Today's War Against Organic Farming: New Targets, Same Tactics

Yet another new book concludes that feedlots are a better way to feed the world than organic farming. The twist? This time it's aimed at a liberal audience.

The war against organic farming isn’t over. In fact, things are starting to heat up again. But this time, the forces opposing organic farming are targeting groups that have historically supported organic farming—and they’re starting to succeed.

My first inkling that something fishy was going on was when I read We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate by Michael Grunwald (Simon & Schuster, 2025). This is the second book that’s been released within the last two years by a major New York publisher that claims input-intensive chemical agriculture is better for the environment than organic farming. (The first one was Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World). Grunwald concludes, somewhat reluctantly, that the only way to produce beef without frying the planet is in conventional feedlots—because that can free up more land to grow carbon-sequestering trees.

This “land-sparing” argument originated in the 1990s. Its biggest proponent at that time was Dennis Avery, who worked for the right-wing Hudson Institute and liked to say things like, “If we ban pesticides, we literally ban forests and wildlife.” The argument itself is logically weak, and there’s no evidence that conventional farming is either creating or “sparing” wildlife habitat, but enough scientists have published peer-reviewed articles on it that they’ve convinced at least these two journalists.

Back then, anti-organic rhetoric was largely targeted as conservatives, while environmentally conscious liberals were some of organic farming’s strongest supporters. Now, a growing number of writers are using issues like social justice to erode liberal support for organic farming and healthy food. This became especially obvious when a liberal social justice group recently sued the USDA for granting states waivers to exclude sweetened beverages from SNAP. Of course saying that people need soda to survive isn’t real social justice, but they’re claiming it is. Another recent anti-organic article aimed at liberals claims that organic farming “undermines trust in science and profits from fear.”

How could the anti-organic movement pivot political sides so quickly? The answer is simple—the forces opposed to organic farming are non-partisan. They’re using the current conservative lip service to healthy food to turn liberals against organic food and health—while simultaneously working to undermine the MAHA movement so that it’s unable to make any meaningful reforms.

This reminds me of a scene from C. S. Lewis’s 1946 social-issues-fiction book That Hideous Strength, where the evil pseudo-scientific, anti-nature, anti-life (and definitely anti-organic) organization N.I.C.E. is launching a propaganda campaign. A not-quite-convinced writer asks, “Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot?”

“Both, honey, both,” his supervisor tells him. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us—to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

The modern-day N.I.C.E. behind anti-organic rhetoric (whoever they are) is using the same tactic. Let’s be careful not to fall for it. We have to keep organic farming out of partisan politics.