While we don’t have to worry about starvation like the Irish due to lack of crop diversity, it is interesting that we are seeing the same mold that caused the Irish Potato Famine widespread in the USA now. – Anthony
Potato famine disease striking home gardens in U.S.
Reuters – Dark brown lesions on stems, with white fungal growth developing under moist conditions, are characteristic … By Julie Steenhuysen Julie Steenhuysen – Fri Jul 10, 5:22 pm ET
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Late blight, which caused the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and 1850s, is killing potato and tomato plants in home gardens from Maine to Ohio and threatening commercial and organic farms, U.S. plant scientists said on Friday.
“Late blight has never occurred this early and this widespread in the United States,” said Meg McGrath, a plant pathologist at Cornell University’s extension center in Riverhead, New York.
She said the fungal disease, spread by spores carried in the air, has made its way into the garden centers of large retail chains in the Northeastern United States.
“Wal-mart, Home Depot, Sears, Kmart and Lowe’s are some of the stores the plants have been seen in,” McGrath said in a telephone interview.
The disease, known officially as Phytophthora infestans, causes large mold-ringed olive-green or brown spots on plant leaves, blackened stems, and can quickly wipe out weeks of tender care in a home garden.
McGrath said in her 21 years of research, she has only seen five outbreaks in the United States. The destructive disease can spread rapidly in cooler, moist weather, infecting an entire field within days.
“What’s unique about it this year is we have never seen plants affected in garden centers being sold to home gardeners,” she said.
This year’s cool, wet weather created perfect conditions for the disease. “Hopefully, it will turn sunny,” McGrath said. “If we get into our real summer hot dry weather, this disease is going to slow way down.”
FUNGICIDES WILL CONTROL BLIGHT
According to its website, the University Maryland’s Plant Diagnostic Lab got a suspect tomato sample as early as June 12, very early in the tomato growing season, which runs from April-September.
McGrath said the risk is that many gardeners will not recognize it, putting commercial farms and especially organic growers at risk.
“My concern is for growers. They are going to have to put a lot more time and effort in trying to control the disease. It’s going to be a very tough year,” she said.
“This pathogen can move great distances in the air. It often does little jumps, but it can make some big leaps.”
McGrath said the impact on the farmer will depend on how much the pathogen is spread. “Eastern New York is seeing a lot of disease,” she said.
She said commercial farmers will be able to use fungicides containing chlorothalonil to control the blight.
And while some sprays have also been approved for organic use, many organic farmers do not use them, making it much harder to control.
“If they are not on top of this right from the very beginning, it can go very fast,” she said.
Pamela Gray (11:07:50) “. . . link for a short course on trade winds and oceanic oscillations. . .”
The text in this link is confused. Names and locations are not right. Trade winds do not come from the Gulf of Mexico to the western US and “The same trade winds usually sweep westwards over the continent and the Pacific, picking up moisture from that ocean as they go, before doubling back and carrying their watery cargo back towards the United States in the upper atmosphere.”
There are such things as Sub-tropical high pressure cells and Westerlies in the areas attributed to the trade winds in this link. Maybe the model has these things, I don’t know.
Jimmy Haigh (17:40:58) : Bordeaux Mixture
a jones (08:49:21) :
It was reputedly discovered when a Bordeaux grape grower applied a copper/lime mixture to his areas of the vineyard close to the roads to discourage passers-by from helping themselves.
From/more here: http://www.farmwest.com/index.cfm?method=pages.showPage&pageid=609
Gentian Blue, or Gentian Violet is a powerful natural dye and effective anti-fungal which is also seemingly safe in its usual application topically intraorally for thrush, which is monilial, a fungal infection. Its stain is tough, but not permanent on living epithelium.
Andrew Zalotocky (17:09:19) :
Thanks for the pointing out the Spectator article. My favourite quote from it has to be
“…I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses.”
ohioholic (09:09:44) : Weather is not climate.
Unfortunately, the official definition of “climate” as a 30 year interval is weather, IMHO. If you live in a high Mountain Alpine climate, you do not suddenly end up in a Cool Desert climate without some serious change of geography. This, however, does not show up in the “30 year average weather” that is use used to define “climate” for “climate researchers”.
When I look at the individual definition of climate zones and types, I see nothing that says “weather averaged over 30 years gives a mediterranean climate” but rather see things that talk about altitude, distance from the ocean, wetness levels, vegetation (forest / desert ), snow persistence, etc.
