If the word “unnatural” is colloquially defined as “anything which humans do that the earth wouldn’t or couldn’t have on its own”, agriculture and animal husbandry are fundamentally “unnatural” endeavors— whether it is done in vast fields of noxious chemicals or a permaculture food forest painstakingly built over three decades.

However, this point of view comes dangerously close to a kind of self-hating misanthropy that is entirely uncalled for— as humans are, when it comes down to it, simply a vehicle for nature’s latest innovation— consciousness. So, everything we do, from love, physics, ethics and religion to crime, plastics, toxic oil spills and killing off entire species and ourselves— is pure, unadulterated nature.

The earth on its own kills and changes constantly, slowly moving whole continents and their residents, changing from a lifeless beautiful ice planet to a humid tropical paradise to a molten hellscape to various degrees in various places over time, and back again— without a conscious endgame to self-sustain endlessly as the gorgeous fertile green planet we grew up on. It is humans who have an “unnatural” desire to preserve the earth, to have a homeworld, to live on it forever, to freeze it in time and watch all the places and flora and fauna we’ve grown up knowing and loving thrive, never changing, only growing and self-actualizing.

Both conservation and progress are deep and profound human desires and ethics. It didn’t exist before nature invented us or whatever once existed like us that didn’t survive.

Conservation is just as emotional as progress and both are just as emotional as hedonism, they are all as much a battle to conquer nature as exploiting it is.

It helps to remember this so we don’t get murderously fired up about it when each of us has small differences in how we think about it; so that we don’t treat nature as a harsh, all-powerful God that gives us rules to follow and expects simpering worship and in exchange gives us and the things we love permission to exist for a little while, on its whim.

Whether you’re a hardnosed capitalist or a soft-hearted environmentalist, whether you’re human or whatever sentience comes after us— you are in the driver’s seat. You belong there. You were designed for it, by will or circumstance or accident.

The real argument is whether a particular thing that we’re doing has more pros than cons when it comes to our survival and our spiritual (aka ethical aka emotional) goals, at least for as long as we have only one planet to work with.

A single catastrophic mistake means an end to our 300,000 year old talking-ape experiment, along with all our animal besties. The real argument, if you want to get anything done, comes down to degrees of acceptability and long-term bets.

Even a cursory familiarity with a typical pesticide schedule for, say, potato farming, even under GAP (”Good Agricultural Practices”) or non-organic IPM (Integrated Pest Management), makes one aware of the egregious use of novel compounds it entails— and really the only thing which makes this type of farming morally acceptable is the important, entirely defensible claim of assured food security, not some supposed “scientific consensus”, “evidence-based science”, “scientific literacy” or “established standards” that this is ideal, sustainable or safe.

On the other hand, there’s much to be appreciated in the conservative ethic of Organic and Natural Farming (a type of farming which uses no “synthetic”, especially new and relatively untested, chemicals or inputs, among other principles), and its critics vastly underestimate the efficacy of modern organic interventions.

A single year of these natural farming interventions, even ones that are fringe and pseudoscientific, involve a wide variety of soil health practices along with an engaged, experiential awareness and learning of the natural world that together often make a life-changing impact for the farmer and the farm ecosystem.

But the practitioners of these systems and often the systems themselves suffer from an utter lack of scientific enquiry and rigour, accurate documentation with specific advice, redundancy planning and pragmatism, which are needed when doing things for others, at scale, and advising poorer farmers and countries.

A country whose essential rations are entirely based on organic or natural farming would be playing with the lives of their citizens— because when organic farming systems are infiltrated by natural disasters, epidemic diseases, animal damage or pests (though they are more resistant in the first place), the effects are generally far more devastating than a conventional system, sometimes reaching a 100% crop loss, not to mention the persistence of the pathogen in the soil of that piece of land as no chemicals are used to kill it (you would be depending on the superior soil microbiota in organic farms to kill or suppress them, or worst case, waiting a few years for the pathogen to die out)

Minimizing inputs from external sources and attempting to recycle nutrients at the farm or local level makes it much more environmentally stable and significantly reduces expense, often temporarily at the cost of much more labour and time, though in the case of externally-sourced manure-based farming, the expense is greatly magnified compared to the vastly more affordable government-subsidized (i.e geopolitically-subsidized) fertilizers.

