From Eurekalert
Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required. This is the finding of a new international study, published in the journal Nature
Chalmers University of Technology
IMAGE: The crops per hectare are significantly lower in organic farming, which, according to the study, leads to much greater indirect carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation. Although direct emissions from organic agriculture are often lower — due to less use of fossil energy, among other things – the overall climate footprint is definitely greater than for conventional farmed foods. Credit: Yen Strandqvist/Chalmers University of Technology
Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required. This is the finding of a new international study involving Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in the journal Nature.
The researchers developed a new method for assessing the climate impact from land-use, and used this, along with other methods, to compare organic and conventional food production. The results show that organic food can result in much greater emissions.
“Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas. For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference – for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent,” says Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor from Chalmers, and one of those responsible for the study.
The reason why organic food is so much worse for the climate is that the yields per hectare are much lower, primarily because fertilisers are not used. To produce the same amount of organic food, you therefore need a much bigger area of land.
The ground-breaking aspect of the new study is the conclusion that this difference in land usage results in organic food causing a much larger climate impact.
“The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation,” explains Stefan Wirsenius. “The world’s food production is governed by international trade, so how we farm in Sweden influences deforestation in the tropics. If we use more land for the same amount of food, we contribute indirectly to bigger deforestation elsewhere in the world.”
Even organic meat and dairy products are – from a climate point of view – worse than their conventionally produced equivalents, claims Stefan Wirsenius.
“Because organic meat and milk production uses organic feed-stock, it also requires more land than conventional production. This means that the findings on organic wheat and peas in principle also apply to meat and milk products. We have not done any specific calculations on meat and milk, however, and have no concrete examples of this in the article,” he explains.
A new metric: Carbon Opportunity Cost
The researchers used a new metric, which they call “Carbon Opportunity Cost”, to evaluate the effect of greater land-use contributing to higher carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation. This metric takes into account the amount of carbon that is stored in forests, and thus released as carbon dioxide as an effect of deforestation. The study is among the first in the world to make use of this metric.
“The fact that more land use leads to greater climate impact has not often been taken into account in earlier comparisons between organic and conventional food,” says Stefan Wirsenius. “This is a big oversight, because, as our study shows, this effect can be many times bigger than the greenhouse gas effects, which are normally included. It is also serious because today in Sweden, we have politicians whose goal is to increase production of organic food. If that goal is implemented, the climate influence from Swedish food production will probably increase a lot.”
So why have earlier studies not taken into account land-use and its relationship to carbon dioxide emissions?
“There are surely many reasons. An important explanation, I think, is simply an earlier lack of good, easily applicable methods for measuring the effect. Our new method of measurement allows us to make broad environmental comparisons, with relative ease,” says Stefan Wirsenius.
The results of the study are published in the article “Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change” in the journal Nature. The article is written by Timothy Searchinger, Princeton University, Stefan Wirsenius, Chalmers University of Technology, Tim Beringer, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Patrice Dumas, Cired.
More on: The consumer perspective
Stefan Wirsenius notes that the findings do not mean that conscientious consumers should simply switch to buying non-organic food. “The type of food is often much more important. For example, eating organic beans or organic chicken is much better for the climate than to eat conventionally produced beef,” he says. “Organic food does have several advantages compared with food produced by conventional methods,” he continues. “For example, it is better for farm animal welfare. But when it comes to the climate impact, our study shows that organic food is a much worse alternative, in general.”
For consumers who want to contribute to the positive aspects of organic food production, without increasing their climate impact, an effective way is to focus instead on the different impacts of different types of meat and vegetables in our diet. Replacing beef and lamb, as well as hard cheeses, with vegetable proteins such as beans, has the biggest effect. Pork, chicken, fish and eggs also have a substantially lower climate impact than beef and lamb.