It is irksome that the “30 years average weather” is equated to climate, since unless you move the continents around a fair amount, Italy has had a Mediterranean Climate type despite the Iron Age Cold Period, the Roman Optimum, the Little Ice Age, etc.
So I’m left to conclude that, as used in the AGW debate, Climate is, in fact, weather. Just a 30 year average of weather and unrelated to climate zones and other uses of the word climate as traditionally defined.
bill (12:41:56) :
Please check the facts:
From wiki:
Sorry, bill, but you make your first error right there.
Wiki is not a source of facts, it is only a source of opinion. “Consensus” if you will.
From what I’ve seen, it is a reflection of whatever pressure group has the most motivated advocates for their propaganda.
Now, sometimes, it seems to have the facts straight, but then in a week or so it can be re-written by some pressure group or emotional advocate, so even then you can’t trust a reference link to stay unpolluted. Sorry.
I was an early advocate for Wiki, but got to watch the communal barn raising turn into a ritual barn burning one time too many … like what was done to the Jevons Paradox page.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/jevons-paradox-coal-oil-conservation/
There are several environmental conditions that are conducive to P. infestans. […]
20 °C (68 °F) and 75% […]
10 °C (50 °F) or above and on each day at least 11 hours when the relative humidity is greater than 90%.
The temperature has to be ABOVE 10C/20C and humid.
It is not cold damp conditions!
Don’t know where you are from, but 50 to 68 F with 75% or more RH is cold and damp! at least by the standards of folks from California through central Texas… I can’t personally attest to what a New Englander calls cold / damp. I can say that my Florida friends seem to think anything less than a thunderstorm is “low humidity” 😉 but they also think anything less than 80F is “cool” … then again, I met a guy from Alaska once who thought that anything over 50F was “warm”, so maybe you’re from Alaska?
At any rate, much of the west, central and south USA can easily have 90 F to 100 F plus temperatures in the middle of summer. Frankly, I don’t feel like summer has really gotten going unless it’s well into the 90s and preferably 100F+ for a good stretch of time. So from that perspective, it is “cold and damp” right now in the areas in question, when compared to what it usually is expected to be.
I will look more closely at tomato and potato plants sold in stores. Thanks for the post.
pkatt (12:46:38) :
Blight and diseases are the problem with most of the monoculture plants we create in the United States. Diversity has been lost and we are set up for a grape vine style die off for wheat, corn, soy, tomatoes and potatoes. Since GMO (gene modified organisms) plants carry a dominant gene, even if you plant diversity too near a gmo field, you end up with gmo plants.
Oh and did you know that the definition of organic has been changed to include GMOs? Control the food, control the world.
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~agroeco3/index.html
pkatt,
I remember a documentary a few months ago about a foundation in Belgium or the Netherlands that specialized in “forgotten vegetables and crops”.
They study the vegetables and crop grown during the little ice age up to the fifties and sell seeds for those interested planters and hobby gardners to plant them.
I will try to find the contact information of the foundation if anyone is interested.
P.s I did a quick search:
http://dutchfood.about.com/od/aboutdutchcooking/a/ForgottenVeg.htm
http://www.vergetengroenten.be/
For more information, google “forgotten food crops”
Arthur Glass (13:35:04) : Couldn’t plants be genetically engineered to be more blight- and drought- resistant? I would suspect that is well within the abilities of current bio-engineering.
It doesn’t require bio-engineering, just plain old plant breeding. But remember that Darwin is at work here too, and the “bug” keeps finding new ways past the defenses if at all possible… Part of the cause of the potato famine was a dependence on the Lumper, a potato that was particularly prone to turning to mush when infected. There are other potato types that do not do that. In the native environment, the potato is highly variable and this helps it withstand such attacks and helps it change as the bugs change.
FWIW, I’ve grown a few potatoes from potato SEEDS (NOT seed potatoes – the actual seeds from the FRUIT of the potato plant. They do flower, just rarely) specifically to make my mix of potatoes more genetically diverse. Potatoes are a bit like apples in that what you get from the seeds can be very different from the parent tuber… You don’t preserve a variety this way, you make a mix of new types.
