Organic Farming - The New Snake Oil

There is an increasing trend in the demand for organic food in the United States, but it is due to the benefits of organic farming, or is it only a marketing ploy by the agricultural industry to increase revenue? Try to imagine yourself in your favorite supermarket picking up tomatoes for homemade pasta sauce. You see organic tomatoes for $1.99/lb and local non-organic tomatoes for $0.99/lb. The $1 price difference doesn’t seem to be too much to pay to support a small local farm that produces organic food that is more nutritious and healthier, and how can you put a price on health? Those apparent reasons to choose organic food are the same reasons that should make people choose otherwise. The non-organic food is the better choice since it is cheap, locally grown, nutritious and safe.

The price of organic food is commonly thought of as higher than conventional non-organic food because it is more labor intensive and is grown by small farms. On the contrary, most of the organic food grown today mimics the methods that are used by conventional farming, and for the most part are produced in large-scale. Part of the excessively high price of organic food is actually due to supply and demand. United States consumers are willing to pay exorbitant prices for organic food, and the agricultural businesses are happy to oblige them. Also, the amount of produce per acre of land is significantly smaller for organic farms, and as a result causes another cost increase. Lower nutrient content of the soil due to lack of modern fertilizers, required crop rotation, and smaller sized produce tend to make organic food more costly, just as a shirt made manually on a loom by hand-spun cotton would be more expensive than one made by today’s efficient equi...

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Now imagine yourself again in the supermarket, but this time deciding over a locally grown, conventional, non-organic tomato at $1.99/lb or an organic tomato, most likely grown tens of thousands of miles away in a foreign country, for the same price. Since price is no longer a factor (nor should it be in an ideal situation), when you deliberate over which one to buy, consider that organic food neither provides any additional nutrition, nor does it even mean pesticide free and safe. The only real reason to buy produce from outside the mainstream agricultural system should be for fresh local produce that supports small, local farms regardless of farming methods. There is no apparent reason to believe that organic farming has any benefits over the conventional methods that have made food plentiful, cheap, nutritious and safe through the use of modern technology.