organics
This is an interesting topic. I'll give my 2 cents.
I was raised on an organic farm in Maine. I started working when I was ten (champion rock picker.) We started fairly large scale on an old potato farm. Eventually Pops fixed the huge potato picker to pick rocks instead of spuds and I moved on to the next job.
It is extremely hard work, and a large-scale operation slowly broke us. ALthough we grew the healthiest, most delicious produce in the county! People just DIDN'T CARE about the quality of the food and WOULDN'T PAY for it. They'd rather go to the local food mart and get the produce that is famously delivered "at the end of the East Coast line". You truly cannot get farther east in the US than where I live.
We used to get 18 wheelers up from the coast from the canneries, full of fish scales. This made us very unpopular in the neighborhood. We got trucks from chicken farms, full of poop. When my dad would spread the stuff, occasionally we'd get a chicken in the field. The local horse farm gladly gave us their manure. Pops also had various mixtures and remedies to temper the soil. He was much beloved on the Cooperative Extension and recently received recognition as Volunteer of the Year and the Leon Look Award, for his dedication to agriculture and community. I am proud of his dream and his ethic--now he teaches school, a regular paycheck.
We dealt with beetles, slugs, weeds, etc. WE dealt with problems--not a spray or chemical, although as Chris said, you just can't leave the stuff alone and expect it to grow. It was so labor intensive it wasn't funny. We worked 10 months of the year. January and February were the months that were the hardest. What can you do but look at seed catalogues and dream?
I used to have to weed, by hand, the longest rows you've ever seen. We had a contract with an organic baby food company for a few years, squash and parsnips. I would weed the field for a few hours in the morning and then go back in the late afternoon. We wore bugnets to work in fly season. The parsnips had to be harvested after a frost. We washed every parsnip by hand. Finally good ol' Pops invented a drum washer. We could wash a bunch at a time. We have a video of the crazy crew washing these vegetables. I believe that was the season that really broke us.
It was a true labor of love that had no financial success. I have great memories and a great work ethic. But I know that I would never venture to have a large-scale organic operation. I don't know how people can do it, although in California, there are some huge operations that are quite successful.
Organic is preferred on our table, and I am willing to pay for it, too. I see a skinny kid picking rocks and weeds, and shovelling stinky fish scales onto the spreader, and picking corn worms off the end of the world's best sweet corn, when I eat organic.
We have been out of business for several years and every summer we get people who have heard of the food at the farm. They seem so disappointed, but 5-6 customers a year does not a prosperous business make.
I want to know how they do it in the DR. We had very strict regulations in Maine. I also want to know what obstacles are faced by the growers. For a while there, I dreamed of being famous potato-beetle scientist. I thought I could identify every type of beetle. I picked what seemed like a million a day from the plants. These banana farmers--how do they deal with the obstacles?
Two cents turned into 5 bucks, but this is a truly memorable subject for me.