Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

The fad of recent years for so-called ‘organic’ food has been sustained largely by the popular notion that ‘natural’ must be better. With actual analysis of the nutritional value of crops grown using various cultural practices often being contradictory, and with little else to dispel the myth, a highly profitable niche market has grown up based on the feel-good illusions of sunny farmsteads tucked away in idyllic pastoral settings with little lambs and buttercups.
Given the incredible accuracy of measuring techniques, which can determine chemicals in parts per trillion and better, it might seem odd that the question of nutrient value wasn’t settled long ago. The problem lays in controlling all the variables.
Plants, like all living things, are the products of their genetic potentials and their environments. Apart from the type and chemical composition of the soil it is grown in, the exact nutrient content of, say, a potato depends on - among other things - what part of the world it is growing in; how much sun it gets; how much water it gets and when; the precise variety of the potato; the stage of its growth when it is harvested and for how long and under what conditions it is stored prior to testing.
In the past, nutrient analysis has usually been based on randomized market sampling. Simply put, a team is sent out to purchase a sample ‘potato’ from several stores across some region and these random selections are tested and compared. This sampling technique deliberately ignores all the influences beyond the vague grocery-store classifications of ‘organic’ and everything else.
Overall, the random sampling did produce an accurate - if contentious - picture. The test results sometimes showed that conventional methods produced more nutritious produce. Other researchers found that alternative cultural practices resulted in higher nutrient levels. The results were inconclusive and that suited but both sides in the debate who were happy to quote those studies which drew conclusions in their favour.
An item, buried in a mid-section of the Toronto Star last month, drew attention to a report in the journal ‘Agricultural & Food Chemistry’, titled ‘Metabolite Profiling of Wheat Grains (Triticum aestivum L.) from Organic and Conventional Agriculture’, submitted by researchers at the Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food, in Germany. Not nearly as eye-catching as who Brad Pitt was sleeping with that week but likely of more lasting import!
Grain was taken from a Swiss source which, for more than twenty years, had produced crops using conventional and non-conventional methods side by side. The close proximity ensured the same climatic conditions and the same mechanical soil characteristics. Essentially the only difference was in the methods used to maintain soil nutrients and to control pests.
When these carefully matched samples were tested the researchers found: "The statistical analysis of the data shows that the metabolite status of the wheat grain from organic and mineralic farming did not differ in concentrations of 44 metabolites." (Metabolites are the breakdown products of food - acids, sugars, alcohols, etc. - which are needed to sustain life).
Taken together with all the previous research, these results are consistent with the view that any nutritional differences that may be found, between expensive ‘organic’ and regularly-priced grocery-store produce, is more the result of weather, place of origin and age, than it is about putting manufactured fertilizer or old cow poop in the fields.
While the research reported no difference in the nutritional value of the grains, the Star noted that the yield resulting from modern cultural methods was about 30% higher than that resulting from ‘organic’ practices. Therein lies the real downside of any large-scale retreat from modern practices.
If the use of manufactured fertilizers and pest control products was to cease, the result would be an ecological disaster. In order to maintain the existing food supply, the area under crop production would need to increase by perhaps 50%. (Certainly more than 30% because most of the world’s arable land is already in use and the ‘new’ land would be at best marginal.) Just where would this extra land and the water needed to irrigate it come from? Cutting down even more tropical rain forest is hardly an option.
It is said that it is not the things we don’t know that will hurt us; it’s the things we know that just ain’t so that will do us in! If you want to know why it’s not a good idea to pour bags of peat moss into flower beds; why double digging is counterproductive and why ‘aerating’ the lawn is likely a waste of time and money, perhaps Peel Teaching Garden’s series of free gardening classes is for you this winter. Check out www.teachinggarden.org. What you learn might not save the planet but it could save you time, money and a lot of frustration.