- A farm claiming to be organic have cows in fenced "dry lots" with certified organic grain as food and tethered to milking machines 3 times a day
- Free range can mean a tiny door to a little grassy yard that is only accessible after 5-6 weeks of age
- Organic chickens must have "ACCESS to the outdoors" but if they don't for the first 5-6 weeks of their lives then they rarely go out into unknown territory outdoors
- plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composting soils
Questions:
- On average how many grocery stores sell inorganic food vs. organic food which is still treated similarly with sneaky ways of doing it?
- Whats the difference of energy used on organic vs. conventional?
Great questions. I don't know the answers to either. I've talked a bit with the owners at Nourish Market in Lynn Valley. They deal with island farm organic and avalon. Both of those are apparently good. My uneducated guess would be that the energy inputs would be similar or greater in an organic farm, just from an economies of scale perspective. I was told that people use more fossil fuels per calorie picking up the groceries from the store than are used in transporting foods here from Asia. So the smaller the scale, the more transportation energy would matter per unit of food. Again though, I'd be happy to be shown that I'm wrong on that one.
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