1 - Slows the Decline in Quantity of Our Planet's Soil and Drinking Water
Pesticides and chemical fertilizers contaminate drinking water in almost all of our nation's 50 states. U.S. farmland is losing topsoil seven times faster than new topsoil is being created. Organic farmers, especially small ones, are notorious topsoil builders and they add no contaminants to surface or groundwater supplies. These trends toward declining soil and water quality may not seem urgent to you now, but what would your great great grandchildren say to you about these problems?
2 - Helps Insure a Future for the Next Generation
As noted in reason #1, future generations will bear the burdens (and enjoy the benefits) of our actions today. Disturbing trends now, in terms of soil and water quality for example, become catastrophes in 20, 100, or 500 years. But closer to home, an FDA study confirmed our worst fears: children, on average, are exposed to four times the damaging effects of cancer-causing pesticides in food than are adults. This difference is largely because of the differences in diet, metabolism rates, and body weight between children and adults.
3 - Helps Small and Local Growers
While 750,000 family farms have died in the USA in this decade alone, most organic farms are small (less than 100 acres), family-owned and family-operated. Often, by buying organic you are helping to de-centralize the food-producing economy out of the hands of the large-scale, intensively managed, agri-business corporate farms. This is especially true at People's Food Co-op during the growing season when well over two thirds of the produce items offered come from small Oregon organic farms.
4 - Promotes Bio-diversity
As noted in reason #3 above, large corporate farms have increasingly dominated the U.S. food production system. In their hyper-awareness of the short-term "bottom-line", these corporations have been great in terms of lowering food costs. Unfortunately, many of their methods like mono-cropping, genetically-engineered seed and chemical fertilizers have short-term benefits like lowered prices, but long-term costs, many of which do not become apparent for years, decades or even centuries. The result is a beautiful looking, uniform product that costs less, while at the same time leaving farm topsoils dead and lacking in natural materials and nutrients. By buying organic you are bucking these trends by letting your food bucks speak the only language these corporate farms can understand. You are telling them that the long-term costs are simply too expensive, that non-organic food is just too expensive! (see reason #7)
5 - Saves Energy
Agri-business farming uses more petroleum than any other single industry! In fact, farming consumes over 1⁄8 of our nation's entire energy supply. But once again organic farmers reverse this trend by employing more labor-intensive methods such as hand weeding, green manures, and crop covers that put life and vigor back into their soils, rather than face-lifting their land with chemical fertilizers the way non-organic corporate farms do. The organic methods use less energy, but they cost more in the short run. Even without counting off-farm costs like increased health-care to farmworkers and consumers, air and water pollution, etc., many conventional farmers are now finding that organic methods may indeed be cheaper in the long run. As a non-organic onion farmer in Eastern Oregon (who had just decided to switch to organic) said to me last year, "I spend more and more money every year on [chemical] fertilizer, my grandpa keeps telling my dad and me that we're killing the land; I just can't afford it anymore; I had to do something!"
6 - Protects Farm Workers
You don't have to be a genius to guess which group of workers in the state of California suffers from the highest rates of occupational illness. Pesticide poisonings amongst farm-workers is ballooning out of control with reported cases doubling every ten years. I have talked to farmworkers myself and their opinions are overwhelmingly one-sided; all else being equal, they'd rather work on organic farms than non-organic farms.
7 - Is Healthier and Cheaper
Webster defines the suffix "-cide" as "killer or killing," and most people seem to sense that if something kills one form of life, it may not be too good for another form of life either. The Environmental Protection Agency concurs, labeling 90% of all (legal!) fungicides, 60% of all (legal!) herbicides, and 30% of all (legal!) insecticides as cancer-causing. The fact that organically-grown food is healthier seems generally agreed upon by most folks who know much about it. Many of those same folks, however, would deny that organic is cheaper because a pound of organic carrots or organic sugar costs more at the supermarket checkstand than their non-organic counterparts. BUT WAIT! What about the costs of cleaning up contaminated water and soil? What about the costs of cancer and asthma? What about the costs of farm subsidies that agri-business has shoved (or sugar-coated) down the throats of our representatives in Congress (and thus down our throats all the way to our wallets)? What about the cost of pesticide regulation and testing, of hazardous waste disposal and clean up, and of countless other forms of environmental damage? And even more importantly, what about the human costs in suffering from early on-set of degenerative diseases (not to mention the increased medical costs of a whole range of toxic chemical-caused diseases)? And I'm talking about ALL of us, not just the farmworkers... Yep, those 39 cent per pound carrots are starting to look mighty spendy.
8 - Bonus Reason (optional)
There is an eighth, but very subjective reason to buy organic foods: taste! You will have to let your own taste buds decide if this optional reason is really your #1 reason or not a reason at all. Either way, this list is weighty enough, I hope to make you think twice the next time you buy food at a grocery store, farmers market or restaurant. There are organic alternatives and many are cheaper than you may think. The staff at People's Food Co-op is always happy to help you find organic alternatives in your neighborhood. Just ask! |
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