{"id":30196,"date":"2026-10-09T07:35:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T04:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/but-your-neighbour-sprays-anyway\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T07:52:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T04:52:19","slug":"but-your-neighbour-sprays-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/but-your-neighbour-sprays-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"But Your Neighbour Sprays Anyway\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\"><em>Things We Often Hear \u2013 Part 1<\/em><\/p><\/h3>\n\n<p>As organic farmers, we often hear questions, doubts and sometimes surprising claims about our farming practices and our products. Through this new series of articles, we&#8217;d like to share some of them and explain how we see things.<\/p>\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with one of the most common:<\/p>\n\n<p><p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\"><strong>\u201cThere are no truly organic products. If your neighbour sprays pesticides, your olives are no different from conventional ones.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n\n<p>At first, it sounds reasonable. After all, the wind doesn&#8217;t know where one field ends and another begins.<\/p>\n\n<p>Yes, pesticides can drift from neighbouring fields. Organic farming doesn&#8217;t create an invisible protective bubble around our olive trees.<\/p>\n\n<p><p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\"><strong>But that doesn&#8217;t mean organic and conventional products are the same.<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n\n<p>Think of it this way: if someone smokes next to you, you might breathe in some of their smoke. But that doesn&#8217;t make it the same as smoking yourself every day.<\/p>\n\n<p>Something similar happens in farming. Accidental exposure is not the same as regularly applying pesticides directly to trees and soil.<\/p>\n\n<p>And this difference matters for the products themselves. Scientific studies generally find fewer pesticide residues in organic products than in conventional ones. Organic doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean zero residues, but it does mean a genuinely different way of producing food.<\/p>\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/IMG_10141&#x3BD;&#x3B5;&#x3BF;-1067x800.jpg\" alt=\"Work in the Apo Kardias olive grove in Messinia, Greece, during the olive harvest season.\" class=\"wp-image-30190\" style=\"width:850px;height:auto\" \/><\/figure>\n\n<p><p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\"><strong>For us, however, organic farming is about more than just the final product.<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n\n<p>It&#8217;s also about protecting the soil, the plants and the animals around our olive trees. Our goal isn&#8217;t just a good and profitable harvest. This is where we and our families live and work. We want a better, healthier environment for ourselves and our children.<\/p>\n\n<p>At Apo Kardias, we cannot control what every neighbouring farmer does.<\/p>\n\n<p><p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\"><strong>But we can decide what we do on our own land.<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n\n<p>And every field where synthetic pesticides are not used makes a small but meaningful difference.<\/p>\n\n<p><p data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\"><strong>At least to us.<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Things We Often Hear \u2013 Part 1 As organic farmers, we often hear questions, doubts and sometimes surprising claims about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[221],"tags":[230,229,228,231],"class_list":["post-30196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-environment","tag-olive-oil","tag-organic-farming","tag-things-we-often-hear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apokardias-farmers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}