Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

Organic farming is a subject that fills our food vocabulary. Supermarket products are almost all organic and GMO-free, snacks and school canteens must be organic, health is guaranteed and protected by a healthy diet, and the saying “we are what we eat” has taken hold, yes, at least as far as our excrement is concerned. All these messages, and many more besides, have driven the great growth of organic farming, not least because producers derive an undeniable advantage from it, gaining access to preferential public funding and benefiting from higher selling prices.

There has thus been a significant increase in land under organic cultivation, though still marginal compared with land under conventional farming. One of the countries where this conversion has been most evident is Italy (Vizioli, 2019); this is justified by an undeniable need among producers for a higher income per hectare, given the modest size of the average Italian farm. Unable to count on large revenues from the sheer volume of production, the farmer must resort to quality production, at least presumed, and in any case remunerated as such. This rapid conversion to organic by so many farmers is puzzling, because organic farming, unable to use most of the plant-protection products that had simplified the farmer’s profession, requires a skill and training on the part of producers that cannot easily be improvised, and it invites the supposition of a certain degree of fraud, or at any rate some exception to the rule, that improvised organic farmers may commit in order to obtain a profitable harvest. This is made easier by the system of farm certification, which is carried out by companies that the farmers themselves approach and pay. A situation therefore arises in which the inspected party pays and, in a sense, controls the inspector.

From this initial treatment of the problem it might seem that the writer of this article is hostile to organic farming (OF); nothing could be further from the truth.

OF is a highly desirable approach, not so much and not only for the supposed superior quality of its products, but for its lower impact on the environment of production: the field and the barn.

In short, what are the basic principles of this production technique? The renunciation of non-natural products to solve the problems of a farm field, which are essentially three: the poverty of the soil, the control of weeds, and protection from parasitic agents. The conventional farmer solves the three problems very plainly: he uses synthetic fertilizers to bring the soil’s content of elements (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) up to what is needed; he treats the crop repeatedly with more or less selective herbicides, often with a total weedkiller sprayed before sowing, followed by treatments with herbicides specific to the individual crop; fungicides and insecticides are used to protect the crop from fungi, insects and mites.

Having such aids at his disposal allows the conventional farmer to specialise in a single crop and thus to optimise and minimise his machinery, to specialise in weed-control and pest-protection techniques, and to optimise the storage of the product. These positive outcomes are counterbalanced by a continual impoverishment of the soil, by the formation of a replacement weed flora, that is, one adapted to the treatments, and by the selection of fungal strains and insect races increasingly resistant to the plant-protection products used, thereby generating a continual increase in dosages and treatments, with disastrous effects on environmental quality: the pollution of aquifers, soil and air. From a commercial standpoint, too, monoculture makes the producer a slave to the market and leaves him at the mercy of its erratic swings, driven by causes he cannot control. The livestock farmer runs into similar problems, fundamentally the need to step up antibiotic treatments to ensure the survival of intensive rearing, the pollution of aquifers with slurry, and the deterioration of product quality derived from unhappy animals that are poorly and/or over-fed and intoxicated by an excess of drugs.

OF rejects these methods and turns first of all to a practice as old as agriculture itself: rotation. Rotation consists in alternating different crops on the same plot: forage crops are brought into the rotation, and these keep the spread of weeds in check because their planting density (plants per m²) is very high, and so too is their competition with the weeds; moreover, since the product is the whole plant, the weeds are given no chance to set seed, being cut before seed production; forage crops are often perennial, and this is a further aid to weed control. To return nutrients to the soil it is essential to grow a legume which, thanks to its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, enriches the soil with this element. Many legumes are forage crops, in particular alfalfa, the various clovers and bird’s-foot trefoil, and so the two things, enriching the soil and controlling weeds, can be done at the same time; the fact is that most land farmed organically is under forage crops, and this falls within precisely this logic. Despite these good practices, however, weed control is not total, and the nitrogen hunger of the plants, particularly wheat and maize, is not sated. The fact remains that with the essentially organic farming of the first half of the last century, even if not yet classified as such, yield per hectare was immensely lower than what could be obtained after the Green Revolution, and the world could not feed a population of about 3 billion people, whereas with today’s yields almost the whole of the 7 billion humans can be fed with dignity.