The long-term arithmetic and rigour of “recycling” nutrients within a highly localized input system combined with a partially open output system is currently unknown, especially once we take into account that the top soil vs. the geologic soil, river silt and subsoil we have inherited from a million years of work cannot be clubbed together.

Top soil, or some agriculturally relevant version of it, can be built in a matter of years, with an inch or so every year being par for the course in a well-run farm.

Geologic soil and its minerals are neither static nor a renewable resource in any generational timescale, especially since most farm outputs are transported away from their source and most people like the world to be built that way.

Humans live relatively long, so even with strict localization, certain minerals and nutrients are locked in variously between a human’s excretion/cell renewal cycle (1-90 days) and lifespan (~70 years) and in fact the lifespan of any long-lived species with few natural predators (ex. elephants). Further, most people are perhaps rightfully averse to the most direct form of recycling nutrients— processing and recycling human and pet excreta and cadavers through biological or chemical means.

More bluntly: With a population of 7 billion people who have ethics against letting their compatriots die of starvation, who generally exhibit a deep and abiding natalism— organic produce is a vital agricultural upgrade and civilizational privilege that is earned on the backbone of modern, synthetically-assisted production of a certain volume of essential staples or nutrition.

A parallel to consider: you don’t need to go to a doctor or use medicine for a wide variety of minor and common issues. You want to avoid situations where “the cure is worse than the disease” or a “cure in search of a disease”. But the moment you’re talking about something life-threatening or someone else’s life is on the line, you go to a doctor or you’re a fool.

Proponents of organic farming are aware of these criticisms, but counter it on the notion that the metaphor does not work as it is:

Individual | human | human individualism | ethical

Versus

System | environment | plant volume | ecology

That is to say: individual, human dynamics and concerns are at the opposite of natural population dynamics and concerns.

This is true. In terms of systems science and big pictures— conventional farming is disaster and catastrophe-prone in a different way, as the lack of evolutionary and environmental fitness of the plants and animals being used, and their complete dependence on human intervention to survive has as yet not been solved by the promises of genetic modification (the word “yet” is important to note).

Bigger medical and environmental catastrophes lie in wait to be discovered, as a large number of the chemical agents used are inadequately studied and regulated compared to the standards we expect from, for example, pharmaceuticals (some of which, too, are on far weaker footing than one might assume).

But in the same way that attacking the too big to fail financial institutions that do bad things may ultimately hurt the regular person, attacking the companies that help keep the world’s food system secure, and revealing the depth of their scientific pretenses, might cause more chaos than we can expect our politicians to bear, and our globally-scaled tribal nature and fragile institutions to treat with maturity and restraint.

Without countermovements like organic farming, no-till intensive market gardening, permaculture or regenerative agriculture, so-called conventional or futuristic farming will— especially for the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world— rapidly fragilize, obfuscate and corporatize the world food system in exchange for a massive and world-changing increase in food production and nutritive status.

This is the trade-off that is, depending on your point of view, either a devil’s bargain, or an inevitability of progress.

**Therefore, it is unfortunate that the organic movement has picked a war with the least harmful, most well-studied and understood, easiest to temper, and defensible part of modern farming— smart, simple “synthetic” fertilizers like urea, ammonium, super phosphates and potassium salts.

This ill-conceived war draws its attention away from its vital, rightful and much more difficult war on lenient pesticide and weedicide regulation, soil exploitation, unsustainable labour practices, forest and grassland destruction, land grabbing and land mafias, and the malevolent scientific hubris of the biggest agribusinesses.**

Much is made about the higher cost of organic production and produce, and this higher cost to the customer— more bluntly, price gouging— is partly the fault of:

a) middle men

b) an urban demographic that has gotten used to unrealistically cheap vegetables, available 365 days a year, made possible by irresponsible subsidized fertilizer and pesticide use, and

c) organic farmers themselves, and variously their inability, lack of means or their stubborn ideological refusal towards imitating the calculations and involving themselves in the market forces that make successful “conventional farms” so productive and vital.

d) Government **agendas/schemes aimed at regulating/incentivizing “essential” commodities that instead deserve a sharp market correction and a well-earned shortage in supply or demand. When the focus should go into easy credit/liquidity, low-interest debt funding, inputs, mechanization, pure green production, local logistics and ease and quality of value-addition and ease of doing business.

