{"id":53028,"date":"2016-03-17T23:11:06","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T05:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=53028"},"modified":"2016-03-17T16:09:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T23:09:13","slug":"moving-from-conventional-farming-to-organic-farming-jumping-from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/03\/17\/moving-from-conventional-farming-to-organic-farming-jumping-from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving from conventional farming to Organic farming \u2013  Jumping from the frying pan into the fire?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><em><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong>\u00a0Chandre Dharmawardana, Ottawa, Canada.<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n<p>Most people assume, without further inquiry, that moving to traditional farming methods, or what is sometimes caleld organic farming\u201d, es essential to a ensure a healthy food supply and a sustainable future. Unfortunately, that view is too simplifitic and in fact wrong. Furthermore, a number of people have\u00a0 expresses surprise about my statement\u00a0 that &#8220;Organic fertilizers made by repeated composting of leaves can have dangerous amounts of metal toxins like Cd and As, as plants bio-accumulate them&#8221;,\u00a0 quoted from\u00a0\u00a0 &#8216;Wholesome agriculture&#8217; for a &#8216;toxin free nation&#8217;?\u00a0 (see: The Island 11\/03\/2016, or in the longer article in The Lankaweb, March 10th:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"kmmC4Zk0KU\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/03\/10\/whole-some-agriculture-for-a-toxin-free-nation\/\">\u00a0\u201cWhole-some agriculture\u201d for a \u201ctoxin-free nation\u201d ?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;\u00a0\u201cWhole-some agriculture\u201d for a \u201ctoxin-free nation\u201d ?&#8221; &#8212; LankaWeb.com\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/03\/10\/whole-some-agriculture-for-a-toxin-free-nation\/embed\/#?secret=gHXG0Gifgs#?secret=kmmC4Zk0KU\" data-secret=\"kmmC4Zk0KU\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Others have expressed surprise at the statement that Chemical analyzes of the soil, water and food have NOT revealed any relevant toxins from agrochemicals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The latter is the conclusion that we can derive from the world-health-organization (WHO) and Sri Lanka National-Science foundation (NSF) funded study (2013) of the Rajarata environment in the context of chronic kidney disease. The WHO-NSF issued a second report where they speculated on the possibility that there may be some risk from Cadmium toxins in the food. The latter has\u00a0 been questioned by subsequent studies, while the absence of metal toxins\u00a0 like Cd, As, lead etc., in the soil, water table, reservoirs and rivers has been established\u00a0 subsequent studies (after 2013) from the geology department, Peradeniya University,\u00a0 by the University of Tokyo and from other studies including those from an Australian study.<\/p>\n<p>Professor James McWilliams, a green\u201d advocate and author of\u00a0 Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong\u00a0 and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly\u201d writes:<\/p>\n<p>One issue &#8230; overlooked in the rush to\u00a0 embrace organic agriculture is the prevalence of excess arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, mercury, copper, and zinc in <strong>organic soil<\/strong>. Soil ecologists and environmentalists &#8230; have known for more than a century that \u2026 conventional farming leave heavy metals in the ground. But the fact that you&#8217;ll also find the same toxins in organic soil has been something of a dirty little secret\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>New Zealand is one of the biggest users of synthetic fertilizer, applying 1700 kg\/hectare in 2012. Other comparative figures (per hectare, World Bank data) are, Malaysia,1600, Singapore 3400, Holland 300, India 165, Sri Lanka 198,\u00a0 Nicaragua 50. Both Nicaragua and Sri Lanka have chronic kidney disease of unknown origin (CKDU). There are similar trends for glyphosate (herbicide) use. While Nicaragua uses very\u00a0 little fertilizer and glyphosate, New Zealand which uses more than 34 times has no CKDU.<\/p>\n<p>Singapore (3400)\u00a0 and especially Qatar (11,650)\u00a0 use enormous quantities of synthetic fertilizer while Quatar has to deal with a desert. Singapore attempts to make the most out of its small land area and use modern agriculture. There are parts of USA where the fertilizer use is even double that of New Zealand, but the overall national average is less than that in Europe.<\/p>\n<p>It is instructive to draw a map of Fertilizer and Glyphosate usage in the world, and also plot the incidence of kidney disease or cancer. It is clearly seen that there is no correlation of fertilizer or herbicide use with CKDU, Cancer\u00a0 or nay other disease. The fertilizers and glyphosate are not toxic enough to cause problems even if\u00a0 farmers did not use gloves\u00a0 and protective garments when applying these\u00a0 agro-chemicals. Meanwhile, the substitutes that have come on the market as safe\u201d alternatives are only safe because they are ineffective, or are used only in small domestic quantities.