Organic Fertilizers



With the mounting concern for health and environment, consumers are now getting more conscious as to the quality of the food they buy from the grocery store.  As chemicals from fertilizers become a global concern for their carcinogenic effects, more and more people are buying organic fruits, vegetables and meat.  These products are grown using organic fertilizers and undergo very  little or zero chemical processing.  But what is organic fertilizer in the first place?

Organic fertilizer is defined as naturally occurring fertilizers or naturally occurring mineral deposits like saltpeter.   Examples of organic fertilizer include manure, slurry, worm castings, peat, seaweed, humic, guano and humic.

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French Caribbean poisoned by pesticides



The French Caribbean Islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe have been poisoned after years of pesticide use.  Experts say that more than half of its 800,000 residents are contaminated by a chlordecone or kepone which is used as pesticide in banana platations to kill weevils around the country.

Scientists say that the “health disaster” will contribute to residents developing cancer, infertility and birth defects.  Health specialists have warned that chlordecone has poisoned both the land and water.  Chordecone when sprayed can stay in the environment to up to a century, contaminating the entire food chain.

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Spinning the Biological Wheel



Organic farming is a quite distinct, and more original, approach towards environmental- friendly production of food and other organic commodities. Instead of synthetic (chemical) agents, it relies either entirely, or predominantly, on using natural organic (biological) material for all/most of the farming processes. In broad terms, organic farming is all about empowering the ‘biological’ over the ‘chemical’ constituents of life. This makes sense when we look at organisms (any of them) as bands of tiny chemical elements, all put together by nature to create a larger biological entity. Upon death and decay, these biological units are broken down to their chemical sub-units and become nutrients for other biological forms (mostly plants and microbes). This way the wheel of life keeps spinning with the biological entity as the higher form of existence.

Organic farming is based on the consciousness of the biological cycle as something inclusive, especially when it comes to issues of health and environment. Introducing chemical (fertilizers and pesticides) or biological agents (genetically modified organisms) from the outside may make the biological wheel spin faster to cover more grounds but, in the long run, it will put the system at a loss because it makes the wheel wear more quickly. Hence, synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers may increase the fertility of soil for one season but the amount left in the soil needs to be washed before cultivating another crop and this washing process is likely to deplete the soil in other nutrients. So additional chemicals need to be used; means more cost and more cleaning, and the production cycle is stressed. In organic farming, letting nature take care of nature keeps the balance intact.

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