Hallo, vibrant viewers, and welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home.
On today’s episode, we feature an interview with Paul Roos of Limpopo,
South Africa who practiced conventional farming for 17 years before
switching to organic farming five years ago.
He has a masters
degree in agriculture and his farm produces between 250,000 and 300,000
cases of peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums a year.
What prompted Mr. Roos to embrace organic agriculture?
Roos (m):
Our main reason was to produce a better quality product, a better
fruit. We wanted a higher sugar content and better color,so we started
researching and decided that we had to improve the status of our soil.
Then
we started with a biological approach, more compost, mulching and so
forth. The step from biological to organic was basically to get the
accreditation behind our name and we had to change one or two things to
comply to be fully organic.
HOST : The term “organic
agriculture” is formally defined by the International Federation of
Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) as “a production system that
sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people.
It relies
on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local
conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects.”
Organic
agriculture does not include use of pesticides, herbicides, synthetic
fertilizers, or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO).
Organically
grown produce has seen a rapid rise in demand worldwide in the last
decade. The number of hectares devoted to organic agriculture continues
to expand in many countries.
As of 2007, 32.2 million hectares
of land were being cultivated by 1.2 million organic farmers across the
globe. Almost half of the world’s organic farmers reside in Africa.
http://orgprints.org/15575/03/willer-kilcher-2009-1-26.pdf Soil is the most important element in cultivation and organic farming helps to prevent its erosion and preserves its fertility.