A chapter is now needed to clarify better what the “Green Revolution”, so contested by “environmentalist” farmers, actually was. The Green Revolution arose in the second half of the 1900s at the laboratories of CYMMYT, an international research centre located in Mexico, and it is an innovative approach to agricultural production that, by combining genetic improvement and chemistry, made it possible to multiply yields beyond measure. What was needed was to produce plants that could make the fullest use of the nutrients offered by chemistry, and so a great deal of work went into genetic improvement to obtain varieties of rice, wheat and maize capable of maximising the input of nutrients and converting it into consumable product; short-stature varieties were therefore developed, but with large ears, rich in chlorophyll and with an erect habit that allowed them to intercept the maximum light energy per square metre. The result was exceptional: yields increased fivefold, a hectare of wheat that before the Green Revolution produced 10-12 quintals could afterwards reach eighty.

The fight against pests is perhaps the most demanding aspect for the organic farmer, and indeed exceptions to the rule have been, and still are, made, allowing the use of substances that are neither natural nor friendly to the environment. Take the case of copper sulphate, the “copper wash” as Ceccherini would call it in the film Il Ciclone, which is not natural and pollutes soils and aquifers; and yet, being a product used in the farming of yesteryear, it seems to be acceptable. And this is proof that OF, rather than a new method, is a matter of giving a different name to the agriculture of two centuries ago, when, in Italy, hunger and under- or malnutrition were very widespread.

From what has been said, it follows that OF cannot be the definitive answer to solving the world’s food problem, and above all cannot solve the problems that confront us today: 1) the exponential growth of the population; 2) the reduction of cultivable agricultural land; 3) the need to safeguard natural spaces.

Obviously, it would first of all be useful for these problems to be tackled head-on. It would be entirely feasible to avoid squandering high-value farmland: our plains are submerged under single-storey sheds, car parks, and kilometres of roads and dual carriageways, often underused, in the municipality of Perugia alone I could point to many kilometres of them (fig. 1), and so on.

One need only look at how the plain between Assisi and Perugia has been reduced, not to mention the Veneto plain, to realise how much land we have, most often needlessly taken away from agriculture. In Italy, where we pride ourselves on high-quality agriculture, the value of a hectare of UAA (utilised agricultural area) is not even taken into consideration in the cost-benefit calculation of a new piece of infrastructure. The fact is that the destruction of farmland advances inexorably.

Finally, a word on the natural environment and the agricultural environment. Industrialised agriculture, or rather biotechnological agriculture, is often blamed for the reduction of biodiversity, confusing the defence of the natural environment with the biodiversity of an old farm field. It must be stressed at once that agriculture is not nature, not even the most sustainable and most archaic agriculture. Agriculture is a form of exploitation of nature: necessary, virtuous, but it would certainly be misleading to think of preserving the natural environment, the diversity of species, the trophic chain and the balance between the input and the degradation of energy that takes place in natural environments by means of an eco-compatible agriculture; the biodiversity of a farm field (figs. 2 and 3) will never be comparable to the biodiversity of a wild area (fig. 4), where selective pressures, and therefore the evolution and co-evolution of species, can act undisturbed.

Thinking that biodiversity can be preserved by cultivating species and varieties other than the most common ones may have a historical and cultural significance, and may be welcome to a small group of gourmets, but it has no impact on the conservation of biodiversity; for that purpose what is needed instead is to give up the occupation and exploitation of large territories, the Amazon region is perhaps the most striking example, but it would also be useful to set aside areas of our own territory to this end, something like the island of Montecristo, perhaps the only Italian example that comes to mind.

So, to summarise, we need to reduce the UAA in favour of protected areas and to reclaim degraded soils for agriculture. Why not reclaim degraded soils in order to set them aside as protected areas? Because, in general, degraded soils are the ones that would be most suitable for productive agriculture: they are generally flat and close to inhabited areas (fig. 5), and this allows for local production that cuts transport costs and enables direct selling (from producer to consumer), which keeps costs down and gives the agricultural entrepreneur a fair profit.

