So when I got a message from a PR rep for the Real Organic Project™ about their client, I wanted to know if they still oppose hydroponic food. Hydroponic food uses no soil, which means in a controlled environment it needs no pesticides. The public loves that idea. The last time a survey was done, only 7% of the public wanted to know about GMOs in their food unsolicited while over 70% wanted to know what pesticides are used in food production.(1)

Lined up against transparency for the public was Big Organic™  – they need their toxic chemicals to remain excluded, like their trial lawyer group Environmental Working Group does when producing an annual Dirty Dozen list of foods with trace pesticides. If organic™ pesticides were itemized, as California once did, the entire list of 12 would be dominated by organic- certified compounds. The last time California itemized organic™ chemicals, their farmers used up to 600% more chemicals per calorie of food.(1)

Organic™ lobbyists and trade groups oppose hydroponic being listed as organic™ because they claim soil is vital. If that quasi-religious, unscientific belief about food confuses you, you are not alone.

It’s instead about their chemical industry clients. Not Monsanto, they called that company Monsatan because it sold safer weedkillers than the compounds sold by Grainger and Haviland and Amerimac Chemical and others few can name because they don’t have Big Organic™ funding anti-science activists and social media campaigns claiming they are killing Gaia.

Those companies sell more-toxic-yet-organic-certified copper sulfate and other pesticides.

The irony of the Big Organic™ manufacturing process engaging in de facto tariffs and protectionism against hydroponic food is that the Clinton administration that forced the creation of the National Organic Standards Board inside the US Department of Agriculture used the rationalization that ‘all farmers are good farmers’ and a marketing designation made no difference in that. Now they are using lobbyists and trade groups to insist that not all farmers are good farmers, if it might encroach on their $120 billion Big Food dominance.

Right now, Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Rollins are playing nice with each other. He is obsessed with insinuating that if you give your child a measles vaccine they’ll never play baseball or get a job. When he turns his Weird Ban Hammer on farmers, claiming that is also causing autism, Rollins is not going to take any prisoners. And she will win. President Trump knows American agriculture is the best in the world because it is the safest in the world, thanks to science. We use less land and water and energy to produce more affordable food than at any point in history. We are so efficient that 15,000,000 acres of farmland have gone out of use.

If the world did that, farmland equivalent in size to the country of India could revert to nature and poor people would eat better than ever.
Real Organic Projekt and other groups that are funded by industry panic over that future because it will hurt their revenue stream. They want organic™ food to remain for wealthy white people.

If they simply embraced hydroponics, they could still hate GMOs and CRISPR and every genetic engineering invented since the Mutagenesis they certify as organic™, and their costs would be far below conventional farmers that uses soil. They could become the dominant food sector.
Being against hydroponics is as weird as opposing vaccines so it is little surprise the exact same groups against it were anti-vaccine until just a short while ago. And likely will be again soon.

NOTE:
(1) Lined up against such transparency for the public was and is Big Organic – they need their toxic chemicals to remain excluded, like their client Environmental Working Group does when producing an annual Dirty Dozen list of foods with trace pesticides. If organic pesticides were itemized, as California once did, the entire 12 would be dominated by organic industry compounds. The last time California itemized organic chemicals, their farmers used up to 600% more chemicals per calorie of food.

California stopped listing organic chemicals due to lobbying efforts. More expensive gas formulations and catalytic converters than scientists in Washington, DC, stated were useful, yes, but when it came to pesticides they suddenly decided that the lobbyists and industry executives on the NOSB panel were right.

Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and the author of Science Left Behind. Follow Hank on X @HankCampbell

A version of this article was originally posted at Science 2.0 and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find Science 2.0 on X @science2_0