Why Organic Gardening Has an Image Problem

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines organic gardening as: of, relating to, yielding, or involving the use of food produced with the use of feed or fertilizer of plant or animal origin without employment of chemically formulated fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides. Isn’t that the way it was done prior to the invention of synthetics?

Let’s face it – those who have the most to lose, the companies we refer to as Big Food and Big Ag, have spent decades engaged in disinformation campaigns to make anything that carries the organic label appear radical, too expensive for the average consumer, and not based on reliable science. Pesticides and synthetic fertilizers won’t affect your health they say, GMO’s are no different than the real thing, and high fructose corn syrup is just sugar by another name.

In the meantime, these same companies went on a buying spree to fold just about every significant organic company into their food and seed supply chains. At first, I believed that large companies absorbing organic brands meant that organic was winning – consumers were voting with their dollars. But as Big Food and Big Ag’s influence with the EPA and USDA continues to chip away at the organic label, 5 grain bread may soon be allowed to have similar ingredients as a twinkie.

The baggage of the organic food label

Perhaps the blame lies with J.I. Rodale, Sir Albert Howard, and other mid-20th century advocates of using tree leaves, manures, compost, and grass clippings to grow food -not the new, factory-made fertilizers. Without a doubt, Rodale’s and Howard’s methods were (and are) accurate, but their nomenclature was all wrong. Calling their method of gardening and farming organic, allowed the chemical companies and the bad science they supported to label it as crackpot, leftist, inferior, and un-American (really, they did).

Since organic gardening and farming was actually the original way of growing things for about ten thousand years, since man first tilled the soil (the very definition of sustainable), it should have just remained gardening or farming. Using synthetic inputs should have been the subset to carry a label, as hydroponic gardening does. This reverse would have gone a long way in distinguishing synthetically grown produce from sustainably grown produce, and the impetus would have been on the new growers to prove its efficacy, not the other way around.

When organic everything was adopted by the counter-culture of the 1970’s as a rejection of the mainstream, there must have been high-fives all around the marketing departments of the chemical companies. Nothing separated mainstream from fringe better or faster than the counter-culture adopting anything. Don’t be like the hippies! Choose chemicals! Unfortunately, it’s an image that still persists – as if your best health was something NOT to aspire to. As a nation, we certainly haven’t.

But much of the public knew little about the science behind these inputs and their affects on the environment. It was an era with an unrelenting faith that white men in white laboratory coats would be the salvation of us all, so no one bothered to ask questions. Until Rachel Carson came along.

Rachel Carson, scientist and author, was one of the first to point out the failings of this new science of adding factory-made inputs to the environment. For her efforts, she was pilloried by the companies who made the chemicals. She was fully aware of how her colleagues would react, and how her reputation as a scientist would be called into question, as there was just too much money at stake. History has shown her line of reasoning to be correct.

The makers of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides probably started out with good intentions – to increase crop yields and reduce the pests that affected those yields. But it was fishy from the start. The fertilizer industry started on the back of the ammunition industry, which had one hell of a lot of ammonium nitrate left over after WW2 and nothing to blow up. Fortunately, chemists had discovered in the late 19th century that plants could be grown with nitrogen alone – and ammonium nitrate produced nitrogen in spades. Just pelletize the stuff, spread it on the soil and voila! Bigger plants!

Botany vs Chemistry

Ask a botanist what three primary chemicals any plant needs to sustain life and the’ll say nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. But they’ll also say that the best sources of these chemicals are from decaying vegetable matter which breaks down in the soil via bacterial and fungal activity into humic acids, which feed the roots of the plants. Ask a chemist the same question and they might stop after naming those three macronutrients, because everything comes down to chemicals and plants can’t tell the difference. Farmers in the corn belt know better – their corn grows, but their soil is dead, unable to sustain any living thing but the corn, the result of decades of chemical applications which ignore the biological impact.

The chemist says “I’m correct! The corn produces large ears of corn!” The botanist argues, “Yes, the corn grows large, but at the expense of every living thing around it. And the corn is more susceptible to diseases and the weeds have become super weeds.” Because a field (or garden) which only grows one plant (called monoculture), supported only by synthetic fertilizers and pesticide applications, is a doomed field, as it has no supporting host plants for insects to pollinate the fields crops, or bacteria, fungi, or insect life in the soil to create passageways for air and water and recycle dead vegetation into humic acids.

Stop using labels which have baggage

When asked in person how I grow food, I no longer say “organically”, as I’m tired of the dismissive faces or comments of the unenlightened. Instead I tell them exactly how I grow what I grow and add “and never any chemicals”, which they get right away. That’s because it’s not a term which carries any baggage or images of half naked twenty somethings growing weed in Central Park. I’m even getting my neighbors to abandon their chemicals, when they see the produce I grow without them.

Let me add for you hair-splitters that yes, I know I’m technically using chemicals, as leaves, grass, manures, vegetable matter, etc. all eventually break down into their individual component chemicals.

As we move forward one-by-one and educate friends, neighbors, relatives and strangers to the importance, the absolute imperative of gardening without synthetic inputs, let’s not slap a label on it. That makes what we do a subset instead of the set. So instead of using modifiers like “organic” or “natural” before we explain how we grow our flowers, fruits, and vegetables, let’s just call it gardening or farming. For instance:

Old school exchange:

“Wow, great carrots!”

“I grew them organically”

(funny face that implies you’re a dirty leftie communist-loving hippie who’s probably growing the sticky icky somewhere behind the shed. Epic fail.)

New school exchange:

“Wow, great carrots!”

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

“What’s your secret?”

“Manure and compost”

“Really? That’s all?”

“Yep, that’s all you need”

“Man, I need to start making compost”

See the difference? An explanation without a label or an assumption on the listener’s part. And you laid knowledge and wisdom on them as well. That’s how we win.