Always the same speech that runs in a loop! However, the article is partly correct but seems to ignore the history (it is not the only one for that matter!) Which led to the development of this type of agriculture.
This comes from an awareness (still need to be conscious of course!) That this industrial agriculture, which is booming, is dangerous for the farmer, the products used, as well as for the life of the soil. in fact also the costs and that therefore, eventually, this system goes in the wall!
The peasant world has always been based on common sense because it is based on concrete realities, that of the earthly, that the hand and the eye of the peasant could know without going through sophisticated labs.
But the human being, faced with the promises of an enchanting future, exploding yields, (and the repercussions of the modest income of farmers) is not a superman who can resist the siren song of the industry.
These are the generations of
young dynamic executives (out of agronomic universities) who managed to persuade these farmers, attached to their cultural traditions, to change methods. Unfortunately, they did not foresee that this would provoke an explosion of parasitisms, cryptogamic diseases, more and more expensive treatments, more and more expensive agricultural equipment, ever more important buildings, etc ... and therefore of debts and fall of these enchanting revenues.
So AB is this awareness! But the machine was launched, huge financial interests at stake and farmers, herders, trapped in the system and whose survival depended on it (suicide being only an extreme solution, unfortunately more and more frequent But the idea of a less polluting agriculture, less destructive of the living, is and remains in the depths of the soul inherited from the culture of the ancestors who did not need all these inputs and chemicals dangerous for them. even their families and the people, future consumers of their production.
Thus is born the AB and the farmers who remain confronted with the reality of the polluted ground, more or less sterilized by the system in place and who must do with this reality (the nature is fast to destroy, but slow to rebuild) and the transition between the two modes is not done without difficulties and therefore of production, in spite of everything, on which depends the subsistence of the peasant himself his family, the repayment of debts, etc ... *
This explains why some toxic products, with high persistence, have continued to be used (and still are) for understandable reasons of survival of farms and especially those in conversion. This has also given rise to controversies between the ABs, some of whom opposed the products in question and those who wanted to change without endangering their future harvests.
Both have their reasons understandable according to the contexts obviously.
So yes ! it may seem philosophically abnormal, but the human reality also has its reasons.
Finally, and this is important, and even more so now, is that AB conversions are also related to the difficulties faced by debt-ridden and poverty-stricken farmers who see this AB as a way out of a situation of poverty. more and more difficult and hope for new financial resources "
since AB is more expensive ". but between financial interest and reality on the ground,
without a philosophical approach that led to this AB, the almost inevitable risk (and it is more and more the case) is the decline of the requirements necessary to produce healthy, really healthy, and therefore without pesticides and company and in fact without copper for example.
But the official recognition of the AB (after having denigrated, fought for decades) led to propose fewer quality requirements to open this formula to more farmer put off by the "fanaticism" supposed pioneers AB. And these requirements are even lower in other countries that have AB that claim to be and that invade the supermarkets increasingly demanding (by their customers and the media) of these products.
So yes, today it has become big anything, which aims to discredit the AB and its aficionados because the agronomic industry (despite the appearances of it too) sees a bad eye the loss of its productions and related benefits as any industrialist. Indeed
SI tomorrow all agriculture was becoming AB in a serious way, without cheating, it would be the end of this industry and all these jobs to the key, which could and can not be done over a sufficiently long period (even if that makes more than half a century that this is ongoing).
In the series: When organic carrots contain more pesticides than those called "classic"
in the series, I only tell nonsense it's also a classic! It is not LES but DES, which makes a fundamental difference. But "
when you want to slaughter his dog they say he has rabies"and you obviously did not read the article to the end! it is only an announcement effect like many others, but so is life!
"We make science with facts, like making a house with stones: but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house" Henri Poincaré