All of the reasons you would buy organic foods for yourself apply to your pet.
Organic foods are full of so much more flavor. Your dog will love the full flavor that comes from organic foods and appreciate their full flavor. Organic food tastes better because it is grown locally and harvested on local family farms. Organic fruits and vegetables are full of so many more juices. The freshness of these foods gives them a full flavor that will be so much more enjoyable to your dog.
Organically grown foods are grown in accordance with the seasons of the climate they are grown in. Growing these plants in the cycle they have grown for millions of years allows them to reach their full potential. Organic foods are proven to have five times as many vitamins and minerals as non-organic foods. Growing in the full richness of the earth's seasons makes a difference in the quality of foods. And, your pet's health and happiness will reflect the added nutrition given to them. Quality growing practices means quality food!
Organic foods are also free of pesticides and fertilizers which are bad for your pet's health. For more information click here.
The Soil Conservation Service estimates that more than 3 billion tones of topsoil are eroded from US croplands each year. That means soil is eroding seven times faster than it is being built up naturally. Soil is the foundation of the food chain in organic farming. But in conventional farming the soil is used more as a medium for holding plants in a vertical position so they can be chemically fertilized. As a result, American farms are suffering from he worst soil erosion in history.
Protect Water Quality
Water makes up two-thirds of our body mass and covers three-fourths of the planet. Despite its importance, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates pesticides (some cancer causing) contaminate the groundwater in 38 states, polluting the primary source of drinking water for more than half the country's population.
Save Energy
American farms have changed drastically in the last three generations, from family-based small businesses dependent on human energy to large-scale factory farms highly dependent on fossil fuels. Modern farming uses more petroleum than any other single industry, consuming 12 percent of the country's total energy supply. More energy is not used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate, and harvest all the crops in he US.
Organic farming is still mainly based on labor-intensive practices such as weeding by hand and using green manures and crop covers rather than synthetic fertilizers to build up soil. Organic produce also tends to travel fewer miles from field to table.
Long-distance air and road transport of food - organic or not, is environmentally damaging. Food eaten in a shorter timeframe should be fresher, have more nutrients, and benefit consumers' immune systems. Some researchers believe that the dramatic rise in allergies and autoimmune diseases may, in part, be a result of people no longer eating food which has been produced in their local environment.
Eating food produced locally enables people's immune systems to learn which particles are harmless o the body. Hay fever, asthma, and allergies occur when the immune system overreacts to benign airborne particles such as pollen or components of food as if they were highly toxic. Autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and early-onset diabetes occur when the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells of tissues in the body as if they were foreign cells.
Many pesticides approved for use by the EPA were registered long before extensive research linking these chemicals to cancer and other diseases had been established. Now th EPA considers that 60 percent of all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides, and 30 percent of all insecticides are carcinogenic. The bottom line is that pesticides are poisons designed to kill living organisms, and can also be harmful to humans. In addition to cancer, pesticides are implicated in birth defects, nerve damage, and genetic mutation.
A National Cancer Institute study found that farmers exposed to herbicides had a six times greater risk than non-farmers of contacting cancer. The US continues to lose family farms, making organic farming one of the few survival tactics left for family farms.
Current prices for conventionally grown foods do not reflect the costs of federal subsidies to conventional agriculture, the cost of contaminated drinking water, loss of wildlife habitat and soil erosion, or the cost of the disposal and clean up of hazardous wastes generated by the manufacturing of pesticides. Consumers can pay now or pay later. Although organic foods might seem more expensive than conventional foods, conventional food prices do not reflect hidden costs born by taxpayers in the form of subsidies. Other hidden costs include pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste disposal and clean-up, and environmental damage.
Mono-cropping is the practice of planting large plots of land with the same crop year after year. While that approach tripled farm production between 1950 and 1970, the lack of natural diversity of plant life has left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. To replace the nutrients, chemical fertilizers are used, often in increasing amounts.
Single crops are also much more susceptible to persists, making farmers more reliant on pesticides. Despite an ever increasing use of pesticides, crop losses due to insects continue to rise, partly because some insects have become genetically resistant to certain pesticides.
Organic produce simply tastes so much better. Fruit and vegetables full of juice and flavour, and so many different varieties to try! There are about 100 different kinds of organic potatoes in production in the UK, and that's just potatoes!
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