Then again, I run a tough garden. I’ve got one square where the potatoes have to grow up through Bermuda Grass (!). The Bermuda overran it, and I decided to abandon it and not bother weeding it out (was too busy with some family issues). The end result was the survivors are one sturdy type of potato. Naturalized about 4 years now under bermuda… I’m going to “reward” them with a new square some time this year after the tops die back. Oh, and one of them made flowers and fruit this year, so I’m saving those seeds too. It is this kind of thing that can give you a potato that does not need a lot of tending and stands up to blight, or weeds, or bugs…
BTW, to the person who said to never grow potatoes and tomatoes in the same garden (and folks who also say to never grow tobacco and tomatoes):
I regularly grow all three together. Not in the same square, but within 10 feet of each other. No problems. Maybe it’s a California thing… then again, Dad was from Iowa and his dad was from Pennsylvania and they grew tomatoes and potatoes together. On a traditional family farm like they had, if you would eat tomatoes and potatoes you had to grow them both. And they did. My tobacco was started from seeds and has no tobacco mosaic virus in it, so it is not a threat to the tomatoes.
On the heels of the salmonella-spinach scare of last year, Isn’t this another black eye at least for large-scale ‘organic’ farming? The prudent use of chemical pesticides is surely one of the major guarantors of the food supply in a market of 300 million people.
I’m more or less neutral on the issue of “organic”. I buy what looks good, organic or not, as the mood takes me. Pesticides can work wonders. Yet it is quite possible to grow abundant crops without them, it just takes more work. More crop rotations, weed kill with flame throwers rather than chemicals, hand weeding once the crop is up, companion planting and more.
For example, I’ve discovered that a tobacco plant near my garden has seriously reduced the leaf miners that in the past had hit my leafy greens this time of year. Inspection of the underside of the leaves shows a lot of little bug eggs. All dead from the nicotine …
I don’t know what the “organic” approach is to blight or fungus issues, but I would guess that with the larger labor pool and close attention to the crops, the first sight of it would result in the infected plant being rapidly removed and burned, reducing the spread. I could also imagine more active pruning to keep the humidity down and open the plants up to sun and wind more. While I don’t know all the “magic” that the pros use, these folks list a variety of “organic fungicides”:
http://www.planetnatural.com/site/xdpy/kb/organic-fungicides.html
I use nothing (other than an occasional bit of fertilizer) in my garden. Not because I’m hung up on it, but because I accidentally stumbled into it. One year I got fed up with fighting the insects and just stopped spraying. Next year the bugs got a lot of the garden. 2 years later I had a crop of wasps and spiders keeping the place “cleaned up”. Haven’t needed to change that relationship since… Now I have essentially no pest problem (other than some sporadic aphids for a brief time).
Oh, and a ‘Possum moved in under the shed and cleaned out the snails too. I’d done snail bait for 10 years+ with little to show for it, after 2 years without it, Ms. ‘Possum moved in. End of problem. And each year we get to watch the baby ‘possums grow up and move out. They are darned cute when they are little. The ‘possum cleans up the cat food that the cats think is too old to eat. We just rotate the dish out to near the shed when the cat turns it’s nose up. Cat is happy with fresh food. ‘Possum is happy. I’m happy because I’m not “wasting cat food” tossing it out for a picky cat…
So I run a more or less organic garden, but simply because it is LESS work and I’m getting MORE produce this way. I’ve also “let go” of some plants that I can’t get to work without sprays (my apples get worms if not sprayed). Again, not from some zeal, but mostly just lazyness. So I grow citrus that needs no spray here. There is probably some organic process I could learn to do the apples, but I haven’t had the time. So the rabbits and ‘possums get the apples.
Now I’ve been in East Texas in summer when the bugs were so thick you needed machete to cut your way from the car to the gas pump (only a slight bit of hyperbole – it was evening at the gas station and it looked like a downpour of rain, except it was bugs and they were flying in circles, not falling…) and I can’t imagine how one would do gardening there without bug spray. But I figure the folks there do know. My wife was horrified and would not get out of the car, but I had to… we needed gas. It was an “interesting experience”… there were at least 5 kinds of bug in the fog of them. Probably a lot more, but I was busy keeping them off my face and out of my collar while I pumped the gas and not doing a population count. If I farmed there I would probably own Dow Chemical stock 😉
BTW, my Amish ancestors and relatives did, and do, just fine without modern chemical farming. Again, it just takes more work sometimes and a more finely tuned sense of what is going on at other times. One example? My dad trained an English Retriever to pick tomato horn worms off the vines. He would just send her out with the command “Get the Worms! Get ’em!” (she was white with tan patches) and she would pick them off and bite them in half… then come back when she was done, all light green with tan patches and smelling of tomatoes! She loved doing it too.
