Organic agriculture products are in demand all over the world because there are so many products that are being produced by unnatural means. The world market is growing rapidly since 1990, reaching a $63 billion level in 2012.
Many countries have banned GMO (genetically modified organisms) foods in favor of going back to natural farming. Organic methods for growing crops is regulated internationally and is enforced by lots of nations around the world. Standards are placed into effect by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.
Roughly 91 million acres worldwide have been farmed on an organic basis since 2011, which makes up roughly.9 per cent of the total farmland of the world.
Of course original farming of a traditional nature has been in practice with mankind for thousands of years, and is the world’s oldest form of food production.
When artificial fertilizers, fashioned during the 18th century, used super phosphates and ammonia-based products were cheap, easy to transport and apply, American crops began to boom. The when chemical pesticides began to be used in the 1940s, crops took another upward boost.
While these advances proved to be a boom for the short run, they caused problems in the long run with serious effects in soil erosion, compaction, overall fertility of soils decreasing, and most electrifying, the entrance of toxic chemicals into the food supply.
Because of these concerns, in the 1940s Sir Albert Howard and his wife Gabrielle, who were both highly trained botanists created organic agriculture, and organic agriculture products got their start.
The increasing public awareness of the problems of the mass producing, feed the world mentality, driven by the chemical, produce at all costs mentality, has caused a focus away from this, back to a more sensible, and safer way to produce our food.
A definition of organic farming could be a farming process in which the structure resembles an imitation of a natural system that has the integrity and independence of a natural process of nature without man made influences such as pesticides and fertilizers.
As an example an organic farming operation could use carbon based fertilizers instead of chemically based synthetic fertilizers. It can use biological pest control instead of synthetic pesticides.
Organic farming promotes the planting of diverse crops in one field, as opposed to mass production farming when only one crop is planted in a field over and over again. If a variety of vegetable crops is planted in a field, there is a wider range of beneficial insects supported, as well as different soil microorganisms.
Organic farming relies very much on natural breakdown of organic matter and composting, which puts back the natural components into the soil which reduces the need for any artificial fertilizers.
It is interesting that the American farming machine was originally ramped up to feed the world, and it seems that the world is beginning to reject the mass production, chemically induced method in farming for the more natural organic agriculture products farming model, which more and more of the countries of the world embraces.
