The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [81]
Is there anything wrong with this picture? I’m not sure, frankly. Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing on its fidelity to organic principles, and that unless organic “scales up [it will] never be anything more than yuppie food.” To prove his point Kahn sent me to visit several of the large-scale farms that supply Small Planet Foods. These included Greenways, the Central Valley operation that grows vegetables for his frozen dinners (and tomatoes for Muir Glen), and Petaluma Poultry, which grows the chicken in his frozen dinner as well as Rosie, the organic chicken I made the acquaintance of in Whole Foods. I also paid a visit to the Salinas Valley, where Earthbound Farm, the largest organic grower in the world, has most of its lettuce fields.
My first stop was Greenways Organic, a successful two-thousand-acre organic produce operation tucked into a twenty-four-thousand-acre conventional farm in the Central Valley outside Fresno; the crops, the machines, the crews, the rotations, and the fields were virtually indistinguishable, and yet two different kinds of industrial agriculture are being practiced here side by side.
In many respects the same factory model is at work in both fields, but for every chemical input used in the farm’s conventional fields, a more benign organic input has been substituted in the organic ones. So in place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways’ organic acres are nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby, and by poultry manure. Instead of toxic pesticides, insects are controlled by spraying-approved organic agents (most of them derived from plants) such as rotenone, pyrethrum, and nicotine sulfate, and by introducing beneficial insects like lacewings. Inputs and outputs: a much greener machine, but a machine nevertheless.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to farming organically on an industrial scale is controlling weeds without the use of chemical herbicides. Greenways tackles its weeds with frequent and carefully timed tilling. Even before the crops are planted, the fields are irrigated to germinate the weed seeds present in the soil; a tractor then tills the field to kill them, the first of several passes it will make over the course of the growing season. When the crops stand too high to drive a tractor over, farm workers wielding propane torches will spot kill the biggest weeds by hand. The result is fields that look just as clean as the most herbicide-soaked farmland. But this approach, which I discovered is typical of large-scale organic operations, represents a compromise at best. The heavy tillage—heavier than in a conventional field—destroys the tilth of the soil and reduces its biological activity as surely as chemicals would; frequent tilling also releases so much nitrogen into the air that these weed-free organic fields require a lot more nitrogen fertilizer than they otherwise might. In a less disturbed, healthier soil, nitrogen-fixing bacteria would create much of the fertility that industrial organic growers must add in the form of compost, manures, fish emulsion, or Chilean nitrate—all inputs permitted under federal rules. (International organic rules, however, forbid the use of Chilean nitrate, a mineral form of nitrogen mined in Chile, often using child labor.) Not surprisingly the manufacturers of these inputs lobbied hard to shape the federal organic rules; in the end it proved easier to agree on a simple list of approved and prohibited materials rather than to try to legislate a genuinely more ecological model of farming.
Yet the best organic farmers deplore this sort of input substitution as a fall from the organic ideal, which envisions farms that provide for as much of their own fertility as possible, and control pests by means of crop diversification and rotation. It is too simple to say that smaller organic farms automatically hew closer to the organic ideals set forth by Albert Howard: Many small organic farms practice input substitution as well. The organic ideal