Since I’ve had the wasps working over the garden, I’ve not had any tomato worms to deal with. So I leave the wasp nests under the eaves of the house and everybody is happy. I’ve learned that if a wasp is looking me over, they are just checking me out for aphids, worms and beetles, and will soon wander off. No worries.
My neighbors are ‘hard core’ organic. Have a “farm share”. I went to the annual party at “their farm” with about 100 other farm share members and got a tour of the place. Highly productive farm with a variety of mixed crops. The biggest difference? They have a staff of workers year round. If they find an infestation of anything starting, they deal with it very fast. More labor, less chemicals.
BTW, Salmonella is orthogonal to the organic question. You will find salmonella just about anywhere. If you have surface water, you will likely find salmonella in it. What causes some bit of it to cause illness for some folks is unclear, but the source is often traced back to the “wash water” rather than to the field. IIRC, the recent issue with salmonella here in California was not one of organic spinach, it was ordinary spinach.
There was one batch of problems traced to a facility in Mexico where they refilled the wash water from a non-treated well source (rather than the approved treated water) and got an outbreak. The offending faucet was removed in some way. ANY vegetables run through that packing facility would have been contaminated (and were, which was part of how they figured it out… the diversity of foods causing illness all had one common transit point.)
A final note: Organic does not mean “no pesticides”, it means “natural pesticides”. So a “tea” made from a plant with a natural insecticide can be used. “Tobacco tea” works in this way (the nicotine is a natural insecticide). Similarly, you can use simple soapy water to kill aphids (and some other soft bodied bugs). There are others, too, but I don’t know them all.
There are also strategies where you plant a ring of one crop around another (either to drive the pests off or to attract them to the outside ring that is not harvested or is burned off / ploughed under). IIRC, Chrysanthemums can be used as an insecticide in this way and onions? repel some pests.
Basically, being an organic farmer is not about lower yields, it is about more complex farming practices. Often you get more yield or you get more yield per dollar spent. It’s just one heck of a lot more complicated to do it “old school” than it is to pay Sam’s Sprayers to dump a load of chemicals on the field and go watch the game on TV…
Francis (18:47:13) :
“McGrath said in her 21 years of research, she has only seen five outbreaks in the United States.”
So, this is the 5th outbreak since 1988.
You conveniently left off what she said after that:
“What’s unique about it this year is we have never seen plants affected in garden centers being sold to home gardeners,” she said.
This year’s cool, wet weather created perfect conditions for the disease.
But, what does she know, being just a plant pathologist.
So, we are not dealing with the cooler temperatures in Europe, back in 1850.
Nice straw man. No one said we were back to 1850 temperature-wise. Not yet, anyway.
And maybe its just the relatively cooler temperatures of a La Nina event…
Ah, so it is cooling, but it’s just because of a La Nina. Got it.
Maybe increased blight is to be expected if GW increases!!!
So, as GW increases, you get cool, wet weather, which then causes the blight. Fascinating.
So…what else is new…besides the higher temperatures?
And there you have it folks. Cooling is warming. You can all just throw your thermometers away.
John A (16:36:07) : So its not a stretch to say that the organic food fad has put the stability of basic foodstuffs at risk and that prices will rise.
John A, I don’t know where you are coming from with this, but it’s just wrong.
First off, even conventional farmers can lose a whole crop. When it rains up near Chico at the wrong time in August, you can hear the crop dusters working overtime to put down sulphur dust on the peaches. Doesn’t always work, and some times some farmers lose their whole crop. That’s just part of being a farmer. Hail. Wind. Rain. Lack of rain.
Chose the wrong crop, or the wrong techniques, or just have an unlucky season and you are in a word of hurt. Bugs are only one of a long list of risks.
Further, any organic farmer is very unlikely to have a single crop going. By the nature of the process it works better with a farm of many mixed crops. The guy at greatest risk of “going under” is the “conventional” farmer with a monoculture dependent on specific chemicals to keep it alive. See the history of the corn rust outbreak of the ’70s (IIRC… but it might have been the early ’80s) where we were on the edge of losing the entire US corn crop because it was all the same cultivar and a fungus figured out how to eat it… State after state had total failures. We were lucky enough that a different resistant cultivar could be planted the next year (after some work), but the risks of monoculture are gigantic. Not so organic farming where diversity of varieties is a hallmark.
