Beets and Berries, Connecting the dots

There have been two news items recently that caught my eye. The first was about a decision by a federal judge to undo the approval of GMO sugar beets (hooray!) linked here. This decision sent the sugar-beet industry into an uproar with a lot of farmers concerned with how they would be able to meet their needs without roundup ready beets.

The second piece of news that grabbed my attention has been the release of a study conducted mostly by scientists from Washington State (Pullman) University, as well as members from Utah State, U of Oklahoma, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (full text here). The study compared conventionally grown to organically grown strawberries from 13 different farms. What they found is that "the organic strawberry farms produced higher quality fruit." The organic strawberries have a longer shelf-life, higher concentrations of many nutrients including antioxidants and vitamin C, and that they showed through their taste-tests that the organic berries were generally sweeter.

Wait, so the organic strawberries were sweeter? And the beet growers are thowing a hissy-fit because they can't grow their sugar beets conventionally? Has anyone else noticed this connection? Also worth noting is that the farms in the study didn't manage the microbial communities in their soils, so each trial was still a bit of a crapshoot (each farm could have started out with very different microbes, which will grow very different plants). I dare to suggest that had the organic trials incorporated a more thorough microbiological management, they would have seen results much more pronounced than what they found.

Determining the BRIX level for a fruit or veggie is a way of quantifying it's sugar content. According to John Evans of BounTea, a competitor/cooperator (coopetitor?) organization to my own BioLogic Systems, a normal grocery store carries veggies with a BRIX score of between 6 and 10. My guess is that typical organic would test right in between, probably at 10-15 or so. A vegetable given all it needs by the addition of billions of microbiological workers (i.e. good compost/compost tea) in the soil will regularly have BRIX levels of up to 20!

Hello beet farmers of the world! You can do it without roundup, grow beets with more sugar, do it for less money, with less dependence on certain multinational gene-manipulating corporate juggernauts! Doesn't that sound appealing!?

So yes, to recognize any arguments that might stem from this study, they did report lower levels of nutrients like potassium and phosphorous, but considering that their method of fertilization is to dump excessive amounts of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous (NPK) on the plants, that news comes as not much of a surprise. Yes, the organic crops also had lower yields by up to 25%. I believe that these places where the organic crops came in second can be explained by means of what microbes were present in each of these farms. What I found to be a bit of a pity is the way the study examined the microbiology.

Imagine billions of these guys working for your plants to provide them with all they need to thrive!

It seems as though the study simply mashed up all the microbes together and then weighed them to determine the total microbial biomass. What we miss by doing that is knowing what the diversity is like, what communities were present, what the relative populations are of specific organisms, which has a huge impact on the plant. They missed out on a great opportunity to really show that organic is more viable than conventional because they failed to properly account for the microbes. Guys, just because their little doesn't mean they don't matter! 

So here's my appeal to the university scientists. Now that we have this data, great! Job well done! Now lets go ahead and do another study comparing conventional, organic, and biologically managed veg. It is my belief that this proposed trial will leave no room for question. The biologic plot will, as it constantly does in undocumented trials, perform at least to the yield standard of the conventional, with all the added benefits from the organic. Who's up for it? Takers?