See also earlier press release from 24 February 2016: Better technology could take agriculture halfway towards climate targets https://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/chalmers/pressreleases/better-technology-could-take-agriculture-halfway-towards-climate-targets-1325077
More on: The conflict between different environmental goals
In organic farming, no fertilisers are used. The goal is to use resources like energy, land and water in a long-term, sustainable way. Crops are primarily nurtured through nutrients present in the soil. The main aims are greater biological diversity and a balance between animal and plant sustainability. Only naturally derived pesticides are used.
The arguments for organic food focus on consumers’ health, animal welfare, and different aspects of environmental policy. There is good justification for these arguments, but at the same time, there is a lack of scientific evidence to show that organic food is in general healthier and more environmentally friendly than conventionally farmed food, according to the National Food Administration of Sweden and others. The variation between farms is big, with the interpretation differing depending on what environmental goals one prioritises. At the same time, current analysis methods are unable to fully capture all aspects.
The authors of the study now claim that organically farmed food is worse for the climate, due to bigger land use. For this argument they use statistics from the Swedish Board of Agriculture on the total production in Sweden, and the yields per hectare for organic versus conventional farming for the years 2013-2015.
Source (in Swedish): https://www.jordbruksverket.se/webdav/files/SJV/Amnesomraden/Statistik,%20fakta/Vegetabilieproduktion/JO14/JO14SM1801/JO14SM1801_ikortadrag.htm
More on biofuels: “The investment in biofuels increases carbon dioxide emissions”
Today’s major investments in biofuels are also harmful to the climate because they require large areas of land suitable for crop cultivation, and thus – according to the same logic – increase deforestation globally, the researchers in the same study argue.
For all common biofuels (ethanol from wheat, sugar cane and corn, as well as biodiesel from palm oil, rapeseed and soya), the carbon dioxide cost is greater than the emissions from fossil fuel and diesel, the study shows. Biofuels from waste and by-products do not have this effect, but their potential is small, the researchers say.
All biofuels made from arable crops have such high emissions that they cannot be called climate-smart, according to the researchers, who present the results on biofuels in an op-ed in the Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter: “The investment in biofuels increases carbon dioxide emissions”
Source (in Swedish): https://www.dn.se/debatt/satsningen-pa-biodrivmedel-okar-koldioxidutslappen/
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It has long past the stage where human population can be sustained by organic produce grown from the Earth. It follows that those who insist on organic are selfish rich who do it at the expense of the poor and damage biodiversity harming the ecosphere. Its not necessary to reduce human population as we can sustain ourselves with factory produced food and still leave space for the wild.
This Swedish ‘research is crap non science.
Check out the assumptions folks : A key assumption is that organic farmers must clear forests in order to grow more organic food.
Duh ?
I’ve been an organic farmer here in Australia since 1985. And I have never cleared forest. In fact I have planted thousands of trees to re-create native bushland habitat.
I was also an organic farmer inspector for 4 years here in Oz. Part of the certification standards in. that a minimum of 5% of farm title will be kept as native forest / bushland. Most organic farmers I inspected ( hundreds ) had far more land in bush that that 5% minimum.
And that rule is also part of the IFOAM global international organic standards.
So there we have it. Adopt a crap fake assumption and then build a grand fake hypothesis on it. And get lots of publicity al l over the world.
Why does this fel so similar to the CO2 fake hypothesis ?
Because it does the same crappy type of science.
The point is that it takes more land to grow organic. If the land weren’t being used for organic, it have been left natural.
Exactly who says ?
There is another assumption in that logic : “That an organic farmer will always want to grow the same amount of crop or head of live stock, per hectare, as a conventional one”
But go figure ! Here in Oz there is a premium on organic foods & produce. I saw the same in the USa and in the UK and In France. So the income per kg is higher…And lots of farmers are happy with that trade off..It’s called being less exploitive mate.
Hi Bill in Oz, – Good hard work you are doing. I remember being brought up to Atherton in the early 1970s to talk with some young organic adherents. Anyway I think you might find the following interesting.
Comparing organic to conventional ag should consider not only average differences in yield, but the way the comparative yield ratio is distributed over the years. Fig. 3 of the below cited review (2017) is quite illustrative of 37 species grown in 17 countries according to 52 reports. There is another diagram showing the organic vs. conventional differential according to whether tropical or otherwise.
