lectures published in his book, “Agriculture”. This farming system he named Bio
Dynamic and it bears more than a passing resemblance to Howard’s organic
farming with a similar emphasis on humus. It differs however in taking account
of cosmic and spiritual forces, as well as the influence of soil. The
association with spiritual beliefs and astrology has limited the appeal of Bio
Dynamics for scientists trained to ignore what it automatically calls
pseudo-science. Nevertheless, several respected scientists have pursued the
concepts Steiner introduced, particularly in Germany.
In
the United States, Dr William Albrecht took a different approach again. He was
head of the Missouri Agricultural Research Station for several decades and he
published an enormous number of papers about his ideas of plant nutrition and
animal health. He took considerable pains to distance his work from that of
organic and Bio Dynamic researchers.
The
basic precept behind Albrecht’s work was that there should be an explanation
for why stock health was observably superb in some regions and poor in others.
He conducted extensive soil testing in various parts of the United States and
found a correlation between the ratios of certain elements in the soil and
protein content of the plants growing in them. When the mineral balance in a
poor soil was adjusted to equate with that of a good soil, protein content of
crops increased and animal health improved. He further discovered that
water-soluble fertilisers were inferior to simple crushed rocks containing the
required minerals.
Albrecht
was also keenly interested in the effects of farming on human health. Having
discovered that the prairies of the mid-west produced the healthiest livestock,
he postulated that human health in this region should, in turn, be better.
Since good health was a prerequisite for acceptance into military service, he
perused the army intake records for the various regions of the United States
and indeed confirmed his suspicion. The rejection rate for army service was
lowest where soil fertility was highest and highest where soil fertility was
lowest.
In
more recent time, Professor Miguel Altieri at the University of California has
worked on the role of ecological diversity in reducing pest problems in organic
and peasant farming. He coined the term agroecology for this work.
Although
there were other workers looking at alternative methods of crop production and
animal husbandry, these four schools have been the most important in shaping
Australian organic production methods. The first three had very little influence
on the wider agricultural community when they were being devised. However, post
World War Two events gave them the impetus they needed to the point where they,
and Altieri’s agroecology, are now considered seriously.
The
development of “cures” devised to overcome pests and diseases gained a
significant boost from poisons developed as nerve-gas during World War II.
Rather than storing the materials that remained unused, they were converted
into pesticides and fungicides. Again, the chemical companies’ shareholders
were happy to see these by-products of plastics and drug manufacture sold at a
profit, rather than being stored at great expense. Governments were pleased to
see them dispersed, instead of being dangerous sources of chemical pollution.
Like
their predecessors, these materials had the property of only working for a
short time until the pest, or disease evolved resistance. One class of
pesticides though, created problems that still bedevil agriculture; the
organo-chlorines. The organo-chlorine pesticides include DDT, dieldrin and
heptachlor. They, or their breakdown products, are all very stable materials
that accumulate not only in the organism consuming them, but also their
predators. Animals high on the food-chain accumulate the most. Bird populations
were decimated by these pesticides since they fed on the insects that had been
sprayed. The accumulated organo-chlorines inhibited the formation of eggshell.
Ironically,
birds are a most effective (and under-appreciated) control on many insects
that compete with humans for food. Their decline led to increasing pest
problems and a consequent “need” for ever more potent insecticides in ever
increasing quantities. The impact of their use on Nature enraged
conservationists and Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring” is their manifesto.
Since
the alternative agricultures all severely reduced the need for these chemical
inputs, they were perceived as “a good thing” by conservationists. This is
where the concept of organic equating with chemical-free arose. Bio Dynamic
practitioners like to promote themselves as the purest of the pure, however
Pfeiffer’s book “Weeds and What They Tell”, published in the 1940s by the US
Bio Dynamic Association, advocated the use of the herbicide 2-4D. While the
promotion of the desirability organic farming by the conservation movement has
led to wider acceptance of organics by the general public, there is a downside.
The conservation movement’s propensity for overstating the case and downright
misinformation when it suits their purposes, has acted as a brake on the
acceptance of organics by the wider farming community and agricultural
scientists.
In
actuality, many organic farming practises have already entered the mainstream
of farming, especially when they have been presented without reference to their
origins. It is in anticipation of an acceleration of this trend that this book
has been written. The general public is demanding that agriculture become
cleaner and greener. As well, there is a trend away from tough, flavourless
produce that transports and stores well and merely looks good, toward tastier
food. The assumption that organic production methods result in produce with
poor appearance is a misconception fostered by the manufacturers of chemical
agricultural inputs on the one hand, and the conservationists who believe
organic agriculture is conventional agriculture minus the chemical inputs, on
the other. Not only is agriculture a spectrum, organic agriculture is a
sub-spectrum of its own. There are anti-chemical extremists who will brook no
use of any artificial substance and growers who are more concerned about the
economical production of quality produce and minimising any negative impact of
their farming on the wider ecosystem.
In
our investigations of agriculture, we have found many fine organic
practitioners who achieve results equal to, and often better than, their
conventional counterparts. That is not to say that this is universally
possible. In southern Tasmania for instance, we have almost no codling moth problem
in apple production. This is not the case in the warmer Australian mainland
apple producing districts. It would be foolish to assert that what works well
in one district will work equally well in others. While no black spot fungus
was apparent in the Orange district of NSW in the summer of 1982/3, it was only
kept under control in southern Tasmania with chemical inputs. It is worth
noting here that sodium silicate (waterglass), which is an organically
acceptable chemical, gave results equal to the more potent modern fungicides.
Dr James Wong’s research using calcium hydroxide also showed the potential of
this chemical to substitute for a large part of the usual spray program.
Prices
for some produce are kept artificially low with hidden costs; wheat, for
instance. The Soil Conservation Authority estimates that each kilogram of wheat
grown in Australia costs as much as five kilograms of topsoil lost to erosion.
Such waste of non-renewable resource obviously cannot continue indefinitely.
There is considerable resistance to the introduction of soft wheat in
Australia. We are justifiably proud of the reputation of our hard wheats that
are necessary for bread manufacture. The soft wheat variety, Longbow, outyields
hard wheat by a factor of several times. Products other than bread that use
wheat as an input could be reduced in cost by the use of this variety with no
discernible difference in quality. A move to this wheat variety would allow
less land to be used for the crop and more for growing green manure.
The
following chapters describe various techniques used in organic farming and the
reasons why organic farmers generally have less problems with pests and
diseases than their conventional counterparts. We also assess the shortcomings
of the various organic certification scheme requirements in the real world of
mass production. While it is certainly true that conventional farming’s
sustainability will benefit enormously from understanding the concepts behind
organic production, many organic practitioners and their proponents could learn
a lot from a genuine understanding of modern crop production requirements.
It
is the writer’s fond hope that when he becomes a doddering old fool sitting by
the fire with his glass of port, that we will talk not of organic versus conventional
agriculture, but only good farming practises.