How to go organic

Whether you live in urban or rural Australia, organic living is now a realistic goal. This would not have seemed possible even two years ago, but now it seems that suddenly you can make choices for an organic lifestyle even on a busy day in the city.

There was once a time when your only takeaway food choices in an airport or city street, for example, were high-fat and meat based. Now you can grab a juice and make a vegetarian food choice with relative ease. You can take a yoga or meditation session before or after work and even in your lunch hour. This much-needed transformation to a holistic approach has been driven by our desire for balance and optimum health and it’s thanks to those consumers before us who demanded and drove the change.

The next step to better health is to go organic. This means choosing chemical-free options in every aspect of our lives. If that sounds daunting, the good news is it isn’t. Most of the hard work was done in previous years by environmentalists committed to a greener and healthier future for our planet. Some clever business people who were prepared to take a risk on organics then stepped in and now it’s for us to choose organic or not.

The organic movement began 60 years ago, with the farmers. Their own health was suffering from chemical farming practices and they realised the problems caused by chemicals long before city dwellers did. When farmers nurture biologically enriched soil that’s free from chemicals, we all benefit from receiving tasty, wholesome food grown from a sustainable resource.

Now, all over Australia, organic gardens are popping up in homes, on small acreages and on large farms. It is driving a whole new sustainable system of living. The organic movement may have started with food, but it has begun a chain reaction of health and sustainability that could rescue our planet and enable us to maintain a modern lifestyle at the same time.

The companies that are going organic are finding it’s finally commercially viable. However, this relatively new industry still needs a helping hand. It’s now up to us to put our dollars and lifestyle choices where it matters to ensure the growth of the organic industry. If the trend continues at this rate, we as consumers could create an unexpected revolution whereby the world becomes 100 per cent organic. In effect, we can all turn this planet around. Belgium, for example, already has in place a 30-year plan to ensure the whole country goes organic.

Brief history of organics

The origins of the modern organic movement can be traced to the post-war period in the late 1940s. Pesticides, as they became known, were, in fact, one of the first forms of biological warfare in World War II. A byproduct of this chemical warfare was the noticeable decline in bugs affecting food crops. The pesticide industry found a post-war commercial outlet for their products in the farming industry.

Farmers quickly identified the detrimental health effects of using chemicals and a small percentage of them maintained biological diversity as a farming tool instead, especially in Europe. Known as biodynamic agriculture, these principles were kept alive on a small scale until they began to be used on a larger scale in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was the 1960s before public awareness of the sensitivity to ecological issues started to spread. This was compounded throughout the 1970s, when the first large-scale environment protests and alternative lifestyle communities began researching and applying organic farming methods. The ’70s was a time of new ideas and significant sociological transformations throughout the world and the first time in Australia that organics were taken seriously. It would be another decade, though, before the hippie image was shaken and organics began to be accepted as commercially viable on a wider scale.

This was also the decade when England and France led the way with organic farmers joining together in trade syndicates and federations. A logo was created to introduce the notion of legally formulated specifications and quality controls that gave a legally binding guarantee for the consumer. Soon after, the major national organic farming organisations throughout the world joined forces in the form of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM).

There are now many certification bodies throughout the world and any product with organic integrity carries a logo. Anyone can call their product organic, but not anyone can carry a logo. So look for this as a guarantee on the next product you pick up that claims to be organic!

The 1980s to 1990s saw the first real growth in public demand for organically grown produce. These days, it’s positively smart. At fashionable gatherings, valuable contacts are excitedly swapped: the charming vegetable supplier, the organic supermarket, the farmer who takes Visa. Celebrities are great trendsetters promoting organics, making it fashionable and doing much to raise the profile of organics. It has also become much easier to buy organic products than it used to be, with even supermarkets responding to our demands.

Still, a farmer can’t go organic overnight. After years of using agrochemicals, it takes at least two years for land to become “clean” enough to farm without them. So it takes real commitment from farmers. Now that consumers are voting with their dollars, more and more farmers are prepared to go organic.
The industrial farmers continue to impoverish the landscape, pollute soils and watercourses and market contaminated food, all without penalty. They’re producing for the government, not the consumer. It started after the World War II with the introduction of subsidies whereby farmers were guaranteed prices for what they grew, regardless of world market prices.

There’s a still a discrepancy between what people say they want and what they do. None of us would say no to organic food, but we all buy many non-organic products, too. Free-range eggs cost just a bit more, but 90 per cent of the egg market is battery. Only when it’s easy, when organics are in all stores and are totally cost-effective, can we expect the real revolution to take place. It’s ultimately up to us.