Conventional agriculture, farming with petroleum based fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides, and utilizing monocropping, should be banned in the United States. A return to organic agriculture, which prohibits the use of petroleum based fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides and encourages crop rotation will protect our nation’s arable land, increase the nutritional value of our food, and dramatically reduce our food’s toxicity.

We must protect our nation’s arable land in order to protect our food supply for future generations. With approximately 18 to 19 percent of America’s land being arable, we have the world’s most abundant farming resources (CIA World Factbook, ). Even though agriculturally viable resources are obviously of great economic value to the entire nation, our nation’s soil is treated as though it were disposable. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and petroleum-based fertilizers strip the soil of nutrients and kill beneficial organisms such as earthworms, predatory insects, and microorganisms (Ellis and Bradbury, 5). In order to grow anything in such chemical laden soil, more chemicals are added. After this process strips the land of its agricultural viability, conventional agribusiness moves on, acquiring more farmland. Then the process is repeated, rendering more land barren. By comparison, organic farming replenishes the soil, through crop rotation, natural fertilizers and the use of time honored natural techniques.
As a last resort, organic farmers do use pesticides; however, organic farmers use pesticides that are plant based, these bio-chemicals naturally, quickly decompose. In contrast, conventional agriculture uses a vast array of chemicals, most of them synthetic. “There are over 600 pesticides used in the United States” (Colbert 12). Many of these chemicals are known to last for hundreds or thousands of years before breaking down, and they are toxic to both humans and animals. The degree of exposure to these chemicals directly affects one’s risk of developing numerous cancers, especially cancer of the brain, prostate cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma. (Colbert 12)
If growing nutrient deficient, chemical laden food wasn’t bad enough, conventional agriculture has gone even further, genetically modifying our food to make it easier to grow, but at an even higher cost to the consumer’s health.“ The National Academy of Sciences released a report stating that genetically engineered products introduce new allergens, toxins, disruptive chemicals and unknown protein combinations into our bodies.” “Every day we make life or death decisions, decisions about what we eat. This may sound melodramatic but it’s true.” (Superfoods RX)