Oh, and there is nothing about GM crops that prevents failure either:
https://www.kitcomm.com/archive/index.php?t-39445.html
talks about a massive crop failure in South Africa because, per Monsanto, they had a little problem in the lab when they were cooking up the seeds…
Finally, the organic component of our farm produce is so small a part, and so specialized a market, that it has effectively no impact on prices, and certainly none on “basic foodstuffs” or bulk products like wheat, corn, soybeans, etc. Those prices are based off the conventional suppliers, not the organic stuff that costs more already. Organic farming is a specialized and SEPARATE market from conventional. At most, a widespread failure of an organic product could only raise the price of the organic alternatives.
Clearly you have some kind of hang up about organic farming. Fine, don’t eat it. But there is no reason to disparage those folks who do want to eat foods produced with the minimum of chemicals and genetic mischief.
If the only way I can get foods is to have them soaked in malathion, well, I’m OK with that, I grew up in farm country eating things with lots of sprays on them (and mixing tanks of the stuff and slopping it all over me and playing in the “fog” behind the mosquito trucks and… lets just say I’m not real worried about it.) At the same time if someone is worried for some reason, and wants to pay an extra nickel to get a tomato with no spray on it, I’m fine with that too.
There is a particular joy to sitting up to your eyeballs in a tomato patch with salt shaker in one hand and jello soft ripe tomato in the other with no worries about washing it or “what’s on it”… If someone wants to try and capture a bit of that experience at home without a garden, well, good on ’em!
Jim (18:01:39) :
henrychance (15:29:34) : I know someone who is a decent person in almost every way. But not long ago asked where “organic dirt” could be obtained. For me, that was the ultimate in goofy environmentalism.
Goofy yes, but no more goofy than the “organic” word itself. I still cringe at it. My sense of “organic” is firmly rooted in my “organic chemistry” class… I have trouble talking about “non-organic” food, since it all has carbon in it; so I typically say “conventional” instead.
At any rate, just as “organic” has a legal definition for farming and foods that is not the same as the common meaning, so would “organic dirt”. It is dirt that has not had pesticides and some other list of things done for some number of years. For a farm to put “organic” on it’s products, it must farm with “organic” methods for some number of years until the legal presumption that the “icky stuff” has washed away is met, then the dirt is “organic” and the farm call call the produce “organic”. I think it was about 3 years?
So you friend was just using a term of art in a correct way, but it’s a goofy term of art…
Just to add to Michael Ronayne: the idea that the Irish were too stupid to grow anything else was a bit of propaganda as it was clearly not so. They grew wheat. In large quantites. But couldn’t eat it as this was how they paid tax. So when the blight came and destroyed the potatoes, they starved to death as the landlords (or most of them) wouldn’t reduce the tax and let them use the wheat to live. A very fine hour for the British Crown. if any of you get a chance you should got to Achill Island in the west and see the graves and the Deserted Village.
How do I know this? Well I was taught it in school in Belfast and I’ve been diving in Achill.
Also the ‘luck of the Irish’ means a lot of things. It is commonly a misconception to being stupid and just lucky where as a lot of the time it means we just play stupid and lucky when we are actually very good at what we do. So really there’s no luck there at all. Its all skill. You may have heard the saying: If it wasn’t for drink, the Irish would have conquered the world, or come to think of it seen the Family Guy sketch about it. Life is too short to not have any craic.
Geoff Sherrington (19:11:31) : I go ballistic when I read of the oh-so-trendy “organic farming” gurus spreading pest and disease through pig ignorance.
Geoff, I think you are mixing two different things here. One is your obvious upset at rules that mandate an “organic” approach. The other is your assertion that the organic methods are less workable or somehow bad.
Please try to divorce those two from each other.
Clearly the EU Thought Police are trying to cram “organic” methods down folks throats and that is wrong. It is a consequence of taking the decision making out of the hands of the individuals and putting it in the hand of petty commissioners. Banning the use of proven working products is generally a bad idea, IMHO.
But at the same time, there is no need for every single farmer to soak ever bit of spud in fungicides! I’ve grown potatoes for years with no problems and with no sprays or fungicides at all. Now partly that’s because I have a small isolated plot and only use my own (clean) seed stocks and partly it’s probably because California is a climate that does not lend itself to molds and fungi (a bit on the dry side). But other “organic farmers” do well too, given the bags of their produce I see in Whole Foods stores. Please see the link in my earlier posting that points to a list of “organic fungicides”…
“Since EU policies are aimed at supporting an expansion of organic production, a replacement for copper containing and other chemical fungicides is urgently required”
There is your basic, and real, problem. “EU Policies”. Not some isolated organic farmer. It’s the “one size fits all, even if it has holes in it” EU method that is wrong, not the guy with a patch of spray free food.
