Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

And so. Hello and welcome to episode two of the Science of Everything podcast. I'm your host James Fodor.

In this podcast, I discuss a wide variety of topics in both the natural and social sciences,

exploring the many fascinating insights that the scientific method yields about the world around us.

The topic for this episode today is organic agriculture. And just as a very brief introduction, organic agriculture is basically the idea of producing food without the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers and other such things.

But I'll give a bit more of an introduction later on.

Okay, so in this episode, I want to talk about, first of all, what is that organic

agriculture, give a bit of a background to the history, the core concepts of it, and the

sort of size of the industry, and then the outlook for the industry today, and then I want

to move on to look at some of the core claims of organic agriculture, the arguments for why it should be adopted.

The main ones are that it's good for the environment and that organic food is of a higher quality,

nutritionally in terms of taste and other things.

And then I also want to look at the efficiency of organic agriculture in comparison to conventional farming

in terms of yields and costs and other such things.

Okay, so first we'll start with what is organic agriculture.

And before I get into that, I just want to make a note on the sources that I've used for this

podcast and you can find the complete list in the show notes. I've tried to

stay away from any publications or websites that were overtly pro-organic agriculture, you know,

if they said something to the effect of our mission is to promote the adoption of organic agriculture,

etc. I didn't consider that to be a sufficiently

...