Science Says: Organic > Inorganic... Science Also Says: Regenerative Agriculture > Conventional Ag

I always insist on providing clients with the science behind the products we offer. Thus, I shall preface this article with the only explanation you'll ever need as to why natural and organic farming is, yes, scientifically superior to synthetic "conventional" farming. As it turns out, "inorganic" really is the best way to describe conventional farming, and I hereby encourage that such terminology be coined.

2 weeks ago, Beirut faced a horrid incident: synthetic fertilizer functioned in its original purpose, as a bomb; World War 1 began just a few years after researchers (finally) discovering how to create ammonia, nitrogen fertilizer, for food production. They had known for about a century that plants uptake nitrogen primarily in the form ammonia, and finally they figured out how this chemical can be synthesized so that they could apply en masse to fields in order to, theoretically, significantly enhance soil fertility and accordant crop yield.The mechanization of this process to create explosives entailed surplus production, which was then applied to the founding research's intended purpose, food production increases, all the same. With that, inorganic farming was born.

The retrospective reality we face as a society is that these researcher's discoveries of inorganic fertilizer farming is more of a science experiment than an accurate understanding of soil fertility and crop production. It only works in the short term because it kills the soil biology that facilitates nutrient uptake and holds water, let alone carbon. Ammonium, like other plant-soluble minerals ("plant food"), is the very essence of fecal matter; as such, its proliferation kills soil microbes because soil microbes, like any organism, cannot survive, let alone thrive, in the presence of abundant feces!!! It burns cells because it is chemically highly volatile and reactive, readily damaging and/or destroying biological tissue. This is also ammonia it explodes. In fact, even plants can get nitrogen burn, and they regularly do from synthetic fertilizers!!

In contrast, organic farming works with natural systems to moderate mineralization (render for plant absorption) rates of "plant food" so that the soil itself builds perpetually and allows for only increasingly healthier plants and accordantly higher yields.

Farmers who are reverting to regenerative agricultural practices are seeing their soil's fertility, as well as water retention and accordant crop yields, actually increase on a yearly basis, whereas those still applying inorganic fertilizer of the imminently short-lived, 20th century agricultural conventions often see yields decline on a yearly basis, accordant to their soils' degradation, until land must be retired indefinitely.

(^Stay tuned; I'm going to compile a list of sources evidencing the successes of regenerative agriculture and similarly chemical-free cultivation practices.)