by David Nuttle

Created on: February 09, 2009   Last Updated: February 14, 2009

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) planners have indicated that organic production of foods will be the only means possible to provide enough food for growing world populations in future years. Factory farming, or non-organic food production, requires a high and sustained level of fossil energy inputs to provide chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and mechanization. All of these inputs are increasing in cost, and rapidly becoming less available, worldwide. The U.S., with about 04 percent of the world's population, consumes over 70 percent of all fossil fuels. If global populations primarily used the U.S. means of factory farming to produce their foods, these fossil fuels would only last another 15 to 20 years.

Thomas L. Friedman, in his recent book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" explains how and why population growth, resource depletion, climate change, global warming, conflict, increasing competition, and other factors will force American farmers to find alternatives to factory farming. Studies by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have established that non-organic food production, or so-called factory farming, has been the cause of most soil erosion, water and air pollution, and loss of biological resources. Several university studies also documented the fact that use of chemical fertilizers actually decrease soil microbial activity and reduce the total nutrients available, so foods chemically produced are less healthful. Factory farming has become a means to produce large quantities of less healthful foods using techniques requiring large amounts of energy, while acting to damage the enviroment. Our food producers have favored such non-organic food production means as a way to increase immediate profits, with little or no regard concerning the lack of sustainability for such methods. Organically grown foods help avoid all these problems.

Foods produced by factory farming (non-organic) methods typically contain antibiotics, hormones, steroids, pesticides, assorted chemicals, heavy metals, and other elements proven to be harmful to human health. The National Cancer Institute has determined, for example, that both growers and consumers of non-organic foods have higher rates of cancer. Similar results have been found for other diseases having higher rates when consumers mostlly had a diet of non-organic foods. The general public is aware of these facts, and consumption of organic foods is increasing at a rate of 20 to 24 percent annually,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>