Applying Ecology to Realize Organic Farming

Abstract

Our conventional chemical fertilizers and pesticides are effective to improve our agricultural productivity, making our crops get more nutrients and less pests; however, the usage of our chemical fertilizers will lower quality of the soils, pesticides will also eliminate beneficial organisms which can fertilize soil and control pests. Pesticides except pyrethrin are hard to decay or be cleaned from the crops, they can be ingested by our human the most through our food chain and are harmful to human, pyrethrin is still harmful to fish. Organic farming doesn’t have these problems, but its productivity is still low, so we need organic methods to fertilize our crops and control harmful organisms that undermine our crops. Elements on the earth are used in cycle, so the only way to fertilize our crops is to make the elements move along the cycle, we can use methods that are same or similar to natural processes to provide fertilizers for our crops, such as producing ammonia by chemical synthesizing without adding other anions or cultivating clovers and processing them into organic nitrogen fertilizers, and import more sea foods into the inland and processing the inedible parts of them into organic fertilizers that can provide phosphorus, potassium and many other microelements that are scarce on the land. There are also many materials from some plants that can kill insects, they have small toxicity that is tolerable to human and can decompose after being used, such as matrine and nicotine. And it is also better to use natural enemies of the pest to control their population in low level, this is best to the crops since a low population of insects can stimulate the immunity of the crops by their bites, they possibly can also eat harmful microorganisms, practice shows the crops are less likely to be infected by diseases under such condition. It is perfect to use cat to eliminate mouse. By these organic methods to fertilize our crops and control harmful organisms, our organic farming possibly can have better productivity that is comparable to our conventional farming.