There you will find scientific peer reviewed paper on organic food about nutrients, heavy metals and all other aspects of organic farming,

We see these reports over and over again, yet if you ask for a copy of the papers reviews and you suddenly find out that the report has not been peer reviewed.

Or like the recent paper that said that reported there was no nutritional difference between conventional and organic foods. Upon reading the paper it turned out that the researchers used organic land to grow both the organic and conventional produce. So if you start with a highly mineralized, balanced soil you will come up with similar results.

When the researchers were asked why they did not use conventional soil to grow the conventional food for they replied they did not think it would make any difference.

So until I get to read the study from Belgium I will reserve my judgement on their claims.

Then why are there higher levels of heavy metals in organic grains than in the commercial plants?

Contaminants in organically and conventionally produced winter wheat in Belgium

The results show that for the consumer of organic foodstuffs, estimated daily intakes are 0.56 µg deoxynivalenol (DON), 0.03 µg zearalenone (ZEA), 0.19 µg Cd, 0.28 µg Pb and 0.0006 µg Hg kg-1 body weight. […] For the consumers of conventional foodstuffs, the corresponding estimated daily intakes are 0.99 µg DON, 0.06 µg ZEA, 0.17 µg Cd, 0.12 µg Pb and 0.0007 µg Hg kg-1 body weight.

It’s obvious from this that the conventional food is lower. Especially in lead. Any explanation for why what cannot happen according to you is clearly happening?

What’s he saying would imply that farmers who use chemical fertilizers simply get rid of the organic waste (like cornstalks) that would go into their soil. Many of them used to do that, by burning it, which would release it into the air to… settle on the fields again.

Meanwhile, he seems to be entirely unfamiliar with the idea of water runoff. Water running off of farms that use chemical fertilizers carries the crud into the streams, which eventually winds up in the oceans. (Where it does tend to concentrate in fish, but that’s because they’re downhill from the farms.) If it didn’t do that, heavy metals and the like would easily reach toxic levels on chemical fertilizer farms quite quickly and get worse from there.

The same applies to organic farms. Runoff is going to carry away pre-existing toxins; it would certainly carry it away from compost piles. Chemical dilution then does its magic, since organic farms would no longer be introducing excess heavy metals into the cycle.

The only way for organic farming to be worse than fertilizer farming about concentrating heavy metals would be if runoff only applied to fertilizer farming.

And now I’ve gone and read the piece: everything he said will apply to chemical-based fertilizer farming. The exception is for organic fertilizers that come from somewhere else. But for organic fertilizers to result in more concentration of heavy metals in the soil would require that those organic fertilizers contain more heavy metals than chemical-based fertilizers. A pity he sort of blew past that point, because in some circumstances that kind of excess contamination could occur, which would be the single case where things would be worse for organic farming.

max
[’He coulda skipped the fear-mongering and just stuck to the potential problem, but no….’]

First the politics: This same story has been circulating around the globe for about 19 months. This story and other anti-organic articles come mainly from a conservative think-tank called The Hudson Institute and are sent out by a father and son, Dennis and Alex Avery. They were also the source for many of the pro-rBGH milk reports.

Now for the science: Organic soils are high in organic matter which comes from cover crops and compost. Animal waste does contain heavy metals which occur naturally in plants that the livestock eats. Soils that have high organic matter should also have an good cation exchange rate, which is a measure of how efficiently nutrients move from the soil into the root zone of the plant.

If your soil is high in organic matter with a good technical balance, it will not allow heavy metals to move into the root zone easily. Nutrients are absorbed into the plant, via eucleic acid that is secreted from the roots. The nutrient transfer is basically a chemical reaction that does not transfer heavy metals efficiently; so even if there were a higher measure of heavy metals in the organic soil, the amount of heavy meals would *not* be higher in the plant.

Minerals are essential I’d agree but heavy metals? Sure we need copper and zinc in very small amounts but usually the term is associated with mercury and lead. Very bad, highly toxic and the focus of the research:

For example, in 2007, researchers conducted an analysis of wheat grown on various farms in Belgium; based on the results, they estimate that consumers of organically grown wheat take in more than twice as much lead, slightly more cadmium, and nearly equivalent levels of mercury as consumers of wheat grown on conventional farms.

That’s bad and the fundamental point remains – it’s a bad idea to concentrate heavy metals in out food supply.

Our bodies evolved as part of an ecosystem that included soil with minerals and heavy metals. Industrial farming has drastically altered the ecosystem, and our bodies are struggling to deal with it. Supplementing your diet with minerals and heavy metals such as silver and zinc, to replace those that we used to get naturally in our produce, is a healthy thing to do.

Organic farming is not just about keeping pesticides off the produce, it’s about restoring the natural ecosystem, primarily the natural soil.