By —Courtney Vinopal
Science Updated on Oct 23, 2019 10:00 AM EDT — Published on Oct 22, 2019 3:56 PM EDT
For decades, the conventional wisdom surrounding organic farming has been that it produces crops that are healthier and better for the environment as a whole.
In the U.S., where organic food sales totaled nearly $50 billion last year and made up 5.7 percent of total food sales, companies such as Annie’s and Organic Valley market their products as leaving a low carbon footprint. They remind consumers that their ingredients “matter…to the planet we all share,” or that their farming practices “remove excess carbon dioxide from the air.” The International Federation of Agriculture Movements promises in its literature that organic farming can “help reduce greenhouse gas emissions within the agricultural sector of the European Union and beyond.”
But a new study out this week challenges this narrative, predicting that a wholesale shift to organic farming could increase net greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 21 percent.
“We’re not saying that organic is wrong,” said Adrian Williams, an associate professor of environmental systems at Cranfield University in the U.K., but that consumers and environmental organizations would be wise to consider what these farming practices would look like on a much larger scale before making assumptions about the environmental impacts. Williams worked on the study published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.
While it’s unlikely that any country will pursue a complete, 100 percent transition to organic farming anytime soon, the study falls in line with others that raise questions about the degree to which these practices can mitigate the effects of climate change — and how market forces limit their ability to do so.
What would a shift to 100 percent organic look like?
Much research has been done about the link between organic farming and greenhouse gas emissions in smaller, niche settings, from grassland farms in Southern Germany to suckler-beef producers in Ireland. Results have been varied — while organic farming practices lowered greenhouse gases in some scenarios, in others, emissions grew or remained constant.
A team at Cranfield University sought to expand this scope of research by predicting how far the food supply would carry if England and Wales made a switch to 100 percent organic farming.
“The question was, how much could we produce using only organic methods?” Williams said.
Forty percent less, it turns out. Organic farming typically produces lower crop yields due to factors such as the lower potency fertilizers used in the soil, which are limited to natural sources such as beans and other legumes. Williams’ model found that a 100 percent organic farming system in England and Wales would mean much smaller crop yields. For wheat and barley, for example, their production would be halved relative to conventional farming.
“Having established that there would be a shortfall in massive production, the gap would be filled by increased imports, ” Williams said.
If we try to have the same diet and convert to organic, we can’t really do it without expanding agricultural land demands.
This outcome could lead to a 21 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions from England and Wales because those imports would likely be raised overseas through conventional agriculture. Such a transition would render moot the potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise be achieved by the switch.
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The fundamentals of organic farming are unsustainable in the longer term.
Each time you take produce away from the farm and its soil, you take away nutrients like potassium and phosphorus. These are “refreshed” in the agriculture cycle with mining products. If your belief prevents you from topping up P and K from mines, then your soil will lose its ability to produce, at first efficiently, then at all.
This is probably well-known to all cocerned. However, when you are following a trend or an ideology, adverse knowledge does not stand in your way. You simply proceed as if nobody told you that your system was doomed.
This is the same poor logic that saw renewable energy suddenly grow, despite knowledge that in time, it would fail because of intermittencies that were well known in advance. Geoff S
Geoff , if your beliefs about organic farming prevent you from acknowledging that organic farmers use P, K, Ca, Mg, S, to amend soils so as to maintain productivity, then one wonders what else you are prepared to believe in defiance of the facts.
Organic farming is based on an ideology that does not accept the use of Super phosphate and Potassium Chloride .
The true believers also do not allow artificial nitrogen to be used .
They use finely ground reactive phosphate rock and potassium sulphate and will only use organic chicken manure or similar .
I challenge any one to blind taste produce from organic and conventional producers .
Plants absorb nutrients as they require and growth is limited by a deficiency in any one ,be it major such as phosphate calcium, potassium. sulphur or nitrogen
Other minor elements such as boron and sodium as salt are applied for certain crops.
