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 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.
But these systems suffer from an utter lack of scientific enquiry and rigour, accurate documentation with specific advice, disaster-tolerance 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 volume-oriented farming that requires manure, the expense is greatly magnified compared to the vastly more affordable government-subsidized or geopolitically-subsidized fertilizers.
Soil changes as the earth ages, humans are the ones who care to “preserve” it.
The long-term arithmetic and rigour of “recycling” nutrients within a highly localized yet partially open system is currently unknown, especially once we start realizing that soil and its minerals are neither static nor a renewable resource in any human/generational timescale, particularly since most farm outputs are vegetables and fruits are transported away from their source and most people like a world where this is so.
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 excreta through biological or chemical means.
More bluntly: With a population of 7 billion people who have ethics against letting their compatriots die of starvation, 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).
Without a countermovement like organic farming, permaculture or regenerative agriculture, so-called conventional or futuristic farming will— especially for the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world— rapidly fragilize and corporatize the world food system in exchange for a massive and world-changing increase in food production and nutritive status. That is the trade-off that, depending on your point of view, is 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, most well-understood, easiest to temper, and most rightfully defensible part of modern farming— simple “synthetic” fertilizers like urea— because it draws 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 almost-malevolent scientific hubris of the biggest agribusinesses.
There is also a deep irrigour, hidden harm and lack of sound reasoning in organic farming’s evaluation of what mined/extracted substances it allows vs does not.
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 more humane to make in a lab, even apart from the obvious ones like animal musk vs. synthetic.
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.
This is one reason 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— 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 has to be parallelly and extensively supported.
Considering this knot of global proportions, there has to be a serious 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.
What we need for most people, in the short and medium-term, is a modularly escalating system that heavily borrows from indigenous knowledge/preventive commercial organic farming/IPM, while maintaining GAP’s pragmatism.
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 intervenmtions which you can find here: Conservative Agriculture