Organic certification set an important baseline: no synthetic pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers, and a focus on soil health. But a baseline is a starting point, not a finish line. Better Than Organic is the 500 Foods blog about pushing organic growing further, with better practices, better science, and better results.
We cover advances that help organic farming work better. That includes soil biology and fertility management, biological pest control, cover cropping, water efficiency, and new tools that bring precision to traditional methods. We also follow certification itself, including the rules in Canada, British Columbia, and the United States, and how they apply to newer methods such as hydroponics and other controlled environment growing.
Our view is practical. "Organic" should mean food that's grown responsibly and tastes great, produced in ways that can scale and that growers can afford. When a practice improves yields, cuts waste, or lowers risk without compromising those principles, we want to know about it. When a label promises more than it delivers, we'll say so.
Who is it for? Organic growers looking for an edge. Conventional growers curious about making the switch. Shoppers who want to understand what's behind the label. And anyone interested in where sustainability and productivity can work together.
How we work
Every day we scan a wide range of trusted industry feeds and shortlist the stories that look most interesting. A person on our team picks the best of them, and we then research each topic and write an original article about it. Every post links to the original story and credits the feed where we found it, because those sources deserve the traffic and we want to help promote them. We never copy text or images from the sources we cover.
About our content
Our articles and images are produced with the help of AI. The images are AI-generated illustrations, not photographs of real farms, products, or people. Everything we create is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). Please use it, share it, and build on it. All we ask is a credit to 500 Foods, and leaving the small watermark on our images counts as that credit. We're being generous on purpose: we want these ideas to travel.
Expect short, original summaries of the news worth reading, with links to the original sources, plus occasional deeper dives where a topic deserves one. Welcome to Better Than Organic.