What I found, organic does not mean healthier. In fact, a larger percentage of food related illnesses are reported for organic foods than foods without the organic label, which itself is controversial and misleading. This is largely due to the types of fertilizer used. Animal waste is used to fertilize organic foods. Yes, that is a fact. Organic foods can also use BT pesticides, which are the same chemicals in GMO crops where the BT is produced inside the plant.
The nutritional content also depends on many factors, including what types of fertilizers are used. Are those fertilizers available to be absorbed by the plant. It also varies by variety. Some plants, especially strawberries are better grown outside in the soil than in hydroponics. That was a rare case. I also read many studies on nutritional content of plants grown hydroponically vs organically and some studies found some varieties were more nutritional when grown organically, others when grown hydroponically.
The reality is, the industry is so competitive and the studies are funded by folks with an agenda, so the data leaves me skeptical on both sides.
Only 17 elements are required to grow a plant and these elements can be provided entirely through hydroponics. From my research, hydroponic vegetables, for the most part, are actually healthier for people to consume than organic vegetables according to the science, but there is a stigma that since hydroponics is produced by science and technology and the industrial farming complex that it is worse for our bodies.
The research indicates though that hydroponic plants can more easily absorb nutrients, they are healthier and better able to resist fungus and insects, so not only are they more nutritious, but they don't need fungicides, pesticides or herbicides to be sprayed on them. Plus, plants can actually absorb salmonella and other bacteria into the plant from composted manure, which even when washed can still infect the human gut.
Our regulations do not address food safety or nutrition.
My own foray into hydroponics has been lack luster. Lettuce didn’t taste as good and it’s much more maintenance. I can setup water timers and fertilize every x weeks in my garden. You have to constantly check hydro and put chemicals in it very often. Too labor intensive.
My experience was the opposite of yours. We found through experimentation that the flavor of the crop was directly related to the mineral concentration in the solution. We too had bland crop, but a little research suggested we starve our plants of water. In other words, if you want more flavor, increase the concentration of nutrients. It was easy to check the PPM and pH of the water with two devices you can get on Amazon for under $20. We also used timers.
Our organic farming required a dump truck load of compost, while the hydroponics was about a 5 lb bag of minerals and used about 10% of the water as the soil based. It's much more efficient. In the back yard, it's not that big a deal, but at scale, farming is largely about material movement.
The amount of labor to run an organic farm was incredible. It's also expensive and requires heavy equipment to scale a large farm. Hydroponics not as much, because there is no soil to move, which is heavy! Tilling, raking, tons of fertilizer and pesticides distributed across acres by machines and planes. Whereas hydroponics does that all just by pumping water, which is already being done in those same industrial farms.
Hydroponics requires a lot less labor. Just more thinking. You have to research. You have to engineer things. But you lift less. You move less. Physically its easier. Yes, it's harder because you have to think smarter, but it's not more labor intensive, precisely the opposite.
It certainly does. The videos of automated hydroponics farms are fascinating to look at. This is one such automated system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI17ZwWOEcI
What you call industrial farming started roughly mid last century when people were people figured out how to grow a handful of crops at scale using large machinery at the cost of diversity and quality. The modern variant of that heavily relies on overusing pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, etc.
The downside of farming like this is the lack of diversity of crops and the negative side-effects on the environment. Industrial farming has destroyed vast amounts of land and turned them into eroded wastelands and deserts.
Modern farming is becoming more high tech and using data driven approaches, automation, etc. enables smarter use of land, a wider variety of crops, better quality produce, and more efficient use of resources (water, chemicals, nutrients, light, energy, etc.). Hydroponics are one form of that but also organic farming has evolved way beyond hippies growing small amounts of produce like the industrial revolution never happened. Organic farming at industrial scale is becoming a thing.
This claim is diametrically opposed to the "soil as living organism" claim above. What gives you confidence that there is no interaction between soil, fungi mycelium, plant roots, worm dung microorganisms etc. that you could possibly be missing?
I suggest starting with a nutrient blend like this: https://www.amazon.com/MasterBlend-4-18-38-Tomato-Vegetable-...
You can look up the ratios of the elements for different plants on the web. It's all out there. mhpgardener on Youtube is amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXy32Dr4Z4A He has videos on how to set up different types of hydroponic systems, there are 3 main types, the video link is to an Ebb and Flow system called Dutch Buckets and is mainly used for fruiting plants like tomatoes, eggplant and peppers.
There's also Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) which is more like what you see in PVC systems that pump water along the roots of the plants. There's also a raft system where the plants float on top of the water and the roots are constantly submerged.
I looked at Aeroponics too and I believe that is an excellent system as well, though did not try it.
Watch mhpgardener's experiments with different nutrients. He does one with organic nutrients, but they didn't grow as well as the masterblend recipe, which you can learn about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYv9iu2NI3M
I remember watching a video about a Japanese company that can tweak the flavor of different herbs to exactly cater to what their chefs wanted to accentuate different notes for different dishes.