Organic horticulture (not row crops) range is specified for organic ag having a 10% chance of being 50% lower yielding than conventional ag, yet 50% to 60% of the time yielding 75% of conventiional ag & even a 20% chance of organic horticulture yielding better than conventional.
As per free full text available on-line = “Lower average yielda but similar yield variability in organic verses conventional horticulture. A meta analysis.”
Authors also specify one observation about soil feature in organic ag context. Organic vs. conventional yields “… differed as a function of rainfall … organic maize out yields conventional … in extreme conditions….” To which I will add that a large proportion of humanity can not grow wheat where they live, but maize is their grain.
Exactly who says ?
There is another assumption in that logic : “That an organic farmer will always want to grow the same amount of crop or head of live stock, per hectare, as a conventional one”
But go figure ! Here in Oz there is a premium on organic foods & produce. I saw the same in the USa and in the UK and In France. So the income per kg is higher…And lots of farmers are happy with that trade off..It’s called being less exploitive mate.
Don’t bother refuting this. It’s pointless. I would eat organic foods as well if it was possible here. Growing my own vegetables, I can eat them confidently knowing that they are not sprayed with ‘n’ types of pesticides, fungicides and other stuff. My body reacts quite badly to those chemicals – stomach and skin problems straight away.
Yay Bill from down in Vic;-) ++++
I was in East Gippsland for a long while but now I’m in South Australia. The Adelaide Hills. It’s good that organic farmers are speaking up here on this blog post…Some f the comments from other folk betray a real ignorance of organic farming..Almost as bad as the Swedish researcher who started this all off..
I was a sth Aussie for most of my life. I miss the good soils so much.
Im in the west with sand no lime and the clay that allows the redhums to thrive but not much else.
Adelaide hills, what bliss, except for creeping suburbia ruining good farmland now;-/
family are from Mt Barker Strath n Littlehampton, Macclesfield…pity they sold out/died off , before I was old enough to get a hold there.
I am at Mt Barker on Bollan Rd now that i have retired. It’s a beautiful part of the world. And yes the Herbig paddocks across the road are re-zoned for housing and sports ground facilities. Mt Barker was about 3000 in 1990. It is now around 25,000 people . So today I am researching the ‘Heat island effects’ of that huge population growth on the BOM’s weather records for Mt Barker which are the most complete set for SA. They started in 1961 !
I think that most of the increase in the mean average annual minimum & maximum temperatures recorded by the BOM here are due to the Heat Island effect. But need to double check it all.
By the way Strath is also a boom town now as well. And the Long BValley Rd a bit of a death trap with all the extra traffic.
hi Bill, yeah last seen some yrs ago it breaks my heart to see it now. suburban tack on prime land.
heritage cottages my nan was born in at Littlehampton now some modern ugly crud.
A friend at Echunga rarely goes out now and uses backroads when she has to due to idiots treating rural rds like the freeway,
and you will be correct re the heat island effects, no way even up that high the mass of homes aircons and cars wont be altering it for the worse.
Winter school camps at Mylor used to be brutally icy cold, somehow i doubt it like that much now.
Adelaides been trashed thoroughly.
Im sort of glad I wont have too many years left to see it all get worse
Perhaps he should really be described as “one of those culpable for the study”, which probably also just discovered that round wheels work better than square ones.
And if I ever met him, I would like to ask him what the S.I. units of “climate impact” are.
Brain in Knee Technologies were invented recently that (a) global warming is causing severe droughts and floods by WMO/UN Secretary General in 2013, (b) organic farming is contributing global warming by Stefan Wirsenius from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden [published in Journal Nature], etc.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Here in Iowa, the local PBS ran a feature on a local organic farmer. He really didn’t cultivate much for the weeds any only used natural poisons or predatory species for insect control. His yields were less but he gained a premium price so his income ended up being the same as other farmers at the end. He looked at this as a good thing.
So having more expensive food for fewer people in the world is good. What can go wrong with that?
