Organics and Paying Farmers for Nothing

Demand for organic food products are way up. That's good news. Supply is not up as fast according to this article about the demand outstripping supply.

America's appetite for organic food is so strong that supply just can't keep up with demand. Organic products still have only a tiny slice, about 2.5 percent, of the nation's food market. But the slice is expanding at a feverish pace. Growth in sales of organic food has been 15 percent to 21 percent each year, compared with 2 percent to 4 percent for total food sales.

We currently subsidize American farmers in a wide variety of ways. We should tweak the regulations to make some of them grow organic instead of leaving fields empty. That way the produce wouldn't have much impact on produce's commodity price because organics don't directly compete. There is some competition of course, but if it slowly causes goods made with pesticides to be wiped out of the market, that's not a bad outcome. It's good for the end-consumer, but more importantly it is good for the earth and especially good for the farmers who have much more contact with the pesticides than any of us.

Oh, and one more thing, organic is a stupid name for food that, according to the article, is grown without bug killer, fertilizer, hormones, antibiotics or biotechnology. That food is good and we should support it, but it isn't any more organic than other food. Remember when pre-meds had to take organic chemistry. Right, organic is a technical word. It means of or relating to compounds that have both Carbon and Hydrogen. Wikipedia weighs in:

An organic compound is any member of a large class of chemical compounds whose molecules contain carbon and hydrogen; therefore, carbides, carbonates, carbon oxides and elementary carbon are not organic.

I guess all this distracts from the main idea of the post, that the government instead of incentivizing farmers to leave fields empty should encourage them to grow organic.