Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "Sri Lanka hit by worst economic crisis since its independence | DW News" video.

  1. I'm pretty sure that most farmers could tell you that you can't switch fields and plantations in use from conventional fertilizers and pesticides over to organic from one day to the next even if sufficient supplies were available, which I'm guessing was not the case in sti lanka (they probably had immediate shortages and absurd prices of the legal alternatives). synthetic/mineral fertilizers supply plants' nutrient needs directly, whereas organic fertilizers feed microorganisms in the soil that then excrete plant-absorbable nutrients. conventional farming practices often harm the soil's capacity to support those microorganisms, so even if you suddenly do supply them with organic fertilizers, they won't be active enough to support strong plant growth. organic fertilization also needs to be applied completely differently, with the main difference being that farmers generally have to apply it long before problems arise (months or years) for the fertilizer to then slowly break down, whereas with synthetic fertilizer it's usually possible to attentively watch plants for signs of deficiencies and then immediately solve them by applying the necessary feetilizers, which work instantly because they don't need to be processed by microorganisms first. organic pest control is perhaps even harder, since synthetic herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are extremely effective and there's a solution for everyhing, whereas organic farming conventions only allow very few mostly plant-based pesticides that are far less effective and may require a bigger number of different methods as opposed to using one or teo kinds of highly capable synthetic poisons to do everything. organic farming also heavily relies on more manual labor instead of pesticides, such as by manually removing weeds instead of using herbicides, since there are no organic herbicides. organic farming has big upsides. one for example in sri lanka would be that with the current conventional farming techniques, tea plantation workers are suffering massive rates of illness from the pesticides they use (though this could also be improved by banning particular pesticides and regulating better work safety practices like protective equipment). but switching to organic farming takes a lot of retraining, not to mention that it requires the production or import of supplies that are more expensive and harder to get (the reason why humanity invented synthetic fertilizers and pesticided in the first place), and the sales side of the business also requires big changes to market products at the higher prices that the higher production costs dictate. I would imagine that even if the farming works, this would likely be a huge problem for poor people relying on domestically produced food, who suddenly have to pay extra for organic produce.
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