Chapter 5: Organic Farming
Once Ann settled, she opened a new topic. “I oughta be paying you, f’whatcha done: Ramón told me you did the spring fertilization for me this year.”
I leaned down and gave her a kiss on the cheek by way of acknowledgement but demurred, “I doubt we can do it every time for you, Ann. There’s still gotta be a net loss in fertilizer, if only in the harvested produce. Did we add enough to offset that? Dunno. I wouldn’t ask you to experiment with your livelihood to help us find out. It’s a big enough ask to let us do one fertilization a year our way. You should keep doing the others the normal way until we’re more confident.”
From across the retreat area, Joss asked a question that marked him as a non-farmer: “Why do y’all need fertilizer anyway? They taught us in school about crop rotation and stuff. Didn’t they do that even back before the Renaissance?”
“Even longer, depending on how you look at it,” I agreed, “but it’s inefficient. It means leaving land fallow for a season, either not planting at all or planting a crop that you then plow under to fix nitrogen. An individual farmer can make that choice if they’re willing to take the hit financially, but the whole world cannot do that; we would literally starve the planet if we did that across the board. Chemical fertilizers are one of the major reasons we avoided the predicted Malthusian collapse.”
“What about organic farming?” Joss pressed.
From her perch on a patio chair overlooking her sister’s efforts on Joss’ behalf, his farmer’s-daughter fiancée opined, “Marketing bullshit, love. It’s a scheme to get the customer to pay for the inefficiency in the farming technique, which runs into inherent limitations as Davie says. Even if the available land for farming was infinite — which it isn’t! — M’bubu of the Kalahari isn’t going to pay extra for food when there’s a cheaper alternative.”
Joss asked, “What’s Africa got to do with it? Shouldn’t we just be concerned with solving our part of the problem here in the US?”
Ali replied, “We have less than 5% of the world’s population, honeybear. Add in all the other major Western first-world countries, and it’s still only about 10%. If we ignore the low per-capita GDP countries — India, China, most of Africa and South America — we basically don’t solve the problem at all. First world countries simply can’t wag the dog in this case. Organic farming is just another way for us to flex our economic might: ‘See, we can farm inefficiently and still feed all our people!’ It’s kinda disgusting, once you consider its implications rationally. Even if the world’s population was low enough to allow us to get away with it still, it’s not solving the core problem.”
Joss nodded at the sense in that, so Allison continued, “It’s also a myth that so-called ‘organic’ fertilizers and pesticides have no bad health or environmental effects. Take the algal blooms caused by all that chemical fertilizer being washed out to sea from the farms: that happens because fertilizer purposefully makes stuff grow, right? Well, if you switch to an organic fertilizer, however you choose to define that, if it’s effective, it has the same bad effect for the same reason: it makes plants grow. As for pesticides, the whole purpose of those is to kill things, so again, applying the label ‘organic’ doesn’t solve anything: it’s still a substance deadly to insects or fungus or whatever. Often the high-tech form is safer because it can be made more tightly targeted than the ‘organic’ alternative.”
Joss nodded again, so Ali took a deep breath and came to her opinion’s conclusion. “Bottom line, ’bear, the organic options are either less effective, less safe overall, or more expensive. They’re not going to solve the big worldwide problems with modern farming practices.”
My wife got us back on topic. “That’s where mages come in, Joss. If we can find enough of them to materially replace use of chemical based farming with nature magic — or at least greatly reduce our reliance on that tech — we can continue to grow food inexpensively while avoiding the problems with current practices.”