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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

If organic food actually had a noticeably higher mineral count than nonorganic, I would start eating it. But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals. Organic doesn’t mean healthier it just means that it uses different kinds of pesticides, to my knowledge

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Adjacent: Butter/milk from grass-fed cows has a noticeably better amino acid profile

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10531600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7905466/

This makes sense, because grass and the alternatives(probably corn/oat meal) don't have the same nutritional profile. A more apt comparison might be whether cows which get sprayed with a manufactured anti-fly compound have a different nutritional profile than cows that are sprayed with, say, lavendar oil to keep the flies away.

The biggest difference in food I’ve ever seen is eggs from pasture raised chickens vs farmed ones - it’s night and day.

Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality, and erosion control standards that would hypothetically affect mineral contents.

Monoculture (conventional corn or soybean for example) uses huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer to increase yields per acre far beyond what the soil can naturally sustain. Wide swaths of American farmland has lost literally feet of topsoil over the past 50 years. The soil is largely sterile, and depleted of minerals. Monoculture also means the ecosystem that can replenish the soil is absent.

Corn and soybeans are most definitely rotated. Peanuts are a common nitrogen fixer and Alfalfa is great too.

>This crop rotation benefits both alfalfa and wheat/barley/corn. On the one hand, cereals tend to decrease the development of weeds, leaving the field free for the alfalfa cultivation. On the other hand, there are findings suggesting that corn following alfalfa yields approximately 10% more than corn following corn.[1]

[1]https://wikifarmer.com/alfalfa-crop-rotation/

Peanuts increase nitrogen and probably no nothing for micronutrients. They may allow time for the underlying rock to transfer minerals to the soil which are consumed more heavily by the opposing crops, but they probably won't do anything for the issue reported in TFA.

Having more corn doesn't mean that the corn or soil has more micronutrients. Corn is nitrogen heavy, so rotation makes sense if yields are all you care about.

Farming has changed since the dust bowl of the 1930s. Soil has been lost, but conservation factors have been found. Farmers are now building topsoil. We can only build top soil by about 1mm/year so it takes a long time to get any measurable change (vs the rate of loss which was much higher).

> Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality

No, that's not what it means. Farmers producing food that meets the "organic" label may follow those practices but it's not a requirement.

> Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality, and erosion control standards that would hypothetically affect mineral contents.

So does ‘conventional’ farming

That's not totally true. I remember as a kid going to my grandfather's farm in Iowa and there would be an alfalfa rotation every 6 years I believe. Now they don't bother with that anymore since the fertilizers/seeds and other treatments mean that the low value alfalfa no longer needs to be in the mix.

Fertilizer is like doping. It works! But it comes at a long term cost. Anyway, now we can go down two paths, hyper-modern indoor farming which is expanding in Europe and organic farming that is growing in the US and Europe. Conventional industrial farming is going to get hit from both sides.

Also, the big things keeping corn going is sugar duties and ethanol subsidies. Without those, alot of the crop would disappear.

I have no idea how old you are but the truth is farming techniques have changed significantly, even in the last 20 years. Nowdays if you don't consider yourself a steward of the land then you aren't doing the right thing by it.

My family are farmers in Australia. We are currently going through the worst drought we have ever had. We've had 7 inches of rain this year vs our annual rainfall of 26 inches. We are still growing a (very small) crop. This is possible because of soil conservation, no-till agriculture, and having healthy soil that conserves moisture.

Farmers who haven't adopted these techniques are bankrupt.

in the US and Europe, it is possible to not engage in best practice farming techniques, because government subsidies (20 Bn USD in America, 59 Bn Euro in the EU) remove the competitive pressures that that force best practice (it really isn't as simple as 'just forcing more production out of the soil by adding more fertilizer_.

Yes, of course there are still farmers not following best practice. It's a normal distribution

> Farmers who haven't adopted these techniques are bankrupt.

