In my view, Organic retailing is a knowledge industry.. similar to what IT or Finance is today. We should have a say in the farming process that has scientific backing and that is what should drive our premium pricing..
But unfortunately, I don't see that happening in most places. Organic farming is left to some farmer groups and they do it because they believed that is the right thing to do and since they couldn't sell all their produce, we created organic stores to sell it and we branded it as "healthy"..
Truth is, it is not. Maybe sometimes but not 100% of the time. Sometimes it can even be more harmful than chemical farming when it comes to available nutrients or toxins. We can say it is free of insecticides and pesticides but we can't say it is full of needed nutrients..
When I say this, I am not taking the progress the organic movement has made in terms of raising awareness to the public but from a "progress of actions" perspective, we are stuck at the same place for so many years because we lack validation metrics..
We are moving into an AI world.. what this means is - intelligence differentials between us will move towards zero very fast. This will mean, everyone everywhere will have the same level to intelligence and it'll be available 24x7.. Imagine that world. And in that world, if that intelligence says "Organic products are not always healthy", what happens to all our business models?
To tell you the truth, that intelligence already says it. It is just we are not prompting for it or we are just ignoring to see it. Longer we wait, AI will kill our organic business model that is out there today.
That is where my idea of "organic" as "Knowledge industry" comes from. This is called "Regenerative Agriculture " or "Regenerative farming "..
Here are some of the questions that you can ponder. If you try to get answers for these, you'll see what I see and that will be a big step forward to make our agriculture an entirely new ball game.
- What does your soil pH say about nutrient availability to plants
- At what TDS/ EC of your irrigation water, does the microbial population thrive and at what levels, they die off
- What is the role calcium and potassium in soil balancing. What should be their levels and why
- What is that one nutrient that splits water molecule and make it available for plants? Or why herbicides are bad?
- What are root nematodes and why they exist in nature. What is the environment that can drive nematodes away?
- How is nitrogen supplied to the plants by urea and panchagavya.. what are the similarities and where do they differ..
- What are the environmental factors necessary for a microbe like azospirillum to fix nitrogen to the plant root?
And one more. Let's say - if someone is getting sick every two weeks and he takes "kashayam" every time he gets sick. Do we say that he is a healthy individual? Wouldn't we inquire why he got sick and find remedy for the cause? But are we applying that logic to plant health?.. if a plant gets pest/ diseases, we always run to manage it rather than trying to understand why my plant got pest/ diseases in first place. Not asking that question is our biggest problem.
I have many more but I'll stop here. Able to implement these answers in farming ecosystem and selling from that system will be your business model.
Our current organic movement runs on "anecdotal" evidence. Just one example. I asked TNAU (Tamilnadu Agriculture University) for scientific evidence on - how do we say Erukku (எருக்கு) leaves are a good source of boron? The answer I got was, it is ITK - meaning, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. They don't have any scientific evidence!
I did a search in Google scholar for any scientific papers on this subject. The consensus is, no, erukku leaves are not good source of boron for plants. If you don't have boron, your calcium will not travel and if your calcium can't, no other nutrient will. That is the scientific truth and there is no two ways about it.
I don't mean everything in current organic movement will die, but I see most of our current practices will have no future without scientific understanding of how / why that works. AI will distribute the science, and our current organic model will collapse as a result. As health service providers running organic stores, we need to pivot and integrate nutritional science in our farming and in our products.
That is the only way we can safeguard but also thrive in the coming AI revolution.