For equipment, you'll need a pH meter: https://www.amazon.com/Poit-Digital-Meter-Tester-Resolution/...
a PPM meter for nutrient concentration: https://www.amazon.com/HM-Digital-TDS-EZ-Measurement-Resolut...
The rest depends on the setup you want and the plants you want to grow. What do you want to grow? I can point you to a good kit to get started. Here's one for dutch buckets on amazon, real cheap. https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Water-Culture-DWC-Hydroponic/dp/... You could grow two tomato plants in one bucket and get 20-30 pounds out of it in one season very easily.
Pretty much anyone here can do hydroponics. It's like programming plants!
And they do not taste like grocery store hydroponic veggies. Those are grown to meet other priorities: thick skin, shelf life, uniformity, color (sometimes). They are not concerned with flavor or nutrients.
In your home, in your yard, you can prioritize any aspect of the plant you want, what's important to you: Flavor, Nutrients, Color, Size, harvest dates.
They are all just numbers. It's not that hard. It's not easy and you have to care but it's the same as anything. If you care and you want it, you can do it. I know, because I did and I want more people to know they can too.
YOU CAN!
I'm generally interesting in hydro-/aeroponics from the perspective of growing plants in space, via, as you mentioned, "programming" them - basically, what's the minimum of nutrients (not just minerals, but also water, air and sunlight) that's needed to grow food (and air) for people.
I also thought about actually programming plants, I wonder if there's any research in this direction - e.g. why do I need an orange plant to grow a trunk? If I could inject the right hormones at the right place, I could skip all that and just have it grow leaves (energy production) and fruit (energy consumption) without any other superfluous parts.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/
Monoculture (conventional corn or soybean for example) uses huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer to increase yields per acre far beyond what the soil can naturally sustain. Wide swaths of American farmland has lost literally feet of topsoil over the past 50 years. The soil is largely sterile, and depleted of minerals. Monoculture also means the ecosystem that can replenish the soil is absent.
>This crop rotation benefits both alfalfa and wheat/barley/corn. On the one hand, cereals tend to decrease the development of weeds, leaving the field free for the alfalfa cultivation. On the other hand, there are findings suggesting that corn following alfalfa yields approximately 10% more than corn following corn.[1]
Having more corn doesn't mean that the corn or soil has more micronutrients. Corn is nitrogen heavy, so rotation makes sense if yields are all you care about.
No, that's not what it means. Farmers producing food that meets the "organic" label may follow those practices but it's not a requirement.
So does ‘conventional’ farming
Fertilizer is like doping. It works! But it comes at a long term cost. Anyway, now we can go down two paths, hyper-modern indoor farming which is expanding in Europe and organic farming that is growing in the US and Europe. Conventional industrial farming is going to get hit from both sides.
Also, the big things keeping corn going is sugar duties and ethanol subsidies. Without those, alot of the crop would disappear.
My family are farmers in Australia. We are currently going through the worst drought we have ever had. We've had 7 inches of rain this year vs our annual rainfall of 26 inches. We are still growing a (very small) crop. This is possible because of soil conservation, no-till agriculture, and having healthy soil that conserves moisture.
Farmers who haven't adopted these techniques are bankrupt.
in the US and Europe, it is possible to not engage in best practice farming techniques, because government subsidies (20 Bn USD in America, 59 Bn Euro in the EU) remove the competitive pressures that that force best practice (it really isn't as simple as 'just forcing more production out of the soil by adding more fertilizer_.
Yes, of course there are still farmers not following best practice. It's a normal distribution
If only the world were just. As you say, countries with legislature captured by farming lobbies are no longer subject to survival pressures.
However, there's a lot of non-falsifiable marketing woo out there, and it needs to be held accountable for that deficiency. If we don't, the woo wins every time, because it can't be held accountable for its problems, and we lose our ability to collectively learn and improve.
Using shit will get you an outcome you can count on. Trying to formulate things otherwise is sure to get whatever you are testing for, but likely to miss something important that we won't understand for years to come. That's happened more times than I'd care to count.
An idiom about never taking down a fence one knows not the provenance or reason for comes to mind.
Not that I'm saying I entirely agree with the viewpoint myself, but the rate of catastrophic unintended consequences we facilitate (I.e biodiversity crisis, creation of superbugs, introduction of invasive species) through artificial selection pressures tends to elicit pause at the suggestion we just "toss some minerals in and be done with it".
Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control
Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.
Manure works fine. That doesn't mean it's anywhere near optimal.
Whatever product fits into the economies of scale, and selective commoditization solely for the sake of profit concentration not nutrition or environment.
But back to the idea of measuring everything. These are the counterpoints I can think about regarding measuring and controling:
* Measuring and controlling cost resources, some less, some more. E.g. It is easier to measure yields than to measure nutrition.
* There is imperfect knowledge on how to respond (control) after a given measurement, or even what measurements are important. E.g. Premature optimization, Goodhart's law, lack of certainty regarding nutrition.
* There are conflicting interests on what the result of controlling should be. E.g. more profits or more nutrition?
* Under appropriate circumstances systems can respond to variability or keep functioning without human control or input. This is resilience. E.g. Pollinating insects, edible weeds.
