Soil Building

• Organic practices improve the quality of the soil. By adding organic matter such as manure and compost, organic farmers improve soil structure, yielding better aeration and better water and mineral retention. Organic soil is also better at supporting soil life such as worms and other decomposers. These organisms, in turn, break down organic material, releasing minerals and helping to build more soil.
  
  

Safety

• Conventionally grown foods are grown using insecticides, synthetic fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides and other substances that can have deleterious effects on health. Many of these chemicals are believed to increase the risk of human diseases such as cancer and harm the environment as they enter the groundwater through runoff. Organic soil uses no synthetic chemicals, making it a safer choice for the consumer and the environment.
  
  

Nutrition

• Conventional growing is concerned with producing as many crops as possible as cheaply as possible. As such, conventional growers only add nutrients that plants need to survive. Conventional soil is often low on trace minerals that people need, and as such, conventionally grown plants might not be as nutritious as those grown in organic soil. By contrast, organic soil contains a much higher proportion of trace minerals, leading to healthier, more nourishing produce.
  
  

Pest Control

• Conventional growers have a wide array of pesticides they can use to fight weeds and other pests. If weeds come up or insects begin to infest the plants, they can spray and deal with the problem quickly. Organic farmers lack this resource. They can maintain soil balance to discourage weeds and use a diverse array of crops to discourage infestations; when they are plagued by a pest, however, they have to weed manually or remove diseased plants to prevent the disease from spreading, a much more difficult and labor-intensive process.
  
  

Fertilizer Speed

• Organic fertilizer has a number of disadvantages when compared with chemical fertilizers. Organic fertilizer such as compost has nutrients, but those nutrients are not in a form in which they can be used by plants. It can take time for soil microbes to break down the fertilizer sufficiently for the plants to use it. In cold climates, this is an especially serious problem, since microbes are inactive at low temperatures. Chemical fertilizer, by contrast, is readily available to the plants. If your crop is suffering a nutrient deficit, you can immediately remedy it. The drawbacks are that chemical fertilizer has to be applied more frequently and that it can harm the plants if it is overapplied.
  
  

Fertilizer Precision

• Chemical fertilizer is very easy to apply precisely. It has potassium, nitrogen, phosphorus and sometimes sulfur in precisely measured amounts, so a farmer or gardener can calculate just how much she needs for her plants. Organic fertilizer is much more difficult to measure out. The amount of nutrients in bone meal, compost, manure and other organic fertilizers can vary significantly from batch to batch, so an organic grower does not have the same degree of control over soil nutrients.