However things turn out, given all the difficulties in resolving the three emergencies indicated above, a hectare of land needs to produce a great deal. Increasing industrial agricultural production is precisely what makes the practice of OF possible, because the latter is feasible only if the great demand for food comes to be met; otherwise a social revolt of the poor would be inevitable.

Nevertheless, the defence of the environment is an inescapable emergency, so that if we want to feed everyone decently, and if we do not want to reduce the population, we must adopt advanced strategies. The use of drones to apply precise and timely integrated control, making it possible to carry out pest treatments only where and when they are needed, would allow a drastic reduction in the number of treatments and, consequently, in pollution; likewise the use of pest-control methods that foster a balance between the pests and the whole trophic chain. A system very widespread in organic farming is the treatment of insect-infested crops with Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that produces substances toxic to certain classes of insect. Spreading this bacterium over the crops prevents the infestation from developing, while the release of entomophagous insects helps to contain the spread of other insect pests, for example, the ladybirds that prey on aphids. Tools of this kind, however, are not always available, and the result is never the suppression of the pest but rather the creation of a phytophagous–entomophagous balance, the predator, obviously, is glad that its prey does not die out, and this in any case reduces yields and the health of the crop. It would be a different matter if it were the crop itself that emitted toxic and/or repellent substances. Many plants produce substances that prevent and/or reduce attack by pests; sometimes these substances are unpalatable to both the predator and the consumer, so it would be preferable for them to be produced only when an attack is under way and only in the tissues under attack, sometimes this happens naturally, sometimes plants produce protective substances regardless of any pest attack. Getting inside these mechanisms could be vital in order to have protected crops and an uncontaminated environment, and a helping hand with this technique is given, or could be given, were the legislative, cultural and economic conditions in place, by genetics, plant physiology and genetic engineering. In a talk of mine now many years ago, at a meeting of organic farmers, I had the audacity to put forward this hypothesis, which was the very one I had been working on for several years, engineering plants that would make a sustainable agriculture possible, but I risked my physical safety. In reality, genetic engineering has already produced plants that can meet this condition; a very fitting example is those plants that autonomously produce the toxin of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which protect against attack by many insect pests that cause considerable damage to crops, both quantitative and qualitative. And yet it is precisely the organic farmers, the very ones who use Bt, who have railed against their use, with incomprehensible arguments (the emergence of resistance in insects; the die-off of useful, or at any rate beautiful, insects, bees, and above all the monarch butterfly). It seems strange to think that those who use it indiscriminately, spreading the bacterium across the fields, should find it more dangerous for the toxin to be confined inside the plant and therefore to afflict only the insects that feed on that plant. It is claimed that bees are killed by taking the pollen, strange, though, that the crops into which this gene has been inserted do not produce flowers visited by bees, and strange to think that spreading a bacterium into the environment does not induce resistance, whereas doing so inside the plant does. It has to be said that, by using transgenic plants, the toxin can be modified so as to remain effective even in the presence of emerging resistance, just as keeping non-Bt plants within the field allows the non-resistant insects to survive and keep the insect population susceptible. In short, it seems absurd to think that confining the poison is more dangerous than releasing it freely into the environment.

In any case, the situation is now such that, in the common perception, the most dangerous agriculture is the one that makes use of genetic biotechnology. Unfortunately, fake news is by now our daily bread. Those who currently lose out are the conventional farmers who, because of the restrictions on the use of transgenic seed, cannot grow the most productive varieties; this is felt particularly keenly in our country in the case of maize, because into the latest-generation varieties the big seed companies always insert one or more exogenous genes, the one for Bt and the one for glyphosate resistance (a herbicide), so that they cannot be grown in Italy, and maize producers are priced out of the market. Managing to combine OF with bioengineering is the challenge that must be won. Certainly the distance between the two worlds is great, and the blame borne by the world of biotechnology is far from small.

