Shock! Certified organic strawberries aren’t so organic after all. Although organic strawberries sell for 50% to 100% more than conventional berries, organic strawberries are fumigated with toxic chemicals, including methyl bromide, at the beginning stages of their life-cycle.
Methyl bromide, is used to sterilize the soil before strawberries are planted. It’s not sprayed on the fruit. It’s a soil fumigant that kills just about everything it touches. Many hybridized seed varieties have been created that can only grow in sterile soil.
“The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass.”
– Albert Howard, The Soil and Health, 1947
“For most of agriculture’s 10,000-year history, farmers have succeeded or failed based on their ability to nurture life within soil. The microorganisms and earthworms that thrive in healthy soil metabolize nutrients and make them available for crops. They also convert animal and vegetable waste into humus, thus regenerating their own habitat and maintaining that thin layer of topsoil on which all terrestrial life depends.
In modern agriculture, however, soil operates as a medium, not a habitat: It exists to transfer synthetic, pre-metabolized nutrients from factories to crops. In this regime, any life form found in soil is at best innocuous — and at worst a threat. When a vast field is planted in the same crop year after year, its pests concentrate in the soil, waiting to strike.”
Bottom Line
Prior to the fruit bearing stage virtually all strawberries regardless of if they continue on as conventionally grown berries or organic ones—are treated with toxic chemical fumigants and other unsavory pesticides.
Strawberries are particularly subject to pests. It takes a lot of toxic chemicals to keep production and thus profits up in these vast monocrop strawberry farms.
The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of strawberries. California is responsible for approximately 75 percent of the fresh and processed strawberries exported. Almost 90 percent of U.S.-grown fresh strawberries come from California. It’s also where the majority of the world’s strawberry nursery plants emanate, but there’s not one single organic nursery there.
A truly organic approach to growing strawberries involves rotating strawberries with other crops like broccoli or a suitable cover crop. Broccoli is a natural fungicide and protects strawberries.
Rotating crops prevents pathogens from setting up house and multiplying. “Mostfungi attack in summer, survive the winter as spores in the soil or plant litter, then attack again in the next growing season. So planting the same crops in the same fields year after year allow pathogens to build their populations.”
In 2010 as part of the U.S. agreement to the Montreal Protocol
Methyl bromide commercial use was supposedly banned. But strawberry field fumigation and several other common agriculture applications are excepted from the ban. Methyl bromide is also associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer in farm workers.
More than 9.5 million pounds of pesticides, including over 3 million pounds of methyl bromide, is used annually to keep strawberries pest free.
And the replacement is Methyl Iodide is not much better.
Source:
http://livingtraditionally.com/a-dirty-little-secret-your-organic-strawberries-arent-really-organic/
Methyl bromide, is used to sterilize the soil before strawberries are planted. It’s not sprayed on the fruit. It’s a soil fumigant that kills just about everything it touches. Many hybridized seed varieties have been created that can only grow in sterile soil.
“The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass.”
– Albert Howard, The Soil and Health, 1947
“For most of agriculture’s 10,000-year history, farmers have succeeded or failed based on their ability to nurture life within soil. The microorganisms and earthworms that thrive in healthy soil metabolize nutrients and make them available for crops. They also convert animal and vegetable waste into humus, thus regenerating their own habitat and maintaining that thin layer of topsoil on which all terrestrial life depends.
In modern agriculture, however, soil operates as a medium, not a habitat: It exists to transfer synthetic, pre-metabolized nutrients from factories to crops. In this regime, any life form found in soil is at best innocuous — and at worst a threat. When a vast field is planted in the same crop year after year, its pests concentrate in the soil, waiting to strike.”
Bottom Line
Prior to the fruit bearing stage virtually all strawberries regardless of if they continue on as conventionally grown berries or organic ones—are treated with toxic chemical fumigants and other unsavory pesticides.
Strawberries are particularly subject to pests. It takes a lot of toxic chemicals to keep production and thus profits up in these vast monocrop strawberry farms.
The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of strawberries. California is responsible for approximately 75 percent of the fresh and processed strawberries exported. Almost 90 percent of U.S.-grown fresh strawberries come from California. It’s also where the majority of the world’s strawberry nursery plants emanate, but there’s not one single organic nursery there.
A truly organic approach to growing strawberries involves rotating strawberries with other crops like broccoli or a suitable cover crop. Broccoli is a natural fungicide and protects strawberries.
Rotating crops prevents pathogens from setting up house and multiplying. “Mostfungi attack in summer, survive the winter as spores in the soil or plant litter, then attack again in the next growing season. So planting the same crops in the same fields year after year allow pathogens to build their populations.”
In 2010 as part of the U.S. agreement to the Montreal Protocol
Methyl bromide commercial use was supposedly banned. But strawberry field fumigation and several other common agriculture applications are excepted from the ban. Methyl bromide is also associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer in farm workers.
More than 9.5 million pounds of pesticides, including over 3 million pounds of methyl bromide, is used annually to keep strawberries pest free.
And the replacement is Methyl Iodide is not much better.
Source:
http://livingtraditionally.com/a-dirty-little-secret-your-organic-strawberries-arent-really-organic/
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