The Hidden Cost of Non-Organic Food: A Farmer’s Journey into Soil Health

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It was 19 years ago, in early 2006, that I bought a couple of acres of land in a village in Tamil Nadu that was shielded from urban influence, yet not so remote that it was off the grid. My decision was led by the books I had read—from Gandhi to Masanobu Fukuoka—and I was excited by the prospect of setting up an organic farm and learning from the experience.
In the years that followed, the idea of serious farming receded to the background, but the experience—of living for a fair part of every month in a village, yet having the economic freedom to understand agriculture without being entirely dependent on it—has been an exceptional teacher. I journeyed through rural India: the villages of Binsar and Ranikhet in Uttarakhand, the rice fields of the Bodoland Territorial Region in Assam and those in Palakkad and Wayanad in Kerala, the coffee estates of Coorg, and the cashew plantations of Sindhudurg and the wheat and soya fields of central Madhya Pradesh.
After nearly two decades, the most significant lesson—one that I strive to apply to my life every day—has been this: if we choose our food with care, its impact could possibly be the biggest contribution each of us makes to protect the planet and, equally crucially, our health. This is a rather lofty claim, and one that requires explanation.
There is considerable evidence that the nutritional quality of produce today is in general lower than it used to be: a carrot harvested from a typical commercial farm, for instance, is nutritionally poorer than one harvested 30 years ago. This decline has been researched and documented in a number of research laboratories across the world. In India, the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) conducted a study, published in 2017, which analysed 151 nutritional elements present in 528 foods and compared them with the same elements documented in a study conducted in 1989. The nutritional levels in common fruits, vegetables, and grains—including potatoes, tomatoes, apples, and millets—had substantially declined.
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The reason is simple: plants do not themselves produce all the nutrition that a vegetable needs but rely instead on the soil. Extraordinary scientific work done in the last three decades has shown the mutualism that exists between plant roots, fungi, and bacteria (the celebrated bookThe Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben did much to popularise these ideas). Plants receive nutrients such as magnesium, a micronutrient that is essential for the human body, from soil. Yet, in most agricultural landscapes, the soil is depleted from excessive use, repeated cropping, little time for natural regeneration, excessive chemicals and irrigation, and the use of machinery. In the NIN study, for instance, the levels of zinc, boron, iron, magnesium, and copper in foods, all micronutrients vital for soil health, were found to be substantially lower than the levels recorded in the baseline study of 1989.
Negative impactThis isn’t just impacting our health. One unintended consequence of such intensive agricultural practices in India has been the rapid decline in the percentage of soil organic carbon, a key component for soil fertility and water retention in soils. It is now known that released carbon has significantly contributed to global warming. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that “the first metre of soil across the globe holds an estimated 1,417 gigatonnes of carbon—almost double the amount in our atmosphere and dozens of times the levels of man-made emissions each year.” The degradation of one-third of the world’s soils has released up to 78 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, FAO estimated.
A farm worker sprays natural pesticide at a multi-crop farm in Aremanda village, Andhra Pradesh on February, 2024. Farmers, caught in a vortex of debt and declining productivity, would benefit from alternative practices that focus on soil and plant health. | Photo Credit: AP
We have, through organic agriculture, the potential to reverse this trend.
I met a coffee planter recently in Coorg who has, in just six years, increased the organic carbon across the 50 acres of his estate from 0.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent with sensible management; even as the quality of his coffee beans improved, the estate now sequesters hundreds of tons of carbon, far more than it did before he began his experiment. If we buy his coffee—which he hopes to brand in a couple of years—and support other organic farmers who work on soil health by increasing its carbon and micronutrient content through inter-cropping, manuring, mulching, and humus build-up, it ensures a win-win-win partnership for the farmers, consumers, and the planet.
Sudhi Seshadri, the author of The Art and Science of Managing Externality takes the example of a farmer in Gujarat who has a 16-ha farm that had been carbon-depleted after years of conventional agriculture, with just 0.52 per cent of soil organic carbon. Since 2000, over a 25-year period during which he transitioned to organic, the soil organic carbon in his farm has increased to 1.44 per cent, sequestering two tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectare per year.
Climate change is one of the two big environmental challenges confronting the planet; the other being the rapid loss of biodiversity. While attention in India has been focused on the decline in megafauna such as rhinos and elephants, the deleterious impact of pesticide-intensive agriculture in India (and indeed across the world) on smaller lifeforms like insects, crustaceans, and amphibians has been given less priority. This biota has an important role to play in the ecosystem, and chemical sprays destroy life with little discrimination. In a TED talk, regenerative farming expert Gabe Brown said that for every insect that is considered a pest, there are 1,700 beneficial or neutral ones, an astounding testament to both evolutionary design and human folly.
The good news is that, in farms that have bucked the trend and opted for alternative approaches to farming, even where there is a minimum use of chemical fertilizers to address soil deficiencies, the results have been promising. Insects and amphibians in such farms, for instance, have bounced back and have engendered a restoration process.
(File photo) Research shows that residues of agrochemicals in our food are over safe limits, and the impact on human health and the cost of treatment has been huge on both consumers and farmers. | Photo Credit: SHAJU JOHN
Research has now taught us that the residues of agrochemicals in our food are over safe limits, and the impact on human health and the costs of treatment have been huge. The impact has been felt both by consumers and the growers. The best-known example of the latter being the train from Bhatinda (Punjab) to Bikaner (Rajasthan) that was named the “cancer express” because it transported large numbers of people afflicted by cancer caused by agrochemicals in groundwater, the result of the Green Revolution.
There is little data in India on the loss of human life, debilitation, and decline in economic productivity as a consequence of long-term exposure to agrochemicals in our diet; yet all evidence points to significant and worrying consequences. Safe food is not the default on the dining table anymore, and, as consumers, we must be as discerning in our grocery buying as we would be with other investments.
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There is one more reason we must consider a switch to organic food: farmers and their families. Farmers are caught in a vortex of debt and declining productivity. They grapple with low financial returns even in crops such as rice and wheat, where the minimum support price was introduced to provide a meaningful profit. If they switch to alternative agriculture and give more attention to soil and plant health, as opposed to a single-minded focus on plant productivity, there may be an immediate drop in output, but then this gradually builds back over years. The initial reduced output then needs a better price and, equally importantly, a predictable price. Across India, a few farmer producer organisations have been created with precisely these objectives, and they need our support as discerning consumers to help the transition to organic agriculture from a niche that caters to the perceived elite to one that is mainstream.
My switch to organic food was guided by books, journals, joining, and informed individuals and networks that helped identify sources to buy chemical-free food from. Safe food is an investment of time, but the payback can be immensely rewarding: when each of us makes a food purchase with care, we support the health of the family that grows the crop, the soil where it is grown, and the biodiversity that is a crucial part of the ecosystem. It is our contribution towards mitigating the climate crisis. And it is a favour to ourselves.
Gopakumar Menon is a conservationist and author with a deep interest in the Himalaya.