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Organic fertilizers.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Organic fertilizer\u201d or manure\u201d is made by composting plant matter,\u00a0 animal matter, kitchen and farm waste,\u00a0 river sludge, etc.\u00a0 Crushed minerals like phosphate rock are also included.\u00a0 Human night soil\u201d is\u00a0 included, especially in China. So, organic fertilizer will contain what ever toxins that are\u00a0 found in the soil, and in plant and animal matter used in the compost.\u00a0\u00a0 Perfectly\u00a0 virgin\u201d soils\u00a0 naturally contain small\u00a0 amounts of metal toxins like As, Cd, mercury, lead. Since\u00a0 plants don&#8217;t have kidneys\u201d, the toxins they absorb tend to accumulate in the plants. If plants are re-used in composting, the new compost will contain higher amounts of toxins.<\/p>\n<p>If the soil becomes toxic, plants themselves can be used to suck up the toxins and clean the soil. This is known as phyto-remediation. The sunflower (Helianthus annus, sooriya kaantha\u201d, curiyakantam),\u00a0\u00a0 Datura innoxia (Aththana, Vellaiyumattai), Water Hyacinth (Japan Jaabara, Akasathamarai) are three examples among many Sri lankan\u00a0 plants that accumulate metal toxins\u00a0 effectively. A detailed list of Sri lankan plants may be found at a website that the author maintains:<\/p>\n<p>( <a href=\"http:\/\/dh-web.org\/place.names\/bot2sinhala.html\">http:\/\/dh-web.org\/place.names\/bot2sinhala.html<\/a> ).\u00a0 Thus eating sunflower seed or using oil from plants grown in contaminated soil is inadvisable. But do you know from where your oil comes from, even if it is said to be organic\u201d? The same is true for most other foods, oils and nuts.<\/p>\n<p>The WHO study of the Rajarata\u00a0 in the context of the CKDU\u00a0 had\u00a0 identified lotus root\u00a0 as a toxin accumulator.\u00a0 Most plants bio-accumulate toxins, and compost made from them transfers the enriched toxins to the crops that are used in the next compost. Thus an enrichment chain gets set up.\u00a0 Organic farmers, naively\u00a0 confident of a\u00a0 healthy product of our fore-fathers\u201d, make no chemical analyzes of their organic manures or\u00a0 crops. But crops grown on such organic\u201d soils may be as contaminated or as safe as those from conventional farming. Hence such monitoring is essential for all soils, fertilizers and harvests, be it organic fertilizer, or synthetic fertilizer. The fore-fathers\u201d used slash-and burn chena\u201d cultivation exploiting the available forest land, and not composting, as they had ample forests and very small populations. Today we are trying to deal with a mono-culture of humans that have densely covered the earth&#8217;s surface. Drastic industrial methods are needed to feed all these billions of people, many being hungry even though the technology is there to feed them. Turing to organic farming to provide custom-made healthy\u201d food for the rich is to abandon the poor. In fact, as we have argued here, even the rich are fooling themselves when they think that organic food is necessarily healthier.<\/p>\n<p>The problems of organic farming\u201d is not well known because organic farming\u00a0 is still\u00a0 marginal. When it becomes capable of feeding even 1\/5 of the world population, it will show itself to be another monster, and that we have jumped from the frying pan into the fire on embracing organic farming.<\/p>\n<p>When\u00a0 organic farms are set up, complaints of smells\u201d, pollution of the water table\u00a0 etc., become common, because large amounts of fertilizer are needed compared to synthetic\u201d fertilizers. While a few tea-spoons of synthetic fertilizer suffice\u00a0 to grow a pineapple plant, many kilograms of organic manure are needed, contributing a larger amount of toxins, foul smells, and attracting flies and\u00a0 insects.\u00a0 Composting\u00a0 produces much\u00a0 methane and carbon dioxide,\u00a0 i.e., unwelcome\u00a0 green house gases.\u00a0 If\u00a0 house-hold bio-degradable garbage\u201d and\u00a0 meat have been used, the compost will\u00a0 contain pharmaceuticals, growth-hormones and other contaminants. Hence, backyard composting must be avoided. A central facilities where the methane is harvested as bio-gas without letting it escape to the atmosphere, with the compost\u00a0 reaching\u00a0 the needed temperatures to kill infectious bugs and foul smells is needed. Chemists\u00a0 can analyze the manure for metal toxins etc.,\u00a0 and\u00a0 bring\u00a0 them\u00a0 to the maximum allowed values (MALs) by dilution.\u00a0 Thus, providing safe\u00a0 organic compost manure\u201d containing certified amounts of N, P, K and\u00a0 trace plant nutrients is a very\u00a0 high tech\u201d\u00a0 operation which is\u00a0 as industrial as producing synthetic fertilizers\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The soil is mostly inorganic matter (sand, rock etc) but it is a complex ecosystem containing bacteria and bugs, worms etc that are vital to its health and nutritive capacity. But these bacterial have alos a negative metabolic effect. Bacteria working on the\u00a0 manure produces nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, I.e, unacceptable green-house gases. The same problem exists equally with synthetic fertilizer unless the soil is so acidic that it does not have much living matter, as may happen if it is used in excess. Suc soils are dead soils and such short-sighted, wasteful, environmentally dangerous\u00a0 practices should be put sharply down by the agricultural authorities.