Carter Admin study on Organics ?!?!

Just a small break from our usual coverage of America and the world sliding into the pit...

An interesting historical bit on Organics

by Meteor Blades [from DailyKos]

Thu Jul 19, 2007 at 12:27:50 AM PDT

Twenty-five years ago, my colleague S.K. Levin and I delved into an issue just then beginning to be discussed on the fringes: organic agriculture. Now she lives in the lower reaches of the French Alps with perpetually dirty gardener’s feet. She was already a bit of a farmer in her journalist days, raising ducks, chickens and mini-crops of vegetables in the thin soil of the Colorado Front Range without benefit of herbicides or pesticides and wondering how this might be done on a larger scale.

In those days, and during the late 1970s, the response of a very few people to what seemed like perpetually hard times for small family farmers was to adopt alternatives to the application of expensive synthetic chemicals to control bugs and weeds and try out other experiments that cut against the grain of factory farming that had been steadily changing the landscape of agriculture physically, financially and culturally for decades, including raising risks to both human health and the environment.

It was the birth, or rather the rebirth, of organic farming.

The whole idea was considered a big fat joke at the time. Critics, and they were in the vast majority, spun the false tale that organic farming was all about a bunch of hippies – or hippie-influenced peasants – wanting to live like the Amish, without electricity or tractors. Anyone, the critics said, who thought farming without chemicals was possible on a large scale, was just plain nuts and deserved to be absorbed by the "scientifically" run mega-operations that had been eroding the small family farm since the 1930s. Never mind that a mere handful of people were talking about living like the Amish, the wacko notion fit the paradigm of the day and held fast.

In 1978, a period of extremely high petroleum prices, President Jimmy Carter, who, whatever else may be said of him, wasn't given to accepting conventional wisdom as all that wise, directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take a thorough look at organic agriculture. USDA soil scientist Robert Papendick led the team that produced Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming. (You can read the whole thing, but, fair warning, it’s a 10.7mb pdf file.) Essentially, it said that organic farming had a lot of promise, with multiple benefits, and a lot of hurdles.

Published at the end of 1980, the report was too late to get much attention from the Carter Administration. It got zero mainstream media attention. When Reagan came into the Oval Office, it was, like Carter’s energy policy, deep-sixed. That didn’t stop a few individuals from pressing forward, but the USDA did next to nothing to help them, and department employees who had anything good to say about organic agriculture were for a long time viewed skeptically by their colleagues and bosses alike. As Levin and I reported in 1983, Papendick was treated like dirt for years.

So, it was with a broad grin smirk that I read at Science Daily last week that Organic Farming Can Feed The World, Study Suggests

Researchers from the University of Michigan found that in developed countries, yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms. In developing countries, food production could double or triple using organic methods, said Ivette Perfecto, professor at U-M's School of Natural Resources and Environment, and one the study's principal investigators. Catherine Badgley, research scientist in the Museum of Paleontology, is a co-author of the paper along with several current and former graduate and undergraduate students from U-M.

"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture," Perfecto said. ...

"We were struck by how much food the organic farmers would produce," Perfecto said. The researchers set about compiling data from published literature to investigate the two chief objections to organic farming: low yields and lack of organically acceptable nitrogen sources.

Their findings refute those key arguments, Perfecto said, and confirm that organic farming is less environmentally harmful yet can potentially produce more than enough food. This is especially good news for developing countries, where it’s sometimes impossible to deliver food from outside, so farmers must supply their own. Yields in developing countries could increase dramatically by switching to organic farming, Perfecto said.

And Robert Papendick? He became a hero in some circles.

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