2. Protect Future Generations. The average child receives four times more exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in foods. The food choices you make now will impact your child's health in the future.

3. Prevent Soil Erosion. Soil is the foundation of the food chain in organic farming. In conventional farming, the soil is used more as a medium for holding plants in a vertical position, so they can be chemically fertilized. As a result, American farms are suffering from the worst soil erosion in history.

4. Protect Water Quality. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that pesticides--some cancer causing--contaminate the ground water in 38 states, polluting the primary source of drinking water for more than half the country's population.

5. Save Energy. Modern farming uses more petroleum than any other single industry, consuming 12 percent of the country's total energy supply. More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate and harvest all the crops in the United States. Organic farming is mainly based on labor-intensive practices such as weeding by hand and using green manures and crop covers rather than synthetic fertilizers to build up soil.

6. Keep Chemicals off Your Plate. The EPA considers that 60 percent of all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides, and 30 percent of all insecticides are carcinogenic. Pesticides are poisons designed to kill living organisms and can also be harmful to humans. In addition to cancer, pesticides may be implicated in birth defects, nerve damage, and genetic mutation.

7. Protect Farm Worker Health. A National Cancer Institute study found that farmers exposed to herbicides had a 6 times greater risk than non-farmers of contracting cancer. Field workers suffer the highest rates of occupational illness in California.

8. Help Small Farmers. It's estimated that the United States has lost more than 650,000 family farms in the past decade. And with USDA predicting that half of this country's farm production will come from 1 percent of farms by the year 2000, organic farming could be one of the few survival tactics left for the family farms.

9. Support a True Economy. We all love to save money. When you purchase organic foods, you play a great role in reducing the federal government's $74 billion in subsidies to conventional farmers. In addition, your organic purchases lessen the hidden costs in pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste disposal and clean-up, and, not to mention, severe damages to our environment. In the long term, purchasing organic foods provides us with enormous savings, plus good health for our families

10. Promote Bodiversity. Mono-cropping is the practice of planting large plots of land with the same crop year after year. The lack of natural planting diversity has left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. Single crops are much more susceptible to pests, making farmers more reliant on pesticides, while some insects have become genetically resistant to certain pesticides.

Reprinted from the May 1998 Issue of Natural Foods Merchandiser