All food is organic, unless it is made of stone or metal that is! Oy.
Had two friends try the “organic” farming gig 10 years ago, they nearly went bankrupt after the first year, only thing that saved them was selling hunting leases on their forested sections. Went back to “normal” farming and managed to get out of hock in only 3 years. They turnout excellent sweet corn, wheat, soybeans and timothy/alfalfa plus various vegetables. Diversify, thats the key!
Oh come on! Next somebody’ll try to tell me recycling plastic is a big fat joke!
“…there is a lack of scientific evidence to show that organic food is in general healthier and more environmentally friendly than conventionally farmed food, according to the National Food Administration of Sweden and others..”
Who cares what the National Food Aministration of Sweden “and others” say about the environmental “friendlyness” of organic food? Are they environmental scientists?
As for whether it’s “generally healthier”, if they want to dispute this assumption that most rational people have come to (and put their money on), why don’t they do some solid scientific studies to confirm their doubts. Otherwise they should shut up, whoever they are. If Sweden is anything like Canada, the USA, and France, their National Food Administration is in the pocket of the “conventional” food industry, and anything but an impartial broker.
But let’s see – is it healthier to ingest herbicides, insecticides, antibiotics, heavy metals, maybe some nuclear material. Really?
Reminds of the time I was in Zurich looking to buy a few litres of distilled water. I was directed to a pharmacy where I was offered an 8oz bottle for an obscene amount of money. When I told them I was looking for drinking water, I was told drinking distilled water would make me very ill, because I’d be missing all those important minerals that come with it.
I’ve heard the same rubbish from a tea guru, who travels around the world buying choice lots of tea. He told me this during lecture session he gave on buying and drinking tea. I guess when you’re an expert you no longer need to use your brain to persuade people you’re right. If I want minerals in my water, I’ll put them in myself, thanks, and not leave up to the local water utility, etc..
And finally a word about lumping categories. What the hell does environmental friendlyness have to do with healthy eating? This kind of lumping happens all the time, and the main effect is shameless exaggeration. The most notorious and frequent instance is there were “hundreds(/thousands) of dead and injured.” This sort of apples plus oranges propagandizing should be a red flag for anyone, that the writer is shamelessly leveraging the effect of the actual statistics (if any).
PS if I have failed to reply to some comments on my posts recently, it’s because since the new format I don’t get any email notices of such. I have to come back the the page and search it, and thats pretty tedious…
I have never really understood the Organic stuff. I have never eaten an Inorganic carrot in my life!
As far as I was aware, the opposite of Organic is Inorganic. Yet another case of a word use being bastardised.
Most intelligent comment section ever.
Enjoy your droughts, massive annual erosion rates, decreasing water stores and dwindling bee populations… slow clap.
Haha. Good job!
Oh please. Just stop.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/04/17/bee-apocalypse-was-never-real-heres-why-12851
My apologies if I repeat something as I haven’t read all the comments.
My organic dairy farming neighbor plants open pollinated, MN13 corn in which he selects ears for the following year to plant. He fertilizes only with cow manure and green crops (rye, spelt), has tried multiple weed control systems from burning (set corn back so much no rows were visible because of the weeds at harvest) to now planting into a rye mat with ridge till. His yield this fall was in the 30-40 bu/a range, in this tough year the local conventional farmers were in the 120-200 bu/a range on the same type of soil.
Re: organic v. conventional seed prices
I just got a 2019 price list from a seed dealer in IA. 5301 alfalfa: conventional-$150/50#; organic:$290/50#; certified Shelby oats: conventional-$10.25/bu; organic-$12.25/bu. The company did not have identical corn or beans with prices listed. Organic seed is always higher priced for the same reasons as food: reduced yield and lots of wasted resources keeping the organic certification trail intact.
Keep in mind the organic farmers also have a special government program for cost-sharing their organic certification costs that isn’t available (because there is no need) to conventional farmers.
