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By Root 497 0

factories and fossil fuels – then many of the nine billion will starve and all rainforests will be cut down. Yes, I wrote ‘all’. Organic farming is low-yield, whether you like it or not. The reason for this is simple chemistry. Since organic farming eschews all synthetic fertiliser, it exhausts the mineral nutrients in the soil – especially phosphorus and potassium, but eventually also sulphur, calcium and manganese. It gets round this problem by adding crushed rock or squashed fish to the soil. These have to be mined or netted. Its main problem, though, is nitrogen deficiency, which it can reverse by growing legumes (clover, alfalfa or beans), which fix nitrogen from the air, and either ploughing them into the soil or feeding them to cattle whose manure is then ploughed into the soil. With such help a particular organic plot can match non-organic yields, but only by using extra land elsewhere to grow the legumes and feed the cattle, effectively doubling the area under the plough. Conventional farming, by contrast, gets its nitrogen from what are in effect point sources – factories, which fix it from the air.

Organic farmers also aspire to rely less on fossil fuels, but unless organic food is to be expensive, scarce, dirty and decaying, then it has to be intensively produced, and that means using fuel – in practice, a pound of organic lettuce, grown without synthetic fertilisers or pesticides in California, and containing eighty calories, requires 4,600 fossil-fuel calories to get it to a customer’s plate in a city restaurant: planting, weeding, harvesting, refrigerating, washing, processing and transporting all use fossil fuel. A conventional lettuce requires about 4,800 calories. The difference is trivial.

Yet when a technology came along that promised to make organic farming both competitive and efficient, the organic movement promptly rejected it. That technology was genetic modification, which was first invented in the mid-1980s as a kinder, gentler alternative to ‘mutation breeding’ using gamma rays and carcinogenic chemicals. Did you know that this was the way many crops were produced over the last half-century? That much pasta comes from an irradiated variety of durum wheat? That most Asian pears are grown on irradiated grafts? Or that Golden Promise, a variety of barley especially popular with organic brewers, was first created in an atomic reactor in Britain in the 1950s by massive mutation of its genes followed by selection? By the 1980s, scientists had reached the point where, instead of this random scrambling of the genes of a target plant with unknown result and lots of collateral genetic damage, they could take a known gene, with known function, and inject it into the genome of a plant, where it would do its known job. That gene might come from a different species, so achieving the horizontal transfer of traits between species that happens relatively rarely among plants in nature (though it is common-place among microbes).

For example, many organic farmers happily adopted an insect-killing bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis or bt, first commercialised in France as Sporeine in the 1930s, which they sprayed on crops to control pests. As a ‘biological’ not a chemical spray, it met their tests. By the 1980s lots of different variants of bt had been developed for different insects. All were regarded as organic. But then genetic engineers took the bt toxin and incorporated it into the cotton plant to produce bt-cotton, one of the first genetically modified crops. This had two huge advantages: it killed bollworms living inside the plant where sprays could not reach them easily; and it did not kill innocent insects that were not eating the cotton plant. Yet, though this was an officially organic product, biologically integrated into the plant, and obviously better for the environment, organic high priests rejected the technology. Bt cotton went on to transform the cotton industry and has now replaced more than a third of the entire cotton crop. Indian farmers, denied the technology by their government, rioted