If only the world were just. As you say, countries with legislature captured by farming lobbies are no longer subject to survival pressures.

Can't imagine why this was downvoted.

Because it is inaccurate.

Please point out the inaccuracies.

Presumably, using natural fertilizers would make a difference, as you'd expect a wider range of minerals than in straight haber-process fertilizer. I don't know if natural fertilizers are always a requirement for organic food, though.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/content/introduction-o...

>Soil Fertility: Crops more easily resist disease, survive drought, and tolerate insects when grown in good soil. Organic crop producers build soil quality by adding compost, animal manures, or green manures. As soil organisms break down these inputs, they convert nutrients into forms plants can absorb and create humus that sustains soil quality. Organic producers must not apply sewage sludge or biosolids to soil. Additionally, organic crop producers use cover crops to protect the soil from wind and water erosion. Soil-conserving practices include the use of cover crops, mulches, conservation tillage, contour plowing, and strip cropping.

There is nothing about organic that means it builds soil. Conventional farmers are adapting the same practices. In many cases conventional farming with "chemicals" does better: because of roundup a cover crop can be applied much easier - you can kill it when you are done vs having to plow it up (plowing is a horrible thing to do to soil). I find it amusing they separate "sewage sludge" from manure as if they are not the same thing.

They are not the same thing. Manure is animal poop. Sewage sludge is the output of our sewers. Despite our best efforts to filter this, there is a lot more than poop in there. Heavy metals, drugs, etc.

While there are many benefits to unfettered trade, a downside is lack of quality control of the inputs into the system. Garbage in, Garbage out...

"But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals."

It could be the opposite too. There's some evidence that, in some cases, purely hydroponic greenhouse-grown produce, which often qualifies and is sold as "organic", has fewer nutrients than soil-grown produce.

I think you’re forgetting about fertilizer. You can’t spray the common green fertilizer on Organic crops.

Some organic fertilizers I’ve used at my home garden: bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion and egg shell.

Organic particularly means "no roundup". Non-organic crops tend to be round-up resistant strains. If the seed engineers for said strains weren't being careful, they could have affected other aspects of the seed's physiology while selecting for round-up resistance.

One concrete example is how certain modern strains of apple seeds have weaker dormancy, causing imbibing and radicand emergence to occur prematurely, usually before the apple is even eaten. Such changes are an unintended consequence of human selection for size. It's possible that the tinkering required to increase plant vigor in the presence of non-organic pesticides has a greater adverse effect on mineral content. Though there are lots of other variables to consider as well such as soils, fertilizers, storage and transportation, the positioning of plants, whether they are able to share nutrients.

It's going to be very much case-by-case. 'Organic' is a very big tent, with lots of different practices. Some is, as you say, quite conventional but with different chemical use. But organic can also incorporate other sustainable farming practices that are more likely to result in real differences.

Slower growth through less fertilizer (including CO2), leads to a higher mineral rate if I remember correctly

Minerals need to be in the ground before they can get into the plant. The depletion of soil & vegetable quality has been going on for years. This isn't the first study on the topic by a long shot. [1]

[1] - https://www.vitacost.com/blog/food-nutrition/nutrition/how-i...

That sounds reasonable if the absorption rate is not uniform. Any source for this?

No, bioavailability of the nutrient is the only real thing that matters when it comes to fertilizers. Most organic fertilizers are not as bioavailable as even the most basic hydroponic fertilizer.

Thats the legal requirement for organic but I’ve noticed it varies a lot in other aspects depending in the food. In US supermarkets standard food is generally big ag, bland, commodity level junk. I think organic has now become a byword for a subset of consumers who want to opt out of our low quality US food system and are willing to pay to do that. For example organic chicken seems to me to be often a different (smaller, better tasting) breed, free range, not water frozen, better packaged etc, not just organic, so that overall it is healthier in a variety of ways.

I expect organic food to have a substantially lower mineral count. Organic farming uses a lot more tillage than conventional farming does.

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