It’s a strange world where food writers rarely report on farms, nutritionists don’t discuss the growing of food, agronomists know nothing about nutrition – and even the champions of organic farming rarely make nutritional claims.
[rssbreak]
So I was pretty thrilled some weeks back to meet Carlo Leifert, a professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University in England whose job it is to help farmers use low-cost methods to grow high-value food.
If this sounds sort of obvious, I’ll take you right to the kicker: Leifert’s team has now demonstrated scientifically, not just intuitively, that individuals who buy organic food are getting more nutrients for their money.
Over lunch at Yorkville organic eatery True, Leifert gives me the goods. Turns out that synthetic fertilizers produce quantity at the expense of quality. That’s because artificial nitrogen encourages plants to grow fast to compete for light, thereby prioritizing starch relative to complex nutrients. Pesticides, he says, also discourage plant production of nutrients, which themselves protect plants from invaders.
When it comes to meat and milk, organic superiority is even more dramatic. Leifert’s team has shown that there is more protein, vitamin E, lutein, carotenoids and omega-3 fats in edibles from animals chewing on fresh pasture than from those fattened fast inside a barn on stored grains.
That makes for a healthy difference in rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, child allergies and a significant reduction in medical costs. And just as riveting: organics deliver more nutrients with 10 to 20 per cent fewer calories, Leifert says. “If obesity is a problem, that’s a benefit.”
But besides proving what many organic boosters have been afraid to claim, Leifert takes aim at the number-one agriculture truism. Though many have criticized the enviro and social costs of capital-intensive farming, none have dared challenge the supremacy of Big Agri’s cheap, plentiful food.
Not a problem for Leifert. His Quality Low Input Food project, funded by the European Union, hopes to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in farm subsidies away from high-volume food production toward high-nutrition edibles.
That’s a huge shift for Europe, where heart-wrenching memories of widespread famines during the 1930s and 40s have long inspired policies that drive up food production.
Organic farming methods, he says, “are the only way forward. Even in the short term, this is the only way to achieve acceptable yields.”
But he insists that his views are based strictly on science, not personal preference. High-input corporate farming methods may have produced low-cost food in the recent past, he says, but not for much longer.
Here’s why: in the old scheme, chemical fertilizer made up of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) let farmers grow the same crops on the same field year after year. So organic farmers, who spread their time over many veggies, grains, animals, green manure crops and composts, couldn’t compete on labour time or price.
While the N in NPK is the chemical elixir that gives plants energy, albeit at the cost of spewing out tons of global- warming gases, the real problem is the P, mined phosphorus. This, says Leifert, is “the bottleneck” or “limiting factor” of plant production, since no other chemical has an impact without phosphorus.
With about 30 years’ supply left in the world, most of it in Africa and Canada, imported phosphorus is already so expensive that it’s starting to drive European conventional food prices to the level of organic, he says.
What gets around this resource crunch? The organic strategy, because it relies on recycling crop and animals wastes instead of purchasing fertilizer from off-farm.
Indeed, Albert Howard, a pioneer of organic farming in the 1940s, based his health arguments exclusively on the superiority of fields composted with manure and crop wastes. This fertility “is the basis of the public health system of the future,” Howard wrote, and can reverse the “famine of quality” resulting from “vast supplies of bastard nitrogen” left over from the war.
So, nutrition, meet farming. The future of public health depends on pricier food that leads to savings on medicine – a smart trade-off since food-based disease prevention is always cheaper and happier than medical cures.
news@nowtoronto.com
