Organic vs hydroponic

Many people think organic is simply a vegetable that is more expensive than its ordinary or traditional counterpart. Organic is often dismissed as being more expensive because it needs certification by an expensive Certifying Body (CB) which oftentimes involve foreigners who have to travel from miles away and stay at four-star hotels while conducting their annual inspection. Let us check why produce can be called organic while others are GAP-certified, natural or organically-grown.

I spoke with Patrick Belisario, an organic advocate and now a certifier with a foreign-based company, to clarify what each label means.

Also, since I have been working with Naturland, a farmers’ association that started in Germany, we may as well clarify what Naturland espouses vs what other organic certifiers do. Apparently, Naturland re-certifies farmers while other CBs certify the farm itself. There are also terms like Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) where farmers or a farm owner may not need a certifying body but be certified by his or her neighbors as to the practices used in the farm and that they comply with organic standards.

When I first came across the terms in 2004 at the first Organic Coffee Conference in Kampala, Uganda I had to keep in mind that there are organic farmer groups, there are certifiers and there are ordinary farmers who are so poor they cannot even buy chemicals or fertilizers, making them organic by default (this is where most of our indigenous peoples or IPs belong, by the way). Back then, when I talked about organic farming, I would always mention the fact that not all our farmers can afford expensive inputs or chemical fertilizers. Organic by default became our byword.

When we were given a grant by then DED, now GIZ, an agency of the German government, to start an organic coffee program, I got to travel to Kalinga, Benguet and Mountain Province to look for possible coffee farms we could certify. We found Benguet State University’s Institute of Highland Farming Systems and Agroforestry (IHFSA) and worked on them to get the first organic certification in coffee in the Philippines in 2007.

Why all this hullabaloo about organic anyway? Well, here are some things we learned over the last 20 years:

Bees will not thrive in a place or farm that is not organic or is not practicing organic farming. If bees avoid your farm or garden, that is a red flag. So get a colony of bees and check. Or better yet, start removing pesticides and chemical fertilizers from your farm areas.

Organic farming makes use of earthworms. We found out that local earthworms dig deeper holes and actually can make water ponding or floods recede in no time. We witnessed this in our farm, over so many typhoons and days of continuous rainfall.

Never use weed killers. They are the most dangerous chemical to use in your farm. They may make the work seem easy, but regenerating the soil takes a longer time. It takes years to remove chemical residues from soil.

Organically-grown vegetables are sweeter and do not have a petroleum-like taste. Do a taste test. Wear a blindfold and try organic vs conventionally-grown.

If your farm is organic, there should be no chemical being used by your neighbors or it will be spread by air towards your farm anyway. Stay away from farms using chemicals and pesticides.

Anyway, back to Patrick. I will guest him in a future podcast to shed more light on the benefits of going organic. We will reminisce how we met almost 20 years ago when he was a student at AIM for a Masters in Development Management and he became my escort at a tree planting in Maragondon, Cavite where we waded through muddy farms. I was lucky Patrick was well-built and tall, he easily helped me navigate the forest.

These days Patrick and I continue to collaborate on what we can do to spread the idea about organic farming vs hydroponic vs natural. We also espouse regenerative farming as it has similar principles as organic. In our coffee farm, we make our own compost and are also using bio-fertilizer from Olive Puentespina’s company in Davao. We are doing a field trial on coffee using Dr Bo’s bio-fertilizer, made from food discards treated with a biothermic process that makes your trees and other produce get better yields while fostering a circular economy. From fast food scraps to fertilizer. How cool is that?

In our small organic farm, we compost all our coffee waste from hulling coffee, roasting coffee and brewing coffee. Our compost pile is enriched by our own household food scraps which are then mixed with our other farm debris like leaves and other fallen fruits and twigs. This compost pile is where we nurture earthworms and which become our flood control system.

Hydroponic, on the other hand, uses sterile solutions to grow vegetables without soil. Organic uses soil, hydroponic uses liquids or solutions which advocates say is clean and sterile. I am not a big fan of this system because I like to use soil.

Aquaponics uses fish in ponds where the water with animal waste drips towards vegetable patches. While it is a productive system making you harvest fish and vegetables, my vote is still to use what Nature intended us to use – the earth. Mud, soil and earth with all its microbes and ecosystem makes for a perfect medium for our organic food.

Do you need to see the certification that it’s organic? It helps of course, as inspectors do the job of ensuring that the producer complies with organic standards. But in the absence of a certification, do visit the farm and check how they produce their vegetables and fruits. Look for telltale signs like agro-chemicals and fertilizers.

Know your farmer. I always say this because many of our farmers may be organic but do not bother with certification until it’s required – for export sales, for example.