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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

>"Ha, see, I knew organic was always a scam"

I'm probably one of these people, so I feel the need proffer a defense.

It isn't that I think organic produce is a scam. But from what I understand about the verification systems in place it is easy to get away with labeling non-organic products as organic. And since organic products sell at a price premium, everyone has a financial incentive to be in on it. Everyone just passes the buck upstream.

I'm certainly not going to pay a price premium for something that isn't easy to validate. Now, if the organic green peppers look better than the non-organic ones, I might buy them instead, but in this instance, I'm paying for tangibly better produce, not a fancy sticker.

It doesn't help that I grew up in soy bean country right around the time when everyone was going organic, so I've seen first-hand the disdain that land owners had for organic buyers. The article is really spot on in this respect.

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Organic certification is shockingly rigorous. So I’m sure it’s true that if you falsify documents or paper chains, or suborn an inspector, you can probably get away with some fraud.

But I think it’s a misunderstanding to think that farmers have an easy path to unverifiable fraud. Those inspectors want to see your books, along with your entire operation. It’s rough to get certified.

Hopefully this kind of story encourages more people to actively shun certified organic products. I do because I think certification is a piece of paper that doesn't mean much about food quality and I resent the pressures it's creating on small, responsible farmers.

I tend to eat my fruits and vegetables, no just look at them. Why is your main way to discern the quality looks and volume?

Are they more flavourful? Nutritious?

Stores tend to frown upon taking bites of produce. But it's not a bad approach to take a nibble of things like herbs.

With enough practice and maybe some reading, you can learn to evaluate a fruit or vegetable pretty well by touch, sight, and smell.

Ripeness is the biggest thing I look at. Generally the more ripe the fruit or veg, the softer, and more fragrant, and deeper the color it will be. So I try to buy firm, light, less smelly produce, but eat it when it is just begun to soften and give off an aroma.

I also look for bruises, cuts, blemishes, or other signs of damage during shipping.

For things like melons, I recommend reading up on how to evaluate them. Watermelons and musk melons in particular have a staggering flavor difference that can see, felt, and smelled, but they don't follow the same "rules" as other produce.

Can you tell us more about this distain?

While I understand that organic farming with reasonable yields requires care and expertise, at face value this just looked like amateur hour to establishment farmers--at least initially. I'm not endorsing this view, but I grew up in farm country and heard it a lot. The thinking is something like what follows.

Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers massively increased yield, so eschewing these modern innovations due to some woo to get trash yields and inferior products (e.g., smaller, with more signs of insect predation) just seems like lunacy.

Keep in mind, people who have made a living judiciously spraying their crops with these chemicals for many years aren't likely to think they've been poisoning themselves or the population for a lot of reasons, so they won't buy into the central premise of organic farming. So it's like insisting on doing all of your programming on a PD-11/20 just because it's pure. When customers start insisting on the right to buy inferior products at inflated prices, it's all the more batty.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Do you know if their perspective has shifted over time?

I don't live there anymore and the friends I had back then all sold their farms to large farming conglomerates (another trend).

I would guess that their views have moderated a bit, but probably more because organic can be good for business and it doesn't seem to be going away so there's less risk that capital expenditures and up-skilling to do organic farming is going to be wasted.

To illustrate, when I was a kid I would "bean-walk," which is walking through soybean fields and cutting down weeds with a hook like tool manually. It was cheaper to pay local kids arcade money than spray, so that's what they did. In general farmers don't like spraying their crop with chemical--it's expensive.

Farmers are pretty pragmatic people, but they have to plan ahead and deal with weather, etc. If organic pays enough of a premium to handle reduced yield and perhaps an increased risk premium for risk (e.g., higher insect levels due to a wet spring that organic methods don't fix) they'll do it.

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