Super phosphate according to organic manuals is injurious to soil life as it is acidic but as the majority of soils around the world are acidic and require liming this is never a problem and sulphur is applied in the super phosphate .
The majority of New Zealands organic livestock farms are low producing as the soil fertility is kept low and no artificial nitrogen is allowed to be applied .
One small dairy farm that a friend of mine brought was organic and he gave it a good top dressing of NPK and in the first 5 months his milk production exceeded the total for the farm in the previous year .
That ideology that you refer to is Sustainability. It’s fairly widely held.
“Organic” is just one approach or manifestation.
And of course it must be a continuum. It will be more or less sustainable depending on the practices..
It’s possible to understand plant nutrition and still try to stick to natural sources like bone meal for phosphorous, as long as one doesn’t look too far up the chain to how that natural bone meal is made or whether the animal ate only ‘organic’ food.
In some regions these minerals are refreshed by volcanic action and spread by weather but nowhere is it better to be ignorant of how things work or dogmatic and stubborn about one’s ignorance.
The best store tomato here is seldom as good as the worst garden tomato because it wasn’t trucked 3000 miles, not because it’s not ‘organic’.
That’s why regenerative agriculture is twice as popular in the US as organic. Regenerative farmers focus on using cover crops to provide as much soil nutrients as they can, but then supplement with traditional fertilizers.
Regenerative farmers are seeing a 80-100% reduction in fertilizer expense/application.
I’m an organic farmer. More CO2 is better for crops and for all farmers. But most of us here already know that. Lot of weirdos in the organic hierarchy.
When I did PR for the British Chemical Industry trade association I used to ask organists what was the difference chemically between organic and non carrots. Never got a useful reply.
well my homegrown organic carrots dont develop black mouldy spots in around 5 days after picking
the store bought ones now do
they didnt used to
I suspect sparytopping before harvest to be the main cause
once we bought carrots with the tops and the chooks rabbits or guinea pigs got a feed as well
You didn’t get a useful reply, because there isn’t one. “organic” is marketing. The food is fundamentally the same, the difference is in the farming methods not the food.
In the US there’s 5 million acres of certified organic cropland/rangeland.
But the new thing is regenerative farming. It is not yet recognized by the USDA, nor is there a in place certification for cropland. There is a certification for rangeland: https://www.savory.global/land-to-market/
At least 10 million acres of US agricultural land is managed for regenerative agriculture. Ie. It is already twice as popular with farmers as organic.
Annie’s (from the main article) has a couple products they sell as sourced from regenerative farms. General Mills is a massive company and they have invested at least $100 million into companies focused on regenerative agriculture. Their family of companies includes Epic Provisions which sells meat snacks from animals raised regeneratively.
In the normal course of events , all living soils are regenerative because – the carbon cycle , the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle. Oh and a little thing called Sol.
The soil /plant complex is , so far , the only useful self-replicating solar panel . It’s an impressive achievement .
All souls are regenerative until you start plowing it. Plowing breaks the cycle. A couple hundred years later the civilization dependent on that farmland dies.
The soil requiring amendments like manure or fertilizers shows it isn’t regenerative. The goal of regenerative farmers is to use cover crops (green manure) to keep nutrients in the soil.
Egypt was the exception because the Nile flooding brought new soil every year.
Not quite right for mine. One or two ploughings can be helpful.
I think you mean that continuous cultivation is usually degenerative.
Where the soil parent material has deficiencies,say among the major cations, then even the regenerating soil will require amending from time to time.
The need to maintain the correct pH is also ever present.
The USDA is really pushing no-till in the US.
Tillage kills many of the soil organisms, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in particular.
Indigo Ag is selling a billions dollars a year worth of seeds coated with microorganism spores and nutrients to feed the spores. If you’re going to plow using coated seeds probably makes a lot of sense.
