Why is weed control so hard?
Weeds are very costly to control in agriculture in general. In organic, it’s the single largest cost factor that differentiates organic from conventional farming. Instead of spraying or using Roundup-ready soybeans, you have to weed those fields. If you looked at the current process and extrapolated that to 100% of the agriculture in the United States, there would have to be an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of people who were essentially hand-weeding and doing the more labor-intensive forms of agricultural work. Are there people who want to do this work? What are the societal implications of having hundreds of thousands of people involved in stoop labor? It’s possible now to live an almost entirely “organic” life, even shopping at a grocery store–especially if you have access to a chain like Whole Foods. Organic products are everywhere–you can even buy organic frozen pizza. Consumers have the impression we know how to create food organically. What are we missing? Organic
