Gambling with our health and Environment
In India and all over the world, chemicals in food have become a norm rather than an exception. Chemical use in food production is considered an easier means to protect your crop compared to Organic farming methods. Chemicals destroy everything alive in the vicinity of the plants except the plant itself. But in the process, the chemicals also compromise the immune system of the plant which further increases the need for more chemicals.
This medium blog is about the lack of sustainability of chemical farming and the true state of it in India today.
There is this ongoing activity in the Industry for the last several decades to make fruits and vegetables cheaper and cheaper. This goes hand-in-hand with not looking deeper into how we can keep on pumping tonnage from soils without improving the soils. It's convenient to say its someone else’s problem. As long as we keep trading vegetables fruits and grains for a profit, who cares is the attitude.
Government statistics clearly indicate most of the farmlands of India have Soil Organic Matter (SOM) below 0.5%. This soil is as good as dead soil and it is a really good opportunity for Chemical companies to offer shortcuts to farmers via chemical inputs. If the soil does not have a three percent organic matter minimum, there is no point in farming at all. Please note that your soil will not magically get to 3% organic matter. The farmer needs to make efforts to get the soil there and maintain it there are move it further up to 5 or more. In temperate regions, without mulching, soils can achieve 12 percent SOM before nitrate leaching can happen because of excess organic matter.
The nutrients needed for plants can never be made available by soluble fertilizers on a consistent basis. Not even the best soil scientist except GOD knows how much each plant needs daily as its food from the soil. Nature has calculated it and has evolved the soil microorganisms in coherence with plant root systems over millions of years. Human beings have evolved along with these plants and microbes. Our body has more microbes than you can imagine. We cannot suddenly start eating food grown in the water and think that it's still healthy. Many key micronutrients in needed proportions are added by nature to the plants which in turn become our food. Humans cannot design plant nutrition as well as nature does and in our stupidity, we think we can and do millions of dollars of blunder, stating that its clean food and uses less water, etc. No-till agriculture with soil takes up almost no water. Its a better answer to the world’s food production that growing food in water and sometimes with LED lights (wow!!) instead of natural sunlight.
You cannot suddenly grow plants in water and artificially feed the crops with chemical concoctions and bypass nature’s way of doing things through millions of years of evolution. Breaking this beautiful relationship between soil bacteria and plant root systems is as good as blowing an atom bomb in the food system. Adding chemicals to the soil as growing media instead of water is just glorified hydroponics and nothing more.
Comparing organic farming with chemical farming is another ugly practice that is going on in India. We know that organic farming means building soil. But organic certification does not involve soil test results for Soil Organic Matter or Soil humic content. How can we say organic food is good for you if you do not know anything about the soil that grows it??
Why are customers not asking questions about the soil? Why are they not asking about who grew the product? How can a piece of paper called a certificate takes care of all the concerns of the customer?
Have we as customers wondered what it takes to grow a healthy product we call a fruit or vegetable or grain? Have we asked all the right questions? We do not have time to consume all the food we buy from the market and end up throwing some good food in the garbage because our lives got busy. How are we going to find the time to find out more about who grew it?
Consider this. The average so-called organic farmer in India is in one or more of the following categories today.
- Efficient than I can imagine because he is selling at dirt-cheap prices and surviving the market forces.
- Victim (farmer has no choice but accept a low price for his product because he does not have a truck or a direct to home customer base ready to buy from him at a fair price)
- Ignorant ( farmer does not do the math, no knowledge of finances and managing finances)
- Side income to support farming (goes in and out of farming due to losses incurred by selling into the unfair market)
- Borrowing from the future (unsustainable organic methods or using products not allowed such as chicken manure from chicken farms using antibiotics which many organic farmers I know buy and use)
- Cheating (Buy from mandi or other chemical farmers and sell it as organic)
Looking at the current state of the Organic Food Industry in India, I believe that both the farmer and customer need a lot of help in the form of awareness and education.
What is laughable is that people who have started companies in Agritech sector to help farmers grow food with chemical inputs, claim that organic farming is not scalable and not sustainable. Then why is the worldwide organic market more than $100 billion in sales in 2018 ?? They also go to the extent of claiming that food grown with chemicals, but with limited quantities of chemicals is “safe food”. That is their new definition of safe food. Is this not pathetic to make such claims? Have you read the book “The myth of safe pesticides”? Please read it to find out the truth about food safety.
Thank you for reading this blog.
-Shankar Venkataraman, Lead Farmer, Founder, and CEO at Mapletree farms.
