AGRI
Organic Farming Organic farming aims to create a soil that is balanced in nutrients, has good structure, high biological activity and substantial levels of organic matter. This ensures that plants produced on such soils are naturally resistant to disease and infestation. ‘We become what we eat.’ Ayurveda The living body has the ability to convert all that we eat into living tissue. It is an abiding though subtle miracle of life that no matter what the form of the food that we eat, it still gets created into “us”. Human food was meant to be living, non-toxic, light and easy to digest and assimilate, alkaline and rich in a variety of nutrients and food factors in their utilizable form. It is impossible to create food of this nature if the pathway to its creation at the farm is paved with hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, artificial preservatives and additives. These form the major implements of modern agriculture and their use at various levels at the farm is reflected in their increasing presence of their complex remnants on our dinner tables, in our bodies and throughout our environment. Organic farming sees little use for all of these necessary factors of modern agricultural systems. It rests on a set of simple defining principles that open the way for a robust, healthy and sustainable environment.
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Feed the Soil Modern and conventional agriculture lays heavy emphasis on feeding the plant. The belief is that providing nutrients are necessary as soil fertility is an imported phenomenon and that all inputs to the plant have to be processed externally and then “applied” to it. Organic farmers see soil fertility as a biological process. The view is that it is the soil that needs to be “fed” and that this can be sustainably and easily ensured
Hammer Food & Beverage Business Review
by simply returning to the soil only those nutrients that have been removed from it in the form of harvested crops. In this context, often, the root of the conflict is nitrogen. Modern farmers believe that nitrogen is a crucial purchased input in the practice of agriculture. Hence hundreds of thousands of tonnes of various forms of nitrogen are manufactured and applied to crops. This has ensured the escalating and dangerous presence of nitrates in our food. These nitrates can be converted into
Dec-Jan ’22
