free range & organic farming – the facts

Pesticides have been around for centuries but it wasn’t until World War I & II that they became the future for our agriculture industry. Part of the reason for this was due to chemicals & technologies being developed for warfare that could be re-assigned to combat impurities in our farmland, but mainly it was due to the sudden demand for homegrown produce as the lengthy years of war gradually stripped countries of their natural resources & cut them off from the export/import industry. This forced the world to find a way to recoup loses in a short amount of time & so pesticides were turned to, & now pave the basic groundwork of our modern farming industry.

Fields don’t need to be tilled.

Farmers dig up the land every year because there is a better yield if they till the soil. Tilling it like this slightly increases the yield for that season, but doing so uses up the reserves of nutrients in the soil which in turn makes the soil die.

How does dirt die? Within the soil is a delicate infrastructure of inhabitants that live as a co-existing community; bugs, worms, & tiny microscopic organisms. These life-forms are integral to the balance that nature has evolved over hundreds of millions of years & destroying this balance in turn stops the cycle that protects & ‘feeds’ the soil. So, the dirt dies.

To counter this, the farmers use fertilizer to re-address the balance that they upset in the first place. The problem lies in the fact that using fertilizers is like using steroids. Too much is as bad as too little, & they only result in creating further problems.

You see, you till the land & the nutrients die. The wind blows & then the top soil disappears so then farmers use the fertilizers to re-enforce the soil, overfeeding the crops & creating weak produce. This in turn attracts insects & bugs that devour the produce & so insecticides & chemicals are used to try & dissuade them.
We overfeed our livestock also, trying to create larger & more cost-affective, juicy produce. But this makes them prone to illness. So we pump them with medicine & hormones.

The food we buy in our supermarkets may appear bigger, with bolder colours, & less imperfections, but they are not nutritious & if humans continue to eat weakened crops & livestock generation after generation then the results may be devastating.

Thankfully supermarkets are beginning to realize this & have begun to promote & sell organic & free range goods. But this in itself can be deceptive with many labels not being entirely truthful, or being careful with their exact wording when describing their sources.
Some supermarkets are leading the way, however, forcing farmers to have to rethink their industry. Sainsburys is doing well, but it is really Waitrose & Marks & Spencers who are putting in the most effort to make all of their produce free range and/or organic. While chains such as Asda, Morrisons, & Tesco are lagging in many area’s & have been known to be deceptive with some of their labelling.