Newbie Organic Farmer or Strawman?

By Guest Blogger Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening

The Wall Street Journal is notoriously stingy with its online content, so I'll have to quote you the paragraph in question:

When Ernie Costamagna, a third-generation California farmer, first tried growing organic tomatoes, his weeding bill rose tenfold, to $500 an acre. Shunning his usual chemical fertilizers, he stockpiled smelly chicken manure and bat guano. But when the curly-top virus attacked some of his plants last month, there was little more he could do than watch them succumb.

I'll confess I'm not up on the best methods of commercial organic production, but several questions immediately spring to mind. His weeding bill went up? Well, did he mulch, or did the increased cost go to mulch? A virus attacked his tomato plants? Um, did he ever hear about the problems with monoculture? How many varieties did he plant? What else did he plant besides tomatoes? Anything?

In debate and logic, the tactic being used here is called setting up a straw man. It's a way of proving your opponent wrong by misrepresenting his position and disproving the misrepresentation. This kind of anecdote is often used to prove that commercial organic gardening is impractical. Well, sure it's impractical, if you try to do it exactly the way you did your chemical farming. You have to wonder if this guy did his homework before embarking on the switch, or if he figured "farming is farming, except with organic farming you don't use chemicals." That's like saying ice skating is just like roller skating, except you have wheels instead of blades. Sure, there's a lot the two activities have in common, but there are some critical differences as well, and if you don't take those into account, you're going to fall flat on your face.

The article isn't really about Ernie, but about how major food companies, encouraged by Walmart's increased interest in stocking organic food, are making some tentative forays into that market. It does mention that "through trial and error, Mr. Costamagna has learned organic tricks, such as using drip irrigation to reduce weeds and planting 'buffer crops,' such as sugar beets and alfalfa, to attract bugs away from the tomatoes and cut down on disease." Aren't there any other resources for commercial growers who want to make the switch to organic, besides trial and error? Or is this a case where the ice skaters don't talk to the roller skaters, and vice versa? We don't need anyone making organic gardening more difficult than it needs to be, and we certainly don't want anyone misrepresenting how difficult it truly is, when the best practices are employed. I don't care if a commercial grower is in it for idealism or profit, I want him (or her) to succeed. And success starts with recognizing that organic gardening requires an approach differentiated by more than a switch from chemical to manure.

Speaking of manure, in my humble opinion, composted, dry chicken manure isn't any more smelly than, say, Miracle-Gro. Wet, that's another matter (cough, cough).  Doesn't he keep it dry, or is this yet another instance of making organic look worse than it is? "Planting the Seeds," in The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2006, page B1, col. 2.

Comments

[M Sinclair Stevens (Texas)]

I didn't read the article but I wonder how much soil preparation was done before he went organic. You can't expect a soil leached of its nutrients by years of non-organic methods to produce a healthy crop. He would have to have planted cover crops beforehand to increase soil fertility and tilth.

For the other side, I recommend reading Michael Abelman's Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It

http://www.fairviewgardens.org/pub_books.html

[Renee]

As a former reporter, I hate to say this, but ... be very careful of what you read in the WSJ. When I worked for White Flower Farm, I was interviewed several times by WSJ writers, and it was very clear they had already decided what the story was, and were looking only for quotes that verified their thesis. I tried to tell them politely they were simply wrong. (It was usually dopey "trend" stories, built on a single factoid.) I saw a similar distinct slant to a story about a project in New London, CT, with which I was familiar.