News Headlines

A View on Growing Things Organically

Before World War 2, ALL gardening was 'organic', as there were no chemical fertilisers until discoveries were made during the administering of bomb production and subsequent dropping of said bombs on innocent peoples heads.

Back in the late 60's early 70's, when growing things naturally started to attract a ground-swell of interest and was subsequently given the title of 'organic gardening' (previously known as plain old 'gardening'); there was a knee-jerk reaction by people who could not quite grasp the idea (amazing, isn't it?) - that led to the rather erroneous belief that in order to be an 'organic grower', one had to dance around naked under a full moon, replete with tamborines, candles, chanting and flowers in the hair, in order to understand this mysterious 'organic' mumbo-jumbo.

Room was even made for articles in popular magazines, albeit tongue-in-cheek, about this new 'hippy hobby'. Even today, in these supposedly enlightened years, there are many who just don't trust all that hippy-shit.

The general belief being, that if produce is not enormous, shiny, not a mark on it, and under vision altering lights - surely it just cannot be all that good.

There is not much variety with organic produce, either! It's always lots of cabbages and daikons, then in summer, you just cannot see over the piles of tomatoes and beans.

The concept of seasonal produce will never catch on.

Modern consumers are too used to getting whatever they want, whenever they want it.

Let us not forget, either, that organic produce is more expensive to buy.

Yes.... it costs more, it's smaller - and well, just doesn't look as good, does it?

Then things get really tricky, if, as is fairly common knowledge, supermarket produce gets more and more expensive, due to the expense of increased use of fertilisers, insecticides, chemicals in general and freight costs; why then is organic produce STILL more expensive if they don't use those things?

The cost of water goes up every quarter, but organic growers use lots and lots of mulch, ground covers and the like, using less water, so THAT can't be it.

Well, sorry folks, it's just greed. The prospect of money to be made always gets in the road.

Organic growers used to be little hobby farmers, pooling their wares, or selling out of road-side honesty stalls. Then organics went legit, became corporate and the fix was in - here there be money!

In the early days of organic growing legitimacy there were governing organisations to oversee the industry's practices, and of course to keep all the cheats in check. Well, if it has been 'grown' you cannot deny that it is organic, a block of wood is organic, so, grave fears were held that the market would be infiltrated by cheats and non-believers.

An Organic certification process was instigated and in order to get top dollar for organically grown produce - one had to become 'certified'.

But due to the fact that most administrative type people, might be a bit pressed to tell the difference between organic or not, the fledgling industry was run by organic growers themselves. Or by people who had 'dabbled' in organic growing (or failed), at the very least they had some knowledge about it, albiet a pretty laid-back attitude.

This led to numerous problems, the most interesting being the 'true believer syndrome'.

A certified grower would periodically be inspected by a representative of an organic regulatory body, who in theory would then go around your farm and check that everything was kosher.

Balanced, integrated farming practices and no hidden bags of 'super', flyspray, etc. But the 'true believers' had the attitude of "we're all in the same club, we ALL believe, there could not possibly be any cheating"

This idea that all organic growers were of the same mind and could not possibly tarnish the pristine ideals of harmonious, organic growing (and doing the world a big favour at the same time) - was just astounding!

These certified organic organisation inspectors had to be forced to actually have a close look! It was practically impossible to get one to pull up a plant and inspect the root formation, or fish around in your liquid fertiliser tank (god forbid actually 'testing' something).

The attitude was one of "your an organic grower, YOU'RE alright" coupled with "it's your patch, so I am not going in there without your express permission".

True believers, organic warriors, brothers in the cause, mates - not to be doubted.

Due to the ludicrous nature of the industry in it's formative years, and money already having been invested in regulatory organisations, something had to be done and it was mostly taken over by large corporations.

These guys regulate prices, they want a significant return. They don't actually care about the blood sweat and tears involved, nor snap frosts. It's all about the bottom line.

Organic produce had come of age.

Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1547862