Subject: Re: PESTICIDES versus NATURAL PRODUCTS

From: [email-masked] (Gil Hardwick)
Date: Fri, 19 May 1995 02:02:39 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, Dean Alaska ([email-masked]) writes:
>The potato blight was also very much due to modern monoculture methods.
>Gil described the process.  Note that "organic" is not a static
>technology.  There are many advancements so modern organic is not
>comparable to pre-chemical farming.

Just to add here, Dean, the facts are that organic farming practice
had reached its peak in craftsmanship during about the 1860-70s, and
>from  that point science began to take more of an interest and to make
its own contibutions.

The comparison is between the skilled tradesman and the scientist.

On the other hand, the "post-chemical" era began as an offshoot of
military experiments looking for sources of raw materials for making
saltpetre, thus gunpowder, and other explosives. The industrialist
agri-chemical "contribution" took off on another tangent of its own
>from  those experiments, increasingly alienated through orientation
toward profit from the actual process of building a good soil profile
on arable farmland, and doing far too much damage into the bargain.

The more general argument in favour of organic farming is as someone
else wrote very nicely, more to do with concern over the nature of
the relationship between the farmer and said agri-chemical factories
than any concern over the use of "chemicals" as such.

An outstanding reference, if you can get hold of a copy, is:

     Russell Sir John E., 1957:1975
     The World of the Soil
     New Naturalist Series
     London: Collins