The Organic Industry's Ties to Factory Farms [1]

We're often given this image of organic food as being all that is right with the food industry, while factory farms are all that is wrong with the food industry, but are the two really so separate? Our research has uncovered an intimate connection between the two.

Organic farms are prohibited from using synthetic fertilizers, and instead must rely on natural sources. While there's a variety of options, one of the cheapest and most abundant sources of organic fertilizer is animal manure.  Organic food is big business now, and there's little concern for where the fertilizer comes from, so long as it's cheap. While it's not true for every single organic product, many, if not most, use manure from factory farms to fertilize their crops.

Many people will look at this and say, manure from factory farms is full of antibiotics and hormones, how can it be considered organic? Well, the US Department of Agriculture, the ones who make the rules about what "organic" means, doesn't seem to care about synthetic chemicals in fertilizers. They even recently allowed for the antibiotic tetracycline to be used directly in organic apples and pears [link [2]].

Studies have shown that plants absorb the chemicals from the fertilizers, and the exact same poisons used to increase production in factory farms are found within organic produce [link [3]]. Many choose organic produce because they believe it to be separate from the systems that exploit animals, but when one starts to dig deeper, it appears the organic industry is very much dependent upon the very systems it was originally intended to rise above.