Take chlorpyrifos[2]. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food. This is not simply an "unnatural = bad" argument: this is a specific chemical with known harmful effects, which you can avoid by buying organic.
Of course, the key question is: is all else equal? Organic farming does permit some other chemicals, and has a wide range of other impacts, including yields etc. So it's possible that organic farming is net negative for human welfare. But it's unfair to characterise a preference for organic farming as being quite as unscientific as you seem to claim.
I also think the article is telling us less about the innate merits of organic farming and more about the stupidity of making huge system changes overnight without training the people on the ground.
It is a given that organic is a net negative. Non-organic allows everything organic plus everything organic prohibits. We might need to reform non-organic in some cases, but those doesn't mean we need the arbitrary restrictions of organic.
Can't you make the same argument with other organic but yucky stuff? eg.
>Take cow manure. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food.
I don’t think cow manure meets any of those four criteria.
But the parent poster explicitly mentioned that "it requires no additional data to determine that"? That sounds pretty closer to "chemicals are yucky", rather than "chemicals are bad and these studies show that" (what you're arguing for).
I live in the Netherlands and the produce here is pretty awful compared with France, Italy or Germany. I'd be happy with some kind of arbitrary point system to indicate holistic quality. Even though we might disagree on details, balancing price, health, nutrition, taste, environmental sustainability and labor ethics is really hard for a consumer. When you buy organic you kind of hope all those things are included, but it just seems so non-rationalized at the moment.
It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
Probably. They feed their kids “organic” because they believe it will give them a competitive edge. Not because if concern for people who can’t shop at Whole Foods.
Would the fridge die sooner if it was used more?
Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini.
Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows?
Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.
Yeah, it's possible that there's another explanation, but it's also possible that foregoing preservative techniques causes food to go bad earlier.
Here's another: If I recall correctly, after WWII the US didn't know what to do with all its munitions factories. They realized that the basic ingredients of bombs were good at fixing nitrogen in the soil, so they made minor conversions to the factories and started producing chemical fertilizers. Fifty years later, Timothy McVeigh was able to buy a truckload of the stuff and bomb a federal building.
I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Could it be that after so many years of conventional agriculture, the soil was too depleted of nutrients to be suitable for food crops? I imagine that things will improve as the land heals.
I think you would be hard pressed to feed a nation with organic farms without oil refineries right now.
The War Department did construct 10 ammonia plants which made precursors for explosives, which could also make fertilizer precursors, and they absolutely switched them over after the war.
But ammonia production capacity doubled by 1950, and that wouldn't have happened without a demand side to the story as well. It also turned out that farmers realized nitrogen fertilizers work really, really well.
100 years isn't long when you're changing the global ecosystem.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s. We're only now beginning to agree on its long-term consequences, and quite a ways off from agreeing on mitigation steps.
I will repeat that I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Experiments like this are the only way we'll get the data we need.
It is absolutely ignorant to believe that organic is better for the environment than non-organic. Oil refineries and heavy industry are needed to support farming enough to feed the world, organic or not. And organic food is more expensive, in terms of resources consumed, not less.
The focus is currently on how use of "non-organic" methods (pesticide effects on humans and insect—particularly bee—population, soil depletion...) are harmful, and naturally, humans immediately explore the other extreme, without looking for a sweet spot in the middle (of course, humans are exploring it, it's just not publicized enough).
And the sweet spot is always in the middle.
Organic produce is popular because it gives you some reassurance (compared to almost none otherwise) and the living standards have increased in large (edit: small, but mostly participating on HN :) parts of the world to be able to afford it (with their living standard, I am sure Sri Lanka wanted to be the first exporter of exclusively organic produce, not for their internal use): we are still far away from finding the best way, but it's important to work from both ends to help us get there.