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by NateEag 2025 days ago
I think the complaint is meant to be "organic doesn't mean anything".

I read GP as saying that while an organic product might be produced responsibly, as your family's farms do, it could also be factory-farmed using pesticides worse than Roundup.

If that is true, then the word "organic" is not meaningful for consumers who want to support sustainable, low-impact farming.
1 comments
robotbikes 2025 days ago
There is certification and regulation required and a fair amount of promises to become USDA organic or even use organic on the label of a food legally in the U.S. So if they were using pesticides they would be engaging in fraud. There is large scale organic farming that is probably not sustainable though and this is likely the source of a lot of organic produce that is not locally sourced, but it also probably doesn't have pesticides on it. O. The other hand fraud does happen and there was a big organic grain trader who was found to be substituting non-organic grain for grain and I think he was prosecuted for it but he got away with it for years. There are also local sustainable farmers who grow organically but can't afford or can't justify the cost of organic certification. So while it does mean something it isn't doesn't always mean what you might think it does.
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NateEag 2025 days ago
I believe the US law defining what "organic pesticides" are is here:

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...

I'm not sure what the industry standard for something being a "pesticide" is, but there are clearly plenty of tools organic farms can use for pest control. It would be an undertaking to figure out the potential health and sustainability ramifications of all of them (and of course, the label "organic" could encompass the use of any or all of them).

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Broken_Hippo 2025 days ago
Organic farms use pesticides: They are just limited in what pesticides they use. This isn't a secret or fraud. Unfortunately, the pesticides allowed can easily be worse for the environment than the chemical counterpart. Fertilizers have the same woes, and folks can still not take care of the land.
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