Not the blame of the technique, but of those who have appropriated it. Genetic engineering was born in public laboratories, the universities of the western United States, the Max Planck in Cologne, the universities of Ghent and Nottingham, the university and the CNR of Rome, with a contribution also from the CNR of Perugia. Exploiting the publicly funded and published research of these public researchers, the big chemical and seed companies moved in forcefully, hiring scientists and, above all, patenting methods and products. Now, to release a variety, royalties must be paid to numerous inventors; moreover, in order to comply with the precautionary principle, for the engineered varieties to be released, years of costly and complex trials are required, so much so that small private parties, or even public bodies, cannot afford to reach the end of the process and must turn to the big seed companies (Monsanto, Ciba, etc.); the names change over time, but the companies are the same. Now, for these companies to make their investment pay, they must have a product that sells heavily and therefore has worldwide distribution and involves widely grown species; this means that applying these techniques to local problems and to species of limited distribution is not profitable and is therefore not done, and indeed the engineered varieties on the market belong to very few agricultural species (4-5).

So now, in order to be able to use these methods more widely and to solve specific problems of particular crops and localities, two problems need to be solved: 1) not to recognise the patentability of the methods for producing transgenic plants, and thus to allow even small laboratories (public and private), aware of local issues, to produce plant novelties; 2) to reduce the procedures and the time required to certify the safety of biotechnological products, thereby once again allowing the production and marketing of seed by small producers.

In reality, in recent times things have moved in the opposite direction: the systems for protecting plant varieties have changed, from the UPOV Convention to industrial exclusivity (Fleck and Baldock, 2003). The former allowed on-farm multiplication of the variety and permitted its further improvement by third parties; with patent exclusivity this is no longer possible. As for the biotechnological varieties, the regulations are no longer satisfied with the characteristics of novelty, stability, distinctness and agronomic value laid down by the UPOV Convention, but require substantial equivalence (Kuiper et al. 2002), that is, no difference with respect to the parental lines in the traits not altered by the transgene. In plain words, if an individual produces Bt toxins, then in order to be substantially equivalent it must have no other variations in its content of the most varied substances compared with its non-transgenic parents. This imposes a very thorough investigation of all the possible variations in the content of protein substances, secondary metabolites and potential allergens, prompted by the rather remote hypothesis that a gene might inadvertently influence other characteristics of the plant as well, it is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. This also stemmed from the idea that, not knowing where the gene would settle in the genome of the host plant, one could not predict which metabolic pathways it might alter; now, with the new transformation techniques based on CRISPR-Cas9 methods (Doudna and Charpentier, 2014), a gene can be placed at a known point in the genome, and so many of these concerns are eliminated.

Certainly the furrow that has opened up between OF and biotechnology in agriculture is by now so deep that it will be hard to fill; and yet it is the only solution currently on offer. Research ever more attentive to the demands of the environment, and the abandonment of this conspiracy-minded and anti-scientific attitude that pervades the outlook of organic farmers, as well as of many consumers, who in any case drop it when faced with unexpected health crises (see the Coronavirus), could bring closer two worlds that set out embracing the same concerns, only to choose different paths in seeking their solution.

Allow me one final reflection, harking back to the beginning of this piece: organic is good and good for you, non-organic is harmful to health. This is the cunning stratagem that was used to launch OF. But is it true? Is it supported by data?

As regards the content of pesticide residues, national and international analyses show that almost all products are free of them, or at any rate contain them below the risk threshold (Bressanini, 2010); obviously, both among conventional and among organic farmers there can be “bad apples” who do not comply with the cultivation rules, and indeed some small percentage of non-compliant products is detected.

Certain valuable characteristics of organic products nonetheless seem incontrovertible, such as their lower water content, attributable to the lower nitrogen content in the soil; there are data indicating a greater presence of secondary metabolites, which often perform functions useful to the organism, such as antioxidants, though it must be observed that this may be correlated with the lower amount of water, and that sometimes these metabolites can be unpleasant (tannins) or toxic (lectins). More evident and understandable are the advantages of organic livestock rearing, where the animal is presumed to spend more time outdoors and on the move, and consequently the meat and milk have a higher percentage of unsaturated fats.

At first there were reports of a higher content of mycotoxins in organic products. Mycotoxins are, precisely, toxins, in some cases carcinogenic, produced by the fungi that develop in foodstuffs; the alarm had therefore arisen that organic products, being untreated, might be more affected by them. This alarm, however, seems to have subsided, and the scientific literature shows no difference between products originating from different methods of cultivation.

