You may not have noticed. Today we do not treat medical
infections the way we treated those twenty years ago. I recently accompanied a
friend to the emergency room at the hospital. It turned out he had a serious
infection. Twenty years ago, he would have been given an injection of
antibiotic, a prescription of oral antibiotic and sent home. Not today! He immediately got a dose of antibiotic
intravenously, and then needed to come back to the hospital two times a day for
the next several days for further intravenous antibiotic.
This, my medical friends tell me, is because of antibiotic
resistant bacteria. I am not old enough to remember infections before
antibiotics, but I am old enough to remember the first generation of antibiotic:
Penicillin. Penicillin was followed by second, third and fourth generation
antibiotics. Now, it seems, the only way antibiotic is sufficiently effective
is if it is administered intravenously. And once that no longer works, what is the
next step?
This should surprise no one. Natural selection decrees that
this will occur. The bacteria resistant to an antibiotic survive and reproduce.
Had we known then, when penicillin was first discovered and
available to doctors, what we know now, would we have used these wonder drugs
in the way we have? For example, would we have allowed their use in animal feed?
We have a problem.
Within our food production system, we face a similar
situation. Conventional food production conveniently disregards nature’s cycles.
Within nature, there are many natural cycles. The ones we
understand best are the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the phosphate
cycle. In each case the plant, as it is growing, take up elements from the soil
and air, converting them into plant tissue. The plant dies and the elements
return to the soil and air. Some plant tissue is eaten by animals, but as the
animals defecate and die, the cycle is still completed.
But our conventional food production system does not
recognize these cycles. Instead, the science behind our conventional food
system recognizes that plants need phosphate and nitrogen to thrive. Science
has found a way of converting natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer. The plant
response to this fertilizer is phenomenal. The natural nitrogen cycle, it seems,
is no longer pertinent.
In the same way, conventional science has found that
phosphate, mined at Kapaskasing, can be converted to fertilizer. Again, the
plant response to this fertilizer is exceptional.
But there are problems with this food system. First, the
supply of both, natural gas and phosphate rock is in limited. Already we have
used up the most accessible supplies of both resources. Secondly, when the
plant tissue we consume is “used up”, the “waste” consists of the nitrogen and
phosphate. Nature says that needs to go back to the soil to feed future
generations of plants. But it does not. Instead, it becomes a pollutant. Much
of it ends up in Lake Winnipeg .
Fortunately, for food production, there is an alternative,
at least a partial one. While scientists and farmers within the conventional
food production stream have been looking for ways of increasing the plant
response to chemical nitrogen and phosphate, a much smaller group of scientists
and farmers have been looking at an alternative, a way of enhancing food
production within the natural cycles. They call themselves organic producers.
As we remove our conventional blinders and become more aware of what these
scientists and farmers have discovered, what we find is truly impressive.
By Eric Rempel
