Organic Farming

Organic Farming

Organic farming is a form of agriculture that does not use synthetic, which means artificial, fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified organisms. Organic basically defines a way of growing, processing, and handling food. Organic farming promotes biodiversity. The dictionary defines biodiversity as the diversity among and within plant and animal species in an environment. The goals of organic farming includes maintaining diverse crops, keeping soil healthy, reducing pollution, avoiding synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture, and promoting environmental friendliness.

Organic farming can produce up to two or three times as much food as conventional farming. They found that using existing quantities of organic fertilizers can help produce more. This helps the developing countries because if the developing countries switch to organic farming, their productions can increase significantly. Many farmers from developing countries could not afford the expensive fertilizers and pesticides that the other farmers use to produce high yields (production per land area). Organic farming has helped small farms by giving them an opportunity to compete with larger farms. Green manures which are cover crops that are put into the soil to provide natural soil has been found to provide enough nitrogen to farm organically without the synthetic fertilizer. Conventional agriculture uses synthetic fertilizer, biocides (a chemical that destroys organisms), and mechanical tillage (plowing or sowing) which is harmful to the environment. The excess fertilizer from conventional agriculture leads to dead zones, which are low oxygen areas where marine life could not survive. It also causes the soil to wear down, greenhouse gas emission (release of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone), and loss of biodiversity.

Organic farming promotes biodiversity. It does this by growing