“resulting from poorer control could also influence blight epidemics in neighbouring conventional farms and threaten conventional production systems.”
This is an assumption on your part. From what I’ve seen, the organic guys (at least the ones that stay in business!) are pretty darned good about controlling “epidemics”. They are in their fields much more often and much more diligently remove diseased plants. That is one of their major methods of controlling problems without sprays. They must do that to succeed.
“An integrated systems approach to late blight management in organic systems that eliminates or reduces the need for copper-based fungicides could solve these problems. Such an approach should integrate use of (i) resistant varieties, (ii) agronomic strategies (iii) alternative treatments and (iv) optimise their effectiveness by utilising existing blight forecasting systems and aim to maximise synergistic interactions between these components.”
wtf does that mean?
OK, I’ll translate it:
Instead of using a chemical spray with a complex organic molecules of unknown impact on people, or containing lots of copper than can kill some kinds of aquatic life, we can use other means. The other means have to be used in a set or “suite” of complimentary things, since one alone is not enough. One of those things is to start with varieties that are already genetically resistant. Then we use some “agronomic strategies” that can include things like what is planted nearby, how the plants are pruned, what crop rotations happen, how seed is saved, and any other aspect of the agronomy system that helps control the pests (such as mandatory uprooting, immediate poly bagging, and burning of any infected plant daily). There are alternative effective treatments to copper, and those can be used. Finally, knowing when blight is more likely lets you know when to step up the pace of these actions for best results.
All very reasonable, IMHO. The only unreasonable part I see is an EU wide mandate that you must do things this way. Then again, I don’t know what copper runoff might be doing to aquatic life there.
Would you be as strongly emotive about it all if those were voluntary or were guidelines for Organic but not conventional farmers?
For the sake of sanity, why not use the professonal resources of educated chemists who have devised effective, mostly organic chemicals to reduce the harm of this oomycete?
And you don’t think that the organic techniques are produced using “the professional resources of educated” folks? This isn’t just a bunch of hippies trying their hand at farming in a back to the land movement… There are plenty of experienced farmers, some with multiple generations of experience, along with lot of folks with Masters and PhD degrees in the pertinent fields.
What makes me ropable is that the simple minds of the organic farmers (who want to ban even the limited success of copper teatment, while being a bit vacant about treatment regimes) have already caused the banning, the deregistration, of several potentially useful chemicals.
Again, I see this as an issue only IFF you are required to farm that way. It is not a problem for the Organic guys to define they way THEY want to farm. It does become a problem when the EU rules force the conventional guys to take that road too.
So you have a problem because the EU wants to over regulate, not because the organic potato farmer is willing to do a heck of a lot more work to avoid using chemicals while still getting a healthy crop. Notice that the organic guy does not survive if his crop fails too often… so he is not interested in techniques that don’t work. He’s just interested in non-chemical techniques that work. The conflict comes from forcing everyone down that single path.
This is why markets work better than central planning and regulatory agencies. One size does NOT fill all. Never has. Never will.
Cool and wet? Ask Texas how cool and wet it is there!
E.M.Smith (07:07:06) :
1. I believe the point of defining 30 years as “climate” is because that is long enough to detect a trend.
2. If organic farming is so hot, how did we increase the yield per acre by four times since 1866. It is easy for you to say organic farming can out-produce technology assisted farming, but show me proof. Where’s the study that confirms that. We are and have been a well-fed nation. Our life expectancy had gone way up, and not all of that is medicine – after all, all the liberal know the US lags in medical care. Frankly, I’ll have the cheap veggies thank you.
QUICK, more regulations and taxes!!
When in doubt, regulate and tax.
I hesitate to be a conspiracy theorist, but I read so many stories about food famines and diseases that I do wonder sometimes if malignant agencies will be doing this, be that releasing Swine Flu in Mexico or Phytophtera in the USA.
Not saying they are, it’s just that the way the media is nowadays, you might occasionally think so………
E.M.Smith (07:07:06) :
Goofy yes, but no more goofy than the “organic” word itself. I still cringe at it. My sense of “organic” is firmly rooted in my “organic chemistry” class… I have trouble talking about “non-organic” food, since it all has carbon in it; so I typically say “conventional” instead.