>Soil Fertility: Crops more easily resist disease, survive drought, and tolerate insects when grown in good soil. Organic crop producers build soil quality by adding compost, animal manures, or green manures. As soil organisms break down these inputs, they convert nutrients into forms plants can absorb and create humus that sustains soil quality. Organic producers must not apply sewage sludge or biosolids to soil. Additionally, organic crop producers use cover crops to protect the soil from wind and water erosion. Soil-conserving practices include the use of cover crops, mulches, conservation tillage, contour plowing, and strip cropping.
It could be the opposite too. There's some evidence that, in some cases, purely hydroponic greenhouse-grown produce, which often qualifies and is sold as "organic", has fewer nutrients than soil-grown produce.
Some organic fertilizers I’ve used at my home garden: bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion and egg shell.
One concrete example is how certain modern strains of apple seeds have weaker dormancy, causing imbibing and radicand emergence to occur prematurely, usually before the apple is even eaten. Such changes are an unintended consequence of human selection for size. It's possible that the tinkering required to increase plant vigor in the presence of non-organic pesticides has a greater adverse effect on mineral content. Though there are lots of other variables to consider as well such as soils, fertilizers, storage and transportation, the positioning of plants, whether they are able to share nutrients.
[1] - https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-i...
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "organic" foods are more nutritious than conventionally farmed foods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19640946
They went through 50k+ studies, found 167 they liked, and only 55 of 167 were of quality.
>No evidence of a difference was detected for the remaining 8 of 11 crop nutrient categories analyzed.
Not sure how to interpret this.
That is how meta analyses are meant to be performed. This is a heck of a lot better than listening to one study that you like.
I can understand organic food having less "inorganic" pesticide in it, but I don't see why the other contents of the product itself would differ.
Apparently Finland made it mandatory, and it worked.
The eye-catching graph reproduced on the LinkedIn post is Figure 2 in this paper you linked, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." It is labeled as "The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach." Note that 3 of the 7 data points -- including the two highest points -- are marked with asterisks as "numbers could not be independently verified." Excluding the asterisked points, there is one measurement in 1948 at around 200 mg and then 3 measurements in 2000, 2004, and 2018 all of which look similarly low -- I eyeball them as around 25 mg.
The oldest non-asterisked value is from 1948, cited as
Firman Bear. Ash and Mineral Cation Content of Vegetables. Soil Sci. Soc. Am. Proc. 1948;13:380–384.
The actual paper is here:
https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts...
Sadly, it appears to be in a journal old/obscure enough that sci-hub does not properly retrieve the full text of the article.
The results appear to be from a report commonly cited as the "Bear Report," numbers reproduced here:
https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/phosphorus.php
https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ash.php
(See also https://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/bear-report/ for a top level overview of the report.)
What is the value plotted in Figure 2? It does not correspond to the sum of iron, calcium, and magnesium across any of {cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach}. Taking a guess, it looks closest to the highest reported value for spinach in magnesium (203.9 mg in the Bear report). Note however that the lowest value for magnesium in spinach in the Bear report is 46.9 mg. Whatever is being plotted here, it's also not an average.
Now take a look at the citation for the modern numbers in spinach:
https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/11457?fgcd=&manu=&fo...
It reports an average of 79 mg of magnesium, 99 mg of calcium, and 2.71 mg of iron. There is no single nutrient number or sum of numbers that makes sense as the value plotted in Figure 2 of "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status." Figure 2 shows a number that I eyeball as around 25 mg for the modern (2000 and later) measurements.
The eye-catching claim of "estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years", buttressed by Figure 2 and apparently valid citations, seems to fall apart once you actually look at the citations.
Why would authors put so much effort into making such a confused, thinly supported claim?
2 out of 3 authors, including the first author, are employees of the Balchem Corporation. Their paper helpfully suggests that low serum magnesium levels "could warrant a medication change or dietary recommendations to increase intake of raw vegetables with higher magnesium content and reducing soda and processed food consumption with low or no magnesium and/or recommending magnesium supplements." (My emphasis.)
Balchem Corporation sells supplements to supply magnesium, calcium, and iron:
https://www.balchem.com/our-products/
What about the third author, Robert P. Doyle? He is an apparently legitimate professor at Syracuse University. Here's his faculty page:
http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro...
He links to this full list of his publications from his faculty page:
http://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/pages/chem/Doyle-Ro...
This paper, "Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status," is not listed among them. In fact, scanning over the titles of his listed papers, I don't see anything mentioning magnesium, nutrition, or soil in his publication history. Did the Balchem authors get some preliminary involvement from an actual professor and then add his name to the paper to confer legitimacy? Did the professor consider the final result so low-quality that he didn't want it listed even in his "full" publication list?
This paper has many problems that you can see just by trying to reconcile its Figure 2 with its corresponding citations, and other circumstantially suspicious factors. I would not put much stock in it.
I like one of their references, suggesting it's due to modern farming practices: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/
From my link:
>It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this review.
I’d like to see if it’s improved recently. Healthy foods and organics are more readily available now.