This blog has two parts this week, the first bit was an unexpected happy moment that occurred only yesterday:
We won a national organic award! We won the best “direct to the consumer” award and we are delighted. Thank you so much to Bord Bia and to all the judges for looking at our business and for giving us the thumbs up. It is absolutely a credit to everybody who works at Green Earth Organics that we won, the hard work and dedication, innovation and integrity of the whole team on our farm made achieving the award possible.
Against the backdrop of two very challenging growing seasons, and many growers opting to get out of the business altogether, the award couldn’t have come at a better time.
So, thank you to everybody who works here, thanks to all you our customers who keep us in business, and thank you to the judges for recognising it all. We are very grateful.
In Ireland in 2021 there were 3 million kgs of pesticides applied, and in that same year the dept of agriculture tested 1,039 fruit, vegetable and fungi samples mostly imported and found than 60% had detectable limits of pesticides, and 5.3% had higher levels that what was deemed safe.
It has always been clear to me from a young age that spraying chemicals indiscriminately in nature was wrong. Now I can’t say I understood why I felt this way or why I felt that our planet needed to be protected from ourselves but that is the way I was programmed.
As a scientist I understand the role science plays in our lives and in facilitating the production of food for so many people. But we have been to an extent conditioned to think that we need all these chemicals to grow food, it is not unlike the pharmaceutical industries desire to have us taking preventative maintenance doses of some of their drugs for life.
So here is the thing we have a perfectly amazing way to reduce our chances of getting sick. Being healthy indeed can be our default setting, but it seems that not unlike our natural world we too have developed a deep sense of physical and mental malaise. We are in a word not well.
The common scientific perception is that chemicals in small doses are not harmful to life. There certainly is some validity in this statement and this piece is not about engendering fear, far from it. It is about increasing awareness about how our food choices can have a remarkable positive effect on our lives and our environment.
So, taking low level doses on a daily basis of chemicals in our diet is not how at least I want to live my life. I get it that the scientists use terms like MRLS (maximum residue limit) to reassure us that our food is are, after all that is their job. But is it really? And how do they decide and who is they anyway? Well, they use all sorts of things like acute toxicity and extrapolations and lifetime consumption assumptions.
Talk of the gut Microbiome is everywhere these days and rightly so, its importance is only beginning to be understood. There is little doubt that the myriad of beneficial bacteria that inhabit our intestines play a major role in our health, from depression to inflammation.
So, it’s with interest that I discovered a couple of articles that link the constant imbibing of pesticides into our bodies not only damage our cells but also all the myriad of microbes that live in our gut and you guessed it it is not a positive feedback loop we are talking about here. You can if you are inclined read the article here.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9279132/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-023-01450-9
It is no coincidence then that these pesticides that kill plants or organisms and damage the microbial life in the living soil also damage and kill the good bacteria in our gut.
As always thank you for your support.
Kenneth