The abattoir who processes my sheep once told me he processes a lot of old cows from organic dairy farms. Because the farm gate organic milk price was so high the farmers tended to keep milk cows long past the time a conventional farmer would have kept them. He told me he wouldn’t eat any of them because their bones were hollow. How does that animal produce “healthier” food?
Also, some organic pesticides are more toxic than conventional pesticides. It all has to do with the LD50 rating.
Hi gail, – I, like my neighbors in Gringolandia, keep producing milkers as long as possible; good milk yielding “native” adapted (hot & semi-arid) stock is expensive. Yes, at slaughter their meat is reportedly lower eating quality; yet the protein is still healthy protein if one eats meat.
Bone is either trabecular (ex: like in flat bones) or cortical (ex: like in shafts of long bones). It is trabecular bone with it’s 30 to >90% porosity where most mineral turnover occurs (cortical bone porosity is only 5-30%).
Once consider bone’s dry weight of ash (~45% of fresh bone is ash) then under “full” conditions about 37% of ash is calcium & about 18.5% is phosphorus. Although it may sound illogical, osteoporosis in cows occurs more readily when there is consistant low phosphorus in their diet & most supplemental feeds augment phosphorus along with calcium. In my region we all give a bit of supplemental feed at milking time (it’s all hand milking here abouts).
Mineral mobilization out of trabecular bone is not a linear dynamic. Cows mobilize those minerals in late pregnancy (gestation) & even early lactation no matter how much their feed contains of calcium &/or phosphorus.
When calf is new & even up to the 30th day of milking (lactation) the calcium ratio (%) in ash content of trabecular bone is higher (a metabolic partitioning) than the calcium % of bone ash by the 60th (or even 120th) day of after giving birth. (On the other hand in cortical bone the % of calcium in that bone ash drops when calf born as opposed to when cow lactating). This mineral cycling has been measured in ewes to be a 50% reduction in trabecular bone pores’ content of minerals once the mother is at a stage of mid-lactation.
The abattoir you mention is possibly recieving “organic” dairy cows that have produced their last replacement & nurtured it to an age where the mother is no longer needed (& as per above, trabecular bone % calcium depleting). Her “hollow” trabecular bones when sent to slaughter may not have been that way if examined at a different time. As for abattoir’s rejection of eating hollow bone cow’s meas this kind of professional preference is understandable, he has the luxury of choicest product – I know a few money poor farmers who won’t eat produce unless it was recently prepared for that meal.
A much more legitimate issue with elements of “organic” farming is how to do no-till (which reduces erosion) without herbicides. I’d be curious to hear a response from one of the active farmers here on that.
That said, the most compelling case for organic I have heard and which I try to adhere to, is to buy organic oats since oats (and some beans) typically have relatively high Round-up contamination.
I am sirprised that this article is published internationally, so disappointed with this journal. The authors do not understand that organic farming standard does not allow deforestation. What’s about the comparison between the two farming practice itself plus emissions from input use and the production of inputs for both farming. I am really want to know the all factors for this calculation. I would not object and disappoint with the authors if they use the terrm ‘may cause more climate impact if deforestation involved’.
Hi Janya, –If you are still interested & following up here let me know. For brevity this is my answer.
Herbicides are what “conventional” no-till uses. What you are wondering about can be called “organic rotational no-till”, explained below.
The rotational aspect is to plant an organic cover crop that is later flattened by a particularly designed roller to also kill the organic cover crop; then the organic cash crop is planted into the plant debris, which suppresses weed germination (weed seed gets no light). Rye is well suited for that cover crop when cash crop is soy beans & vetch is suitable cover crop when cash crop is corn. The sacrificial organic cover crop & rotated in organic cash crop can be other combinations – different cover crops have variation in their effectiveness suppressing weeds.
“The fact that more land use leads to greater climate impact has not often been taken into account in earlier comparisons between organic and conventional food,” says Stefan Wirsenius. “This is a big oversight, because, as our study shows, this effect can be many times bigger than the greenhouse gas effects, –
and that after 40 evermore tricky climate modelling science years.
Time is running out!