I agree with this. When some clients ask me about what organic food is, I have no other explanation except that perhaps “organic” is referring to food which has been produced by old-fashioned technology, specifying that it is produced without the use of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, hormones, etc. I could not enlarge more confusion to the issue, so I tell them what a real organic compound is, that is, any molecule which contains an atom of carbon in its structure.
The same problem was set off on traditional medicine, i.e. herbal medicine. People working in phytochemistry call it “natural” medicine; however, all medicines are natural, so the label “natural” is baffling. That is not the language of science.
Regarding the treatment of potatoes crops with biocides, I think is a major mistake. When using Amphotericine B or other fungicidal products on crops, farmers are also affecting mycorrhiza, which is a symbiotic organism essential for the development of many valuable plants, especially, leguminous plants. The best methodologies for avoiding plagues are mixed crops and rotative crops.
Rhys Jaggar (08:36:06):
You forgot to mention deliberate non controlled forest fires. AGW prophecies must be fulfilled, aha?
No, no conspiracy, but idiotic radical environmentalists, whose projects of life are based on what it is into your wallet through scaring you.
Jim (08:10:28) :
2. If organic farming is so hot, how did we increase the yield per acre by four times since 1866. It is easy for you to say organic farming can out-produce technology assisted farming, but show me proof.
Jim we buy an organic “veggie box” every week. It costs perhaps 0% to 10% more than supermarket standard non-organic. If non-organic was 4 times cheaper to produce but costs similar for the end user then there is something seriously wrong with the distribution of profits.
With the box you do get more size variabi;ity, the odd strange shaped carrot but does this matter?
Your 4 times increase is of course partialy due to better crop varieties, but these are available to organic producers too.
What Gore et al. might say about blight infection… “It is well known that Global Warming produces crop failure and blight during the hot summer months… OUR models have shown it clearly.”
bill (11:49:07) :
Well, it seems you must be getting one heck of a bargain. Either that or you “conventional” grocery is a 7/11.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Consumers+willing+to+pay+a+premium+for+organic+produce.-a0200409391
bill (11:49:07) : You may have highlighted a situation where “organically grown” produce is competitive, but by and large it is not competitive with traditionally raised produce. Even 10% more is too much. This “organic” thing is similar to the “global warming” thing in that there is no empirical evidence for either of them. Global warming is predicted by models and shown by corrupted data sets, there is no reliable empirical data showing that the warming we see from time to time is caused by CO2, much less that it will cause any kind of problem. There is no empirical data that shows our traditionally grown crops are bad or that the “organic” ones are better. Both cases are driven largely by hysteria on the part of the “common people.” Other motivations are there for politicians and overzealous environmentalists.
Indeed that is how Bordeaux Mixture got its name but its discovery and/or invention is obscure exept that it seems to have been developed in the 1850’s to deal with potato blight: whereas it’s relative Burgundy Mixture, which uses sodium carbonate instead of slaked lime, did not appear until the 1870s.
And I would point out in the UK at least all the various organic certification organisations do permit the use of copper but NOT modern chemical agents.
Ever so natural that.
But if people want to spend their money buying inferior products because they believe it gets them closer to nature or whatever I have no objection.
Me I prefer to buy the cheaper, better and safer product of modern technology.
But then I like steam engines but do not suggest they are some kind of answer to making modern automobiles, as was suggested in the 1970s, just as electric cars were both then and now. And don’t work very well either: then or now.
No the appeal of this kind of steam technology is that it is a curiosity of a bygone age.
And by the way nicotine is a very useful pesticide, cheap, effective and of course biodegradable. In the UK it is still available commercially in various forms but the retail sale of tincture of nicotine, essentially nicotine dissolved in alcohol, was banned years ago not least because it is extremely toxic.
In the cigarette smoking age of fifty years ago this was not a problem, the gardener simply collected the butts and boiled them up, strained the liquor and added a few soap flakes: and did the pests to death by spraying it regularly.
In these modern times when tobacco is expensive and butts scarce you can extract the nicotine from rolling or pipe tobacco by steeping it in warm water with a little ethyl alcohol, cheap vodka is best, BUT be careful the concentrated liquor is quite poisonous: but a little added to water with a trace of washing up liquid makes a very good pesticide for spraying on your roses and such like.
Kindest Regards