For example, organic fertilization for an acre (of annual and staple crops, not orchards which are much simpler) for externally purchased manure, enough to match at least 80% conventional productivity, can come up to anywhere between Rs.25000 – Rs.1,00,000. Compared to about Rs.10,000 at most for conventional fertilizers. This is a massive difference for any small scale farmer. With a proper application of organic methods over a few years, this requirement can be brought down by around 50% with the trade off of higher-labour and tight cycles of nutrient recycling and breakdown of insoluble soil minerals, though this can vary drastically because of the complexity of decomposition and the varying fertilizer needs at different phases of plant growth.

But the main issue here is the misunderstanding of the value of either scale or specialization, by every stakeholder along this chain. This entire additional cost of the fertilizers/bio-agents needed (over and above organic soil health practices) to match conventional productivity can be covered by an additional Rs.10-Rs.20 per kg on the sale price as long as the yield targets are reached, as opposed to getting abysmal yields and then adding the 2x-3x premium currently charged by organic markets in an attempt to pass on some of the risks, costs and toil to the buyers and customers (in the worst case, though rarer, the successful farming companies hit the yield targets but continue to take advantage of the premium rates)

There is also a deep irrigour in organic farming’s evaluation of what mined/extracted substances it allows as fertilizers vs does not.

For example, the mental gymnastics required to reason that mined rock phosphate (nearly inert and therefore useless in everything except acidic soil, where it becomes an exemplary input) is allowed but Single Super Phosphate— which is mined rock phosphate refined by sulfuric acid and made entirely bioavailable for almost every soil— is not.

Or that the sheer amount of hyper-productive fodder land or synthetically assisted feed/nutrient production, fallow lands and grasslands, weeding, ethical hoops on animal treatment, diet trends, labour exploitation, interventionist price controls and subsidies, scientific precision and logistics needed to produce, transport and use enough cow/animal manure and slaughterhouse byproducts for a world full of organic farms is “natural” and good, but that urea created by a hyper-efficient cruelty-free world-changing process— that is ultimately only a minor contributor to greenhouse gases and that made the modern world possible— is evil (It contributes between 1%-6%, depending on how you like to count and who you like to count with).

Especially considering that most of the environmental ill-effects come from misuse and ignorance at the farm level— which ultimately happen even with improper use of manure.

This is reminiscent of the argument between synthetic vs natural/EO-based aromatics in perfumes, where some aromatics that are exploitative and harmful in the natural form are cheaper, greener and humane to make in a lab, even apart from the obvious ones like animal musk vs. synthetic.

These are among the many reasons why movements like permaculture that are focused on self-reliance, resilience and local economies stress on creating and propagating varieties of plants that get stronger with each generation rather than just higher-yielding or consistent in taste— here, the main human intervention is to encourage ruthless natural selection. It is not uncommon for orthodox permaculture farms to initially watch and learn and select from a majority of their plants dying, on purpose, even if they could have intervened and saved them.

Nevertheless, until a clear alternative is provided for those entirely dependent on the health of their plant life to survive and produce crops reliably, and such systems are proven at scale, this is not an easily actionable counterpoint— but it is an ongoing one that must be parallelly and extensively supported.

The thumbrule to remember is that everything is ruled by resources, and those resources have hard numbers and hard limits. We cannot trick any creature into using significantly less nutrients and somehow magically having the same results (the only possible fillers in most plants and animals is additional fibre, water or fat). Whether you’re feeding the land manure or simple salts, if you follow the numbers for each nutrient and every use of energy back to the source, all inputs are eventually still taking from the same total global pool of resources, and the outputs must end up somewhere that allows us to retrieve it within a reasonable timeframe.

Considering this knot of global proportions, there has to be a purposeful synthesis of ideas so that we can move forward, till either technology, a spontaneous change in the world order from millions of diverging individual choices, a counter-intuitive agricultural insight at the magnitude of the invention of agriculture itself, or simple fate can solve the biggest problems permanently.

Attempted below is a modularly escalating approach to a GAP-based system control that heavily borrows from indigenous knowledge/preventive commercial organic farming/IPM, while maintaining GAP’s pragmatism. It also functions as a basic introduction and reference sheet for each major part of agronomy.

Let’s call this “Conservative Agriculture”.

This piece was originally written by me in Feb 2020 for a quick reference guide on agricultural techniques, inputs and interventions which you can find here: Conservative Agriculture