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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

Being from Ohio I knew quite a few farmers, or people that grew up on farms. They all laugh at organic and say it’s bullshit. There is typically no way to tell after the fact if something is or isn’t organic. Same with rBGH free dairy products.

Farmers have known for years that the label is only as good as the word of farmer, and with economic pressures to cheat, it’s not surprising to find cheaters.

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> There is typically no way to tell after the fact

Consumer Reports (and others) did studies that showed non-organic food have lots more pesticide residue than organic food. That of course doesn't mean they are better for you or that they are tastier.

Depends on the food. Broccoli, possibly, because you eat all of it. But nobody eats a banana peel.

Gonna go out on a limb here and say that consuming more pesticides is bad for you.

It's fertilized with manure; eating fecal bacteria is bad for you, too. Wash your produce no matter where you get it from.

No, non-organic has more residue of expected pesticides.

The often unspoken truth however is that many chemicals aren't tested for. For example copper sulfate, used as organic fungicide.

In other words conventional agriculture uses far more substances that the USDA tests for, a vast majority of them, whereas organic agriculture uses substances that aren't covered by USDA tests. Which should be obvious.

This doesn't mean that:

1. Organic agriculture uses less pesticides (bullshit, unless you're talking about GMOs, another hot subject)

2. Organic produce is in any way healthier

Both of these statements lack credible evidence. And we might actually find instances in which the substances used in organic agriculture are more unhealthy than their conventional equivalents.

I think grouping all pesticides together and thinking about who uses "less pesticides" or "more pesticides" will lead to incorrect evaluations of pesticide safety.

Scientists should evaluate chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis. I found a study that talks about how using certain chemicals on the farm can lead to cancer for farm workers: "In summary, the epidemiologic evidence from a number of different studies now more convincingly shows that prostate cancer is related to pesticide use." This makes me think that, at the very least, organic produce is healthier for farm workers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6276799/

edit: forgot a word.

> For example copper sulfate, used as organic fungicide.

Why would one need to test for copper? The trace amounts of it that one would find are good for you. I mean, it's used for water piping in homes even.

That's silly, like saying breathing chlorine is safe because it's a component in table salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper(II)_sulfate#Toxicologic...

No, it's like saying eating trace amounts of copper is safe as proven by the fact humans have been doing that since forever, and by the fact that health authorities endorse it (hospitals have copper piping).

The enormous and simple point you're missing: just like chlorine versus sodium chloride, copper sulfate is not the same thing as plain old copper.

Its not bullshit in the UK at least. Here is a mainstream article which cites government testing [1] Quote : "A Maximum Residue Level (MRL) for pesticides in foods is set by law and is below the safety level. In the most recent study, 3 percent of conventionally farmed food samples contained over the MRL for an individual pesticide compared with 0.4 percent of organic, while 44 percent contained residues at or below the MRL compared with 3 percent of organic."

Do you have any decent sources for your declamations ?

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/organic_food_health

Trading Standards in the UK are able to detect organic products, and will periodically take samples from farms and manufacturers for lab testing. There have been samples taken from stores, and prosecutions -- not enough, but the ability is there.

That's over and above the Soil Association regulations and inspections. SA is the organic standards body in the UK.

So it sounds like the US problem is lack of oversight. Of course thanks to the deliberate under funding of the state, particularly of local councils, by recent Tory governments the UK is rapidly catching up to that lack of oversight -- Trading Standards are severely underfunded currently as councils are forced to fund more urgent needs first.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/organic-produce-tests-and-inspec...

If you are passing off one product as another, deliberately defrauding your buyers, you are running serious risks. It wont be the feds taking the farm. It will be Whole Foods' lawyers coming to recover the cost of pulling your product off shelves. And insurance doesn't cover fraud.

TFA goes into this. By the time it’s at Whole Foods it’s way too late to test for pesticides.

GMO is a different story. The fraudster in this story got caught early on co-mingling GMO with non-GMO.

In some states, you're not allowed to label milk as rBGH-free, because all milk is rBGH free. They have to label it as being made from cows that the farmers promise not to feed rBGH to.

You can get certification from an auditing organization that you are following organic practices, so for farms willing to spend the extra money on that, it's a little better than someone's word. I know someone who works as an auditor in this space for a living, and they are pretty busy.

Except for those with leaky digestive systems, and non-organic produce is a guaranteed way to get a headache.

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