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Comment by soldehierro | Hacker News Reader

Believe me, the organic transition had nothing to do with agricultural practices and all to do with economics, with the logic being that fertilizer was an expensive import, and by banning fertilizer they could hemorrhage foreign exchange reserves a little less. Of course, they also earned a lot less because the bone-headed transition lead to a marked reduction in yield, only worsening the forex problem the ban of agricultural chemicals was meant to solve.

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Organic fertilizer requires that the N, P, and K actually came from somewhere. Often, that's from something else that used non-organic fertilizer. So if a country goes all organic not only are yields down on the fields using organic fertilizer, the supply of organic fertilizer itself could dry up.

Nitrogen can come from the air by using nitrogen fixing crops in a rotation, so it can never run out (N2 is the most abundant gas on the atmosphere). The problem is that growing nitrogen fixers take a lot of land time that could otherwise be growing crops. Also not as nitrogen rich as fossil fertilizers (gas N2 is quite stable, difficult to fixers to extract in high quantities).

I know nothing about P and K though.

P is mainly manure I believe. It is residual in rocks but I don't know if plants can use that.

Ash is a good source for K if there are no other K-rich fermented dead plants available.

You get a lot of both from coffee grounds so someone might have to drink a lot of coffee.

Number me in the coalition of the willing.

A phrase to remember: "Exports are made out of imports". Almost every export industry depends on an import in its production chain somewhere, which is why trade wars and sanctions are so destructive. Import-substitution planned economies have to be very clever about how they approach this to get it to work.

Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. If its already a somewhat niche product like tea, organic produce might go even higher and make up for the loss in yield.

For Sri Lanka, it was the perfect storm of covid decimating tourism AND overseas demand for their produce.

Without Covid, they might have been able to stay afloat on tourism dollars until the organic farming thing started showing results.

> Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas.

This also affected staple crops like rice which are eaten domestically, effectively forcing the country to start importing food instead of fertilizer.

It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.

> It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.

.. overnight.

Some countries have managed to pivot towards luxury exports, and indeed this is one of the standard things that the IMF tries to make failing countries do, but it's a multi-decade process.

Sri Lanka is the second largest tea exporter in the world -- if you converted all of that to organic, then odds are good that the organic tea market just collapses.

Beyond that, it's easy to get rid of modern fertilizers, but the tradeoff is significantly lower yield. To make up for the loss of yield, you need more space. Sri Lanka is a small island that is densely populated, so space is at a premium. Yielding less crop for the same money might have worked out if not for the pandemic, except for the fact that they domestically consumed most of their domestic staple goods, exporting the surplus. Now they've resorted to importing.

> niche product like tea

Perhaps your niches are smaller than mine. Some people regard tea as an indispensable bulk commodity.

Organic farming is strictly self-regulated. Usually it takes something like five years for a field that was used for traditional farming to be considered organic. The field has to flush the insecticide. With a decision to prevent forex issues by banning fertilizer, Sri Lanka could not afford to wait years for its organic products to be recognized internationally. The plan was foolish.

I guess that makes sense, initially, on paper. I would guess some organic farming fanatic put put the numbers that fertilizers import can be reduced XX%, and the dollar signs in the eyes of the ruling family lit up (All those dollars not spent on imports can be embezzled)

A smarter person would have understood that there is a return on investment for fertilizer.

Doesn’t matter if you don’t have cash.

That means you go broke or into debt more slowly

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