Organic Foods

Organic Foods — page 3 — Do It Yourself Find Organic Food Near You Is there a farmers market near you Farmers markets are one of the best places to find organic foods Farmers markets are usually open once a week or on weekends since the farmers need to be farming the rest of the week They are often located in a central building or on an outside lot if the weather is nice Farmers bring their vegetables fruits and meats Sometimes they also sell baked goods and prepared foods such as preserves maple syrup or sauces Don’t be discouraged if you live in a large city Even large cities have farmers markets and urban farms farms of varying sizes that are in or near the city Urban farming is a growing trend and a lot of these farms are organic Visit your local farmers market or one of the farms on your own or suggest it as a class trip What Is Sustainable What is the difference between organic and sustainable farming For something to be sustainable it cannot use resources such as soil water and nutrients faster than they are renewed A sustainable farm does its best to use only the sun’s energy and the natural cycles of nutrients and water to grow crops instead of applying human-made pesticides and fertilizers Using these methods farmers can produce food without damaging the soil or the environment and continue producing food forever Sustainable farms also allow the farmers the people who work for them and their economic communities to prosper 6

Organic Foods — page 4 — The Origins of Agriculture For most of history humans fed themselves by hunting animals and gathering plant foods This changed approximately 12,000 years ago with one of the most important inventions ever agriculture It was invented in several parts of the world at the same time including China the Middle East and Africa Agriculture is the practice of breeding planting nurturing and harvesting living organisms for food These organisms include animals plants and fungi Humans soon learned to breed varieties of plants and animals that fit their local climate and taste Another important skill was being able to use This wall painting from Egypt dates back to 1200 BCE It shows an ancient Egyptian using domesticated livestock to pull a plow 7

Organic Foods — page 5 — the same soil for crops year after year When crops grow they pull nutrients especially nitrogen from the soil If humans harvest the crops the nutrients are not returned to the soil for the next crop to use Also some methods of agriculture can cause soil to wash away which makes it increasingly difficult to grow crops One solution to these problems is crop rotation With crop rotation the kind of crop grown in a field is changed each year In some years the field may be left fallow meaning no crops are grown Crop rotation works best when one of the crops is a legume such as beans or clover for animal feed Unlike other crops legumes cooperate with bacteria to capture nitrogen from the air and add it to the soil This nitrogen stays in the soil and feeds the next crops planted in the field Over time people found other ways of enriching the soil including adding nutrients back in the form of a fertilizer such as animal manure Finally farmers learned how to collect and direct water in climates where rainfall was scarce The Agricultural Revolution In the late 1700s and the 1800s in the United Kingdom food production by agriculture greatly increased thanks to a new crop rotation method The method rotated crops in four different fields each year The crops were rye grass barley or oats and turnips a new crop that could be fed to livestock Unlike in previous methods fields were never left fallow so production increased without using up soil nutrients Meanwhile better breeding improved crops and livestock New types of plows made plowing faster and easier And new types of fertilizers added nutrients to the soil The increase in food allowed for a large population increase in the 8

Organic Foods — page 6 — Leaving a field fallow allows nutrients to return to the soil making it better for production the next season United Kingdom These changes in farming were copied across the British Empire and Europe Historians think the agricultural revolution allowed workers to participate in and fuel the Industrial Revolution During the Industrial Revolution which took place from the late 1700s to the early 1800s manufacturing evolved and societies across Europe and the United States became more urban and industrialized Into the 1900s farm production continued to improve More trade and shipping of food increased agricultural profits New machines replaced human workers In 1909 Fritz Haber a German chemist invented a method 9

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