In any case, a great deal of literature is being produced on the greater quality of organic products, but on this subject it is very hard to draw firm conclusions; what is certain is that comparisons are very difficult to make, because it is not only the mode of production that makes the difference in quality, but the time elapsed between harvest and consumption, the stage of ripeness at harvest, and the method of preservation.

These aspects certainly work entirely to the advantage of small producers (organic and otherwise) who sell directly, the so-called zero-kilometre farming, but this no longer holds when one turns to retail chains; and indeed I can assure you from direct experience that non-organic strawberries eaten just after harvest, at the right ripeness, have nothing to envy, in taste and aroma, of the finest organic strawberries.

In short, we must produce while respecting the environment and using science to produce more and better; but a final, and perhaps decisive, aspect is to consume better. The consumer, and those who manipulate the consumer’s behaviour, is the party most responsible for the emergencies that arise. Among the various non-virtuous behaviours, besides the consumption of products with a large carbon footprint, such as those imported from distant countries, and the consumption of out-of-season produce, I should like to dwell on the excessive consumption of products of animal origin. Their production has a considerable environmental impact: a large share of farmland is used to feed livestock, it is no coincidence that among the few genetically modified crops on the market the main ones are soya and maize, whose predominant use is for animal feed. Ruminants, and cattle in particular, emit considerable quantities of greenhouse gases, and the abnormal consumption of energy and water involved in producing a kilo of meat is well known. Moving to a diet less rich in animal protein, favouring animals reared free-range and/or semi-free-range, here in Umbria we have the whole Apennine range, which could be used for grazing, with benefits for the production of meat and milk and for the prevention of fires, is a highly desirable and easily achievable option. Meat produced in this way certainly has higher costs, and so, given that it is an important food, perhaps essential for growth, a rift could open up between the social classes that can afford it and the less well-off, for whom it would be off limits: rather like what happens today with the “rich”, who can afford organic meat from free-range animals, and the less well-off, who buy low-quality meat from animals reared in overcrowded intensive farms. It may perhaps be advisable to provide for a way, other than the free market, of handling food products, which are as necessary as, indeed more necessary than, medicines.

Note: there are two ways of understanding the term “food safety” (sicurezza alimentare): in its broader sense, as the ability to guarantee enough food for the survival of all people (food security); and, from a strictly health-related standpoint, it is also understood as hygienic and sanitary safety (food safety)

References:

Bressanini D. (2010) http://bressanini-lescienze.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2010/10/12/ pesticidi-sul-cibo

Doudna J.A. and Charpentier E. (2014) The new frontier of genome engineering with CRISPR- Cas9. Science 28 Vol. 346: issue 6213, 1258096

Fleck B. and Baldock C. (2003) Intellectual property protection for plant-related inventions in Europe Nature Reviews Genetics 4, 834-838

Kuiper H.A. (2002) Substantial equivalence, an appropriate paradigm for the safety assessment of genetically modified foods?Toxicology .Vol. 181–182, 427-431

Lernoud J. and Willer H. (2019) Current Statistics on Organic Agriculture Worldwide: Area, Operators, and Market. In (Lernoud and Willer eds.): The World of Organic Agriculture

Statistics and Emerging Trends 2019. Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and IFOAM – Organics International. Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), Ackerstrasse113, 5070 Frick, Switzerland, pp. 36-38

Vizioli V. (2019) L’Umbria dell’agricoltura biologica. Studi Umbri Vol. 11 n. 2

Francesco Damiani: graduated in agricultural sciences in the academic year 1975-76, he was a university researcher and then a researcher and research director at the CNR, at the Laboratory of Biosciences and Bioresources in Perugia, which he headed. In his research work he devoted himself in particular to the development of genetic biotechnologies in plants (somatic fusion and genetic transformation) and their use for the production of improved plants. He took an active part in the debate on GMOs, and in this context he was, together with his colleagues Tito Schiva and Marcello Buiatti, the author of an appeal for a different regulation of the protection of proprietary rights over plant novelties1, which was endorsed by around a hundred Italian agricultural geneticists. He is now retired but continues to collaborate with the CNR as a senior associate researcher, on projects in partnership with the Department of Pharmacy, the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, and Argentina’s CONICET.