When we think of a farm, we picture a beautiful sprawling rural set-up that’s self-sufficient and relies on nothing other than a few seeds and a good rainfall or irrigation. And perhaps some simple machinery for planting and harvesting. But if you delve into it a little further, you’ll realise that modern agriculture is dependent on the petroleum industry as much as it is on water and seeds. Not just to power tractors and trucks, but for two vital ingredients needed to grow food -- fertiliser and pesticides. Both these are dependent on oil, and both are extremely polluting.

Fertiliser provides the basic nutrients that plants need to grow; these nutrients, usually found in the soil, consist of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Plants use these chemicals to build their bodies, so each time a crop is grown more and more nutrients are taken out of the earth. This depletes the soil, making it difficult for the next lot of plants to grow. In modern farms, nutrients are artificially put back into the soil in the form of fertiliser.

Apart from us, there are lots of other animals like rodents and insects that want to eat the crops we grow for our food. To ensure that we have enough, we need to kill these pests. So we use pesticides -- chemicals specially designed to kill other living things that may be feeding on our crops.

But it’s not so simple: you can’t just put fertilisers and pesticides out in a field and expect everything to sort itself out. These substances don’t always stay where they belong. They get blown around in the wind and washed away by the rain to end up in rivers, oceans and lakes. From there they make it into our drinking water. Pesticides are powerful chemicals; they kill not just pests but other useful animals too, as well as poisoning humans. Because they are designed not to break down in open sunny fields they do not degrade easily. So they last and last and last. Today, pesticides are found in nearly every part of the earth, from the deepest oceans to Antarctica, slowly poisoning the entire world.

Fertilisers have the opposite problem. Because they are nutrients, they make plants grow where they are not wanted. For example, algae. These tiny water plants grow so fast when boosted by fertilisers that they can take over an entire stretch of river, killing every other plant or animal living there. They themselves then die because of overcrowding, and start to rot. Rotting uses up all the oxygen in the water, effectively making sure nothing else survives. This process, known as eutrophication, has been responsible for destroying entire lakes and river stretches and turning thousands of square kilometres of ocean into ‘dead zones’ where nothing else can grow.

In modern agriculture, growing food is treated like an industry much like making cars. You put in certain inputs, fertilisers and pesticides, and you get the desired output -- the crops. As in the manufacture of cars, nothing else matters except how efficiently you produce the output. Farms have turned into factories of sorts.

But soon people realised that growing crops without using fertiliser and pesticides would be a good thing. More and more farmers have begun switching over to what’s known as ‘organic farming’, as consumers want to eat food without destroying nature or poisoning thousands of other species.

Organic farming is healthier for the environment and for people who are not consuming pesticides along with their food. Many people also claim that organic food actually tastes a lot better than ‘industrial’ food does.
 
One of the major aspects of organic farming is that it views farming not as an industry but as a natural process that brings back the essential living relationship between us and what we grow. Organic farming uses natural ecological processes to grow food, and people become part of that healthy natural cycle.

Although the problems of nutrient depletion and pest attacks continue to exist, organic farming tackles them in a more natural way. For example, when a grain crop is grown it is usually the seed that is eaten while the rest of the plant is thrown away. Organic farmers often leave the crop waste in the field to allow it to rot and return to the earth, thus keeping nutrients in the field. Crops like legumes add nutrients such as nitrogen to the soil; these are planted in alternate years to allow the field to regenerate.

Another trick is to leave a field unplanted, or fallow, for a year so that it can regenerate. Also useful is to use natural fertilisers like cowdung and compost -- as was traditionally done before the invention of chemical fertilisers.

The problem of pests is tackled in a variety of ways. The most common is changing the crop yearly so that the pests do not have time to multiply in large enough numbers to seriously destroy the crop. Then again, many organic farmers use natural pest control using insects like ladybugs that eat aphids, a major crop pest. In any case, most organic farmers are willing to give up a small percentage of their yield to pests if it means growing environmentally friendly healthy foods.

Although the concept of organic farming is an old one, there has been the addition of some modern principles to it. The first is that organic farming today, in its attempt to respect nature, does not involve genetically modified (GM) plants. These are crop varieties that are not natural but have been designed in the laboratory by mixing the genes of various species. A gene is taken from one plant, or even an animal, and put into another one in the hope that it will result in a stronger or better-yielding plant variety. Many people think this is like playing god with living things and that once these plants are in the environment there will be no way to control them. They could interbreed with wild plants, thereby destroying many traditional species.

Another concern with GM crops is that of ownership. Nobody owns the seeds of traditional crops: a farmer owns all the grain and vegetables he grows, and he can do whatever he likes with them including keeping some to plant the next year. With GM crops, however, the seeds belong to the company that ‘invented’ them and so no one can plant them unless he/she buys them from the company.
 
The second new addition is non-vegetarian organic farming. These days, raising livestock for meat or milk or eggs has also become an industry, with the aim of growing the most amount of meat in the least amount of time. So, animals are put into tiny cages so that more of them can be ‘grown’ in less space; they are given large doses of medicine to stop them falling sick; they are also given ‘growth regulators’ to make them grow faster. Apart from giving animals a horrible life, all these chemicals finally end up inside us when we eat meat, eggs or milk.

Organic farming, when it deals with livestock, treats animals as living things and lets them grow naturally and at their own pace. 

Organic farming in India is slowly taking off. So far, it’s mostly small-scale but still a number of Indian organically-grown crops such as tea, coffee, spices, fruit and some cotton, rice, and sugarcane are already being shipped to other countries. One good sign is that states like Uttaranchal, Sikkim, Nagaland and Meghalaya have declared themselves to be ‘organic states’ and plan to eventually move all farming in that direction.

-- Manoj Nadkarni

InfoChange News & Features, June 2006