Even better, you can build a low cost Johnson-Su Composting Bioreactor ($50-$100) and make a compost highly dense in beneficial microorganism and fungi spores. David Johnson’s test have found it increases yields the most if you make a slurry of 8-parts whole milk, 1-part molasses, and lots of his compost. Then coat your seeds with the slurry. 1 liter of slurry for every hectare worth of seeds as I recall. He found drilling the seeds into the field wet worked best.
Using cover crops is recently a big educational push from the USDA.
You might enjoy this 23-minute video about 5 farmers that set up small acreage test plots on their farms to test cover crop usage in South Carolina’s notoriously acidic clay soil.
https://www.farmers.gov/connect/blog/conservation/farmer-scientists-five-trials-managing-soil-health
They saw an 80% drop in fertilizer application with the combination of no-till and cover crops.
You said you have pasture land. As you know the more soil organic matter the healthier the soil. Here’s a recent paper about using adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing to build soil organic matter levels.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X17310338#.WpHorNqe0qU.twitter
AMP is slowly gaining popularity in the US.
“They remind consumers that their ingredients ‘matter…to the planet we all share,'”…
Party planners recommend allowing 6 square feet per person for a stand-up cocktail party. I think that’s a little restrictive. Something more like 20 square feet per person seems more comfortable. The state of Connecticut in the U.S. has an area of 5,543 square miles – and the 7.7 billion people of the Earth could all fit in there with 20 square feet per person – three times as much room as party planners recommend.
The land area of Connecticut is, in turn, 0.00964% of the land area of the Earth, and 0.00281% of the total surface area of the Earth.
So this planet that “we all share” is 35,522 times larger than an uncrowded cocktail party.
I just like putting things in perspective. So sue me.
Best irrational quote:“Having established that there would be a shortfall in massive production, the gap would be filled by increased imports, ” Williams said.
If a nation is loney enough to go “full organic” then only “organic” foods would be imported from those “organic” countries that would experience the same “shortfall”. Using the reduction figure assuming the mechanized US ag industry could even come close to only a 40% reduction and assuming those nations would accept GMO food, only 5% to 10% of current US exports of soybeans and corn would be “organic exportable”. This means there simply won’t be enough food to ship to other fully organic nations and massive, worldwide famines would occur. It’s anyones guess what geo-political chaos that will have.
Indeed. It’s a bit like enviro-looney states lake Cali going full wind & solar, it requires other states still using fossil fuels/nuclear to supply them energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. If everyone went full wind & solar, they’re screwed every time the wind stops blows and the sun isn’t shining. newer go full wind & solar.
Organic claims about superior produce have been shot down for years, yet people still believe the claims
Organic claims about superior produce have been shot down for years, yet people still believe the claims
This just shows that radical environmentalists are not really concerned about saving the environment. They are anti-human and will do anything to prevent humans from doing anything to improve their lot in life. They are a death cult in that everything they promote would result in eventual death for humans. If they really felt that the human race needed to be drastically reduced , they could start with themselves.
“Having established that there would be a shortfall in massive production, the gap would be filled by increased imports, ” Williams said.
Not if everywhere else also converted to 100% organic farming, as they’d all have shortfalls too – meaning they would have no extra to export for you to import. Since you won’t have enough food to feed your population you’ll have to reduce your population – which is the ultimate goal.
True John, mostly.
But my pastoral farm produces just as much (if not more) now, as it did before it got a quality assurance/traceability system (organic cert.) in place, because the farm has changed very little (except for the size of the “paper trail”) .
This farm had no history of using nitrogen fertilisers because clover-based pastures supplied sufficient , to the point where it was verified that the result was higher levels of mineraliseable nitrogen than the control. The other significant trends were -increased earthworm biomass
-lower bulk density (more spaces)
-higher respiration rate ( sinful I know).
Here’s a relevant article……
Dishonest Propaganda Sprouts from Organic Agriculture
https://www.pacificresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/MillerOrganicBrief_F.pdf
I’m some one who dabbles in organic produce, for myself and her indoors,and live in a farming area,nitