Giving back is one of the major themes of the Holiday Season.

The Wild Oats organic food you’ve chosen for your family has given something back to someone very important: Mother Earth.

Take that bag of frozen strawberries, for example.

Conventional strawberries are grown is soil that is routinely “sterilized” with the use of fumigants; one of which is so damaging to the environment that it has already been banned in Europe, and will be outlawed in the United States by 2017. Once the soil is sterilized, the farmers then fertilize the plants with up to 100 lbs. of nitrogen/acre, usually in the form of ammonium nitrate.

Sterilizing the soil and injecting ammonium nitrate certainly kills the bad bugs and bacteria that can harm the plant’s growth, but it also kills the earthworms, microorganisms and beneficial bugs that bring life to the soil.

Organic farmers use crop rotations, cover crops and beneficial insects to control pests, and to build the health of their soil That means less chemicals in the environment, and less of our precious topsoil that washes into the oceans.

In other words, those frozen organic strawberries are grown by farmers who are helping to give Mother Earth back healthy soils rivers, and oceans. And that’s a gift our grandchildren will all appreciate.