Think Green Live Clean

Photo Credit: Nicholas T.

I always knew that eating organic food was better for you and the environment, however I didn’t really know about the many benefits it provided. This summer I will be working on an organic farm and am excited to promote safer and healthier sustainable food.

Conventional farming regularly uses up to 400 pesticides that may be responsible for early puberty in children, asthma, cancer, and many other health problems. Organic farmers use little if no pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, livestock antibiotics, or food additives. By cutting these out of their farming routine, organic farmers rely on crop rotation, composting, and mechanical cultivation to maintain soil productivity and intentionally build up populations of “good insects”, like ladybugs, that eat the “bad insects” and their larvae. These organic farms produce food that is up to 25% more nutritious (in terms of vitamins and minerals), contains more antioxidants, and food that contains significantly higher amounts of essential nutrients that our bodies cannot produce on their own, therefore these need to be obtained through the consumption of food.

Organic farming can considerably reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which are a huge contributor to global warming. Conventional farming’s petroleum based practices that use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, interfere with the soils ability to absorb CO₂, so a lot more of it gets released into the atmosphere. Organic farming on the other hand uses composted soil, which has the ability to store high amounts of C0₂ keeping it from being released into the atmosphere. If organic practices were used on all U.S. cropland, 25% of CO₂ emissions could be cut. Is organic farming the answer to ending global warming? I think it is definitely a huge contributor in the fight to stop global warming.

What’s “Organic” About Organic video

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