Give me a choice between meeting up with an honest cow patty or some malathion, and there's no doubt which I'd pick. Organic farmers do not lose more to pests or weeds than other farmers. Both chemical-using and organic farmers on average lose 30 percent of their output to pests or weeds. The loss rates are similar because pesticide users typically grow monocultures, miles of the same crop year after year, a sure recipe for breeding that crop's pests. Pesticides don't reduce crop loss, they just permit monocultures.
Monocultures lend themselves to mechanization and industrialization.
We like to think they reduce costs, but we do not count the costs of spraying poisons across the land or eating their residues in our food. It's because our foods are increasingly mechanized, industrialized, engineered, poisoned and irradiated that organic foods are becoming popular. At present there are 6,600 certified organic farms in the United States, large and small, north and south, growing everything from grain to grapes. Doesn't sound like enough of a threat to mount a publicity campaign against it. But the organic food market has been growing at 20 percent per year in America, faster than that in Europe and Japan.