Maintaining Natural Bio-Diversity as an Alternative to Chemical-Use on the Mojo Plantation

It’s been a week since I arrived and I’m pretty sure I’ve beaten the jetlag. I still wake up at an ungodly hour, but at the very least I am able to stay awake long enough to eat dinner at 8:30. I’ve got to say that being able to sleep in past six is a bit of a relief because it turns out my roof is inhabited by a family of lizards. They scamper back and forth across my ceiling apparently playing some sort of lizard-tag or some other recreational lizard-game. They’re not quite loud enough to wake me up, but once I’m awake they sure as hell make sure I stay that way. At first I thought they were rats, and after my experience with the geese I was understandably upset that I was being tortured by yet another animal that nobody would find cool. Yesterday morning however I finally caught a glimpse of them and they are indeed lizards
I have spent the last two days mostly learning about organic farming practices. Part of the reason I accepted this job was because I felt that the term “organic” was losing meaning in Canada. I know that “organic” means non-chemicalization, but I also know that there is no way the organic oranges I am buying at Sobey’s in mid-February are particularly good for the environment. If I am buying organic products simply because I am worried about the chemicals, I might save myself some money on apples and buy Nicorette gum to cut out the thousands of chemicals I inhale every day.
But I try to buy organic products because at some time during my personal development I became convinced that they were good for the environment. But when I really thought about it I realized that a truckload of oranges (organic or otherwise) being driven across the continent does not exactly define environmentally-friendly. So I’ve got to admit that I was pretty skeptical about an organic farm in a rainforest. Didn’t David Suzuki say we should leave the rainforests alone?
Well it turns out that every once in a while a skeptic like myself can be converted, because this place not only preserves the rainforest, but that preservation is the only thing that allows the agricultural crops to survive. I’m pretty sure bio-diversity will be a pretty major them in this blog, because every single action taken on this farm seems to be motivated by not only maintaining the Rainforest’s bio-diversity but encouraging it as well.
One of the pre-conceived assumptions I had about organic farms was that they automatically produced lower crop-yields. I was convinced that by spraying crops, farmers were able to protect against disease and insects, thereby increasing their plants’ ability to produce fruits (or beans, or vegetables). Otherwise, why would farmers invest so heavily in purchasing chemicals and pesticides year after year? The Mojo Plantation however operates on the principle that by retaining the biodiversity within a rainforest a farmer can use the natural balance that exists within that ecosystem to control pests and disease.
The basic premise of this operating principle is that rainforests are able to survive for thousands of years because there are predators that control the population of each living organism. By maintaining the habitats that these predatory populations require, the Mojo Plantation can regulate the population of pests that would normally destroy their crops. When commercial agricultural farms spray their crops with pesticides, they wipe out the predatory population as well as their targeted pests. This creates a dependency on chemicals as the predatory population may take longer to return then the bugs that decimate their crops.
For me at least, this presented a pretty convincing argument for supporting organic farming. If the farmers are actively working to maintain the eco-systems in which they operate, than the ecological cost of transporting their products remains negligible when compared to the ecological cost of commercial farming. Buying organic products that are produced locally is obviously ideal. But if the term “organic” has sufficient regulatory standards, I believe that it does represent a substantial opportunity for consumers to limit the impact their purchases have on the environment.