I've thought a lot about the difference between organic farming (not using chemicals derived from oil or non-organic processes, but still trucking in organic materials from outside the farm) and sustainable farming (growing and fertilizing is such a way that the soil on the farm builds over time and doesn't need to be nourished from outside the farm). Organic is centered around not using "artificial" fertilizers and nutrients and sustainable is centered around making the farm an ecosystem in and of itself with no need of outside anything.

Now, that's only possible if the farmer's family eats everything grown, all waste is recycled back to the soil and the entire family is eventually buried on the land. But that could be considered a little extreme.

Luckily, Lavender Lane Farm posted a nice blog called Biodynamic Certification vs Organic about this very topic and, since they would be the ones to know the most about why they're doing it, I'll just send you right over there. Makes my job easier anyway.

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Tags: farming, organic, sustainability

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 9:52 am by Joe and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.