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Hello this is Michel.
Hey Michel, how you doing man?
Hey Eric, good to hear from you. I'm good. How are you doing?
Oh pretty good. Um.. hey, you got a minute?
Yeah, sure what's up?
Well, hey the reason I was calling was
I wanted to talk about a concern I've got with some stuff I see in the literature that's comparing organic and conventional ag.
What do you mean?
Well the other day I came across this organic versus conventional comparison paper that's focused on soil microbiology.
At first it seemed really interesting because soil microbiology is a really important part of soil management.
But.... the organic versus conventional comparison was completely meaningless
because there's no information on the management practices that were used in
either the organic or the conventional plots.
You know this isn't the first time I've seen this type of thing being left out of a paper.
Yeah, I’ve seen that too. You know I often make organic versus conventional comparisions
from our long-term farming systems project.
But what I try to do is always be very specific about how we manage the various systems
so that the reader can understand what factors are leading to the differences we see.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense.
You know in our long-term trial we've got 8 different organic systems.
Some of them are what I'd call well-managed organic systems.
You know with frequent cover crops between our vegetables
and other systems are real duds.
They're fallow most winters.
They have really low vegetable yields
and they've got terrible soil quality.
But they're all certified organic.
Ah, yeah, I know. Ah, your experiment is a great illustration of that point...
that not all organic systems are equal
You know not all conventional systems are the same either.
For example conventional no-till
versus conventional tilled systems can be very different in terms of soil quality.
I think it's important to emphasize how much diversity there is in organic and conventional systems.
The details are everything.
You're right. You know what this actually makes me I think?
Uh oh. What's that?
Well, I think this year when we... when we go to the agronomy meeting in Long Beach,
I think we ought to give a presentation
where we highlight some of the problems with making organic versus conventional comparisons.
Hey, that's a good idea.
We could use our experience managing long-term systems studies in California and Maryland
to highlight why the details are important.
That's a great idea.
So..... you know... what do you think our take home message would be?
Ah.... let me see? First we should probably acknowledge that were not the first to make this point.
And secondly stress that researchers need to be very careful to provide enough details on specific management practices
within both organic and conventional systems.
So what type of specifics do you think should always be provided?
I'll start writing them down as we list em.
Soil type
That sounds good. Probably crop rotation.
Yeah crop rotation for sure.
Aaaa.... what kind of fertilizer inputs, especially if they're animal manures or otherwise.
Probably irrigation management that's critical in California
Yeah irrigation can be important in Maryland too.
How about tillage. Yeah that's a good start.
You know an associated issue is that sometimes differences
between conventional and organic systems are just due to specific management practices
like whether a cover crop is used or not in one system and not the other.
That's right I mean that's like in our long-term trial. Whether or not a cover crops used or not is really
the defining difference between our good and our bad systems.
Um... you know what I was thinking Michel is we
can actually take our presentation a step further if we do this at the conference
and we can do by video and then we could leave a lot of time you know to discuss... ah
kind of get feedback from the audience and see what they thought about this issue.
Yeah I guess that might work... it is after all an organic group.
Who knows maybe it will help our colleagues remember why these comparisons are devil a without details.
I think that's a good idea because you know people like to watch videos.
Yeah also didn't you tell me that a scientist that's become a filmmaker is the closing keynote speaker at this conference?
Oh yeah, that's ah... what's his name... Randy Olson.
He wrote a really interesting book called... um... 'Don't be such a Scientist"
Ah.. you know it's about how we can do a better job of communicating our science.
And making a fun video should be a good way to do that.
You bet man. Hey, look out Hollywood, here comes the scientists.
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