What is organic farming? What is the advantage of organic farming?
Answers
Answer:
Organic farming yields such vital benefits as preservation of soil's organic composition. Organic farmers utilize practices that: Maintain and improve fertility, soil structure and biodiversity, and reduce erosion. Reduce the risks of human, animal, and environmental exposure to toxic materials.
Answer:
✯What is organic farming?
Organic farming system in India is not new and is being followed from ancient time. It is a method of farming system which primarily aimed at cultivating the land and raising crops in such a way, as to keep the soil alive and in good health by use of organic wastes (crop, animal and farm wastes, aquatic wastes) and other biological materials along with beneficial microbes (biofertilizers) to release nutrients to crops for increased sustainable production in an eco friendly pollution free environment.
✯Need of organic farming
With the increase in population our compulsion would be not only to stabilize agricultural production but to increase it further in sustainable manner. The scientists have realized that the ‘Green Revolution’ with high input use has reached a plateau and is now sustained with diminishing return of falling dividends. Thus, a natural balance needs to be maintained at all cost for existence of life and property. The obvious choice for that would be more relevant in the present era, when these agrochemicals which are produced from fossil fuel and are not renewable and are diminishing in availability. It may also cost heavily on our foreign exchange in future.
✯The key characteristics of organic farming include
- Protecting the long term fertility of soils by maintaining organic matter levels, encouraging soil biological activity, and careful mechanical intervention
- Providing crop nutrients indirectly using relatively insoluble nutrient sources which are made available to the plant by the action of soil micro-organisms
- Nitrogen self-sufficiency through the use of legumes and biological nitrogen fixation, as well as effective recycling of organic materials including crop residues and livestock manures
- Weed, disease and pest control relying primarily on crop rotations, natural predators, diversity, organic manuring, resistant varieties and limited (preferably minimal) thermal, biological and chemical intervention
- The extensive management of livestock, paying full regard to their evolutionary adaptations, behavioural needs and animal welfare issues with respect to nutrition, housing, health, breeding and rearing.
- Careful attention to the impact of the farming system on the wider environment and the conservation of wildlife and natural habitats
✯ORGANIC FARMING ADVANTAGES
☆Nutrition
The nutritional value of food is largely a function of its vitamin and mineral content. In this regard,
organically grown food is dramatically superior in mineral content to that grown by modern conventional methods.
Because it fosters the life of the soil organic farming reaps the benefits soil life offers in greatly facilitated plant access to soil nutrients.
☆Poison-free
A major benefit to consumers of organic food is that it is free of contamination with health harming chemicals such as pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.
As you would expect of populations fed on chemically grown foods, there has been a profound upward trend in the incidence of diseases associated with exposure to toxic chemicals in industrialized societies.
☆Food Tastes Better
Animals and people have the sense of taste to allow them to discern the quality of the food they ingest.
☆Food Keeps Longer
Organically grown plants are nourished naturally, rendering the structural and metabolic integrity of their cellular structure superior to those conventionally grown.
✯ORGANIC FARMING DISADVANTAGES
☆Productivity
Proponents of industrialized agriculture point to its superior productivity. In the short term, this yield is possible by expending massive inputs of chemicals and machinery, working over bland fields of a single crop (monoculture)
☆Cultivation
While their conventional counterparts may sow by direct drilling of seed into herbicide treated soils, organic farmers are usually at least partly dependent on cultivation to remove weeds prior to sowing. In contrast to cultivation, direct drilling does not mechanically disrupt soil structure and removes the risk of exposed soil being lost to wind or water erosion.
☆GM Crops
Organic growers do not use genetically modified or engineered food crops, some of which are engineered to tolerate herbicides (e.g. “Roundup Ready Canola”) or resist pests (e.g. Bollworm resistant cotton). Conventional growers, on the other hand, are free to “take advantage” of GM crops.
☆Time
Indeed, organic farming requires greater interaction between a farmer and his crop for observation, timely intervention and weed control for instance. It is inherently more labor intensive than chemical/mechanical agriculture so that, naturally a single farmer can produce more crop using industrial methods than he or she could by solely organic methods.
☆Skill
It requires considerably more skill to farm organically. However, because professional farming of any sort naturally imparts a close and observant relationship to living things, the best organic farmers are converted agrichemical farmers.