<\/p>\n<p>Since large amounts of organic fertilizer is needed, in comparison to synthetic fertilizer, there is more room for water wash off. Once the organic fertilizer is applied, the rains can carry of much of its organic nitrogen and phosphorous, in a manner even more drastic than with synthetic fertilizer. In December 2011, the environmental group Environment Maryland\u201d\u00a0 found that\u00a0 runoff from organic agricultural was polluting\u00a0 Chesapeake Bay (USA) and creating dead zones\u201d. This type of problem is becoming quite common with increasing installation of organic farming.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Synthetic\u201d (aka. Inorganic)\u00a0 fertilizers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Phosphate rock and potash rock\u00a0 used in Inorganic fertilizer\u00a0 contain naturally occurring toxins like As, Cd, Lead, mercury etc. Sri Lanka&#8217;s Eppawela phosphate, if used in a fertilizer mixture will add some 0.025mg of Arsenic per kilo of Eppawela added to the fertilizer mixture.\u00a0 Whether this will make the soil toxic or not depends on weather the optimal amount for the soil is used, or not. A virgin soill (like a newly opened chena\u201d) may not need ANY fertilizer. But most conventional farms need regular application of fertilizer, even with inter-cropping, inclusion of legumes etc. If fertilizers are not added to the soil, there will be no crop to harvest!<\/p>\n<p>Toxins from inorganic ore are easy\u00a0 to remove, whereas removing toxins from organic manure is much harder. Hence producing very clean synthetic fertilizers\u201d containing no toxins adds only a marginal costs. Many home-garden fertilizers are already of that category.\u00a0\u00a0 Thus a modern approach to conventional farming would\u00a0 be to use purified fertilizers, and that would still be much much cheaper and also safer than trying to go fully organic\u201d. If the organic fertilizer can be trusted to be free of toxins or antagonistic microbial strains, a blended fertilizer including inorganic and organic fertilizer has many attractive features.<\/p>\n<p>The Harber process harvests\u00a0 atmospheric\u00a0 nitrogen\u00a0 for synthetic fertilizers, while the phosphates and potash come from the earth. The world was saved\u201d of famines by this process commercialized\u00a0 by 1913. Perhaps 80% of the nitrogen in the body of most humans and even livestock living on the earth\u00a0 today is\u00a0 from the nitrogen coming from the synthetic Harber process!\u00a0 New\u00a0 Haber installations\u00a0 use solar energy, and\u00a0 avoid fossil fuels, and hence the accusation that they are based on fossil fuels\u201d is largely invalid.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Coal-power plants in Tamil Nadu.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Besides\u00a0 toxins from the soil, there are air borne toxins as well.\u00a0 Nearly\u00a0 fifty\u00a0 coal-fired power stations along the coast of Tamil Nadu spew out metal toxins and particulate gases, \u00a0brought southwards by the trade winds and monsoons.\u00a0 Some 1,15,000 premature deaths in India result\u00a0 from\u00a0 pollution due to coal-fired generators (Hindu, March 11, 2013). This number is much more than the deaths from kidney disease in the Rajarata. The environmental impact of Indian\u00a0 power plants on Sri lanka is unknown and it is urgent that those who talk of a toxin-free nation\u201d should immediately study it. The fact that these coal-power plants are across the ocean is irrelevant as some of them are near than Colombo is to Jaffna.\u00a0\u00a0 Sri Lanka too has coal-fired\u00a0 polluters in Sampur (known as Saamapura), and in Norochcholai, known in earlier times as Horagolla\u201d.\u00a0 Both organic\u00a0 and inorganic\u201d agriculture will be smothered by over-arching pollution from the Indian coal-fired generators, as well as\u00a0 from the ubiquitous pollution from petroleum fumes and other petro-chemicals. All these are class-I carcinogens (i.e., you definitely<\/p>\n<p>get cancer on exposure to them). Class-II carcinogens may give cancer at very high doses and long exposures.\u00a0 The Sri Lankan government has banned just one of the class-II carcinogens (Glyphosate),, while leaving most class-I carcinogens and\u00a0 all\u00a0 other class-II carcinogens untouched.<\/p>\n<p>Chandre Dharmawardana, Ottawa, Canada.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0Chandre Dharmawardana, Ottawa, Canada. Most people assume, without further inquiry, that moving to traditional farming methods, or what is sometimes caleld organic farming\u201d, es essential to a ensure a healthy food supply and a sustainable future. Unfortunately, that view is too simplifitic and in fact wrong. Furthermore, a number of people have\u00a0 expresses surprise about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chandre-dharmawardana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}