What’s The Most Foolish Organic Food Claim of 2004?
December 31, 2004
My nominee for the most foolish organic food claim of 2004? The competition was stiff, but here’s my winner: Eating organic food will reduce global warming, because organic farming doesn’t use energy-intensive fertilizers and pesticides.
The claim was made most recently in a electronic column titled “Fight Global Warming With Your Knife and Fork,” by Elysa Hammond. Ms. Hammond is billed as the staff ecologist for a company that makes mostly-organic energy bars for hikers and weight lifters.
It’s true that organic farmers don’t use chemical fertilizer on their crops. Instead, however, they use huge amounts of cattle manure to replace the soil nutrients that their crops take from the soil.
Unfortunately, the U.S. and the world have a major shortage of manure. America has less than one-third of the manure needed to fertilize the crops we grow. The world as a whole has only one-fourth of the organic fertilizer for sustainability. Any manure used on organic farms just means some other farmer has to buy more industrial fertilizer to nourish his crops.
The impact of all-organic farming on global temperatures would be trivial, but the impact on our forests would be catastrophic. An all-organic farming mandate for American farms would require the manure from another billion or so cattle. The animals would need roughly five acres of forage apiece, and there are only 1.2 billion acres in the Lower 48 States.
The claim that organic food slows global warming is rendered even more foolish by the fact that all those extra cattle would emit lots of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times as potent as CO2. More cattle to produce manure for organic farming would not only mean cutting all our trees, but additional clouds of methane trapping heat in the atmosphere. Ms. Hammond even warns us about methane from cattle when she tells us not to eat meat.
Great. A billion extra cattle will eat our vegetation down to dust, and we won’t even eat the meat.
That’s still not the most foolish part of the claim that eating organic would help fend off global warming. Ms. Hammond doesn’t actually know any more about the cause of global warming than a Pequot Indian shaman knew about the global cooling during the Little Ice Age in 1750.
I draw the parallel between organic food claims and witch doctors advisedly.
For more than 2000 years, human writings have documented a series of global climate warmings and coolings. During the Roman Warming in the first century, olive trees were planted farther and farther north in Italy, and then the olive groves retreated southward during the cold Dark Ages.
In the 10th century, during the Medieval Warming, the Vikings planted colonies on a grass-covered Greenland. During the Little Ice Age, in the 15th century, Greenland’s grass turned to frozen tundra and the Viking colonies froze or starved.
Over the last 20 years, new studies of ice cores and seabed sediments have documented a moderate, natural 1500-year global climate cycle-going back at least 1 million years.
Ms. Hammond claims a graduate degree from Yale University-in the ecology of food production systems. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Park in Yale’s School of Geophysics has been quoted in Science confirming the existence of the 1500-year climate cycle.
At least part of Yale is looking at reality.
The organic movement has never been required to document any of its claims. It says organic food is safer, healthier and better for wildlife. Now it claims organic farming can cure global warming.
And you’d better believe the organic shamans have the bear claw necklaces and magic river rocks to prove their claims.
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