The Ideological Challenge of Organic Farming.

Organic farming bans all uses and all rates of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. For example, it prohibits using an herbicide to kill a cover crop. It prohibits using 100, 10, 1, and even 0.1 kg/ha of urea fertilizer. Ever expanding to cover new materials and technologies, the ban now includes all genetically modified crops – every use of every GMO. What began over 75 years ago as a reasonable response to the introduction of synthetic farm chemicals has become an entrenched marketing tool for organic foods. However, scientific evidence does not support such a comprehensive ban. It is ideology, based on a false ideal of nature; what is of nature is good, what is of man is not. Synthetic chemicals are bad, natural chemicals are good. Nevertheless, over the past couple decades, this ideology has been incrementally embraced: funded by USDA, investigated by researchers, taught to college students, presented at Extension workshops and at meetings of scientific organizations, and published in top-tier journals. All this lends credence to the ban because the ideology behind it is rarely challenged. Although research done on organic farming may be robust and rigorous, it is restricted from accessing all the tools available. With more dire consequences, we teach this inflexible ideology to students who will be our future scientists. Furthermore, the public views the research and teaching of organic farming as tacit approval of this ideology by our trusted scientific institutions. This approval suggests that synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are so dangerous, or detrimental, that they should be banned, or at least viewed with suspicion, fostering a dangerous chemophobia. Increasingly, this mingling of science and ideology will hinder the advancement of agriculture. Within science, however, we can acknowledge the benefits of organic farming without accepting its ideology.