05 Feb 2013 QA-4

Dear Gurudev, the food that we eat today have so much chemicals and the government policies promote these. How to tackle this? Please also talk about organic food and organic farming.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Organic farming is the future of Earth.
If we want the earth to sustain itself, we have to go organic. There is no other way.
There are people who are so greedy and selfish that they do not care for the planet, and so they promote these harmful things to the farmers. One or two crops come very good, and that tempts the famers and they take it. Once they take it, then from the third or fourth crop, everything goes down and even the land gets spoilt. The land becomes unfit for cultivation. This is the problem.
That is why we have established an agricultural institute to teach farmers organic farming; the ancient type of farming.

In ancient days, they would put three crops together. So even if one crop dies the other two crops are there. So people were never starving. They never went bankrupt, or never went into loss.
They would put, let us say, sugarcane along with some pulse, so that if one crop fails, the other two will be there. Usually all three crops would yield and it would fix the content of nitrogen in the soil all by itself, because of the variety. This is the kind of farming that one has to revert to.

We have to do Agnihotra (a Vedic yagna) and that will take care of harmful insects and pests. So you do not need to put pesticides.Then there are natural pesticides like cow urine, Neem leaves and several other things like that.
So we need to revert to this type of farming which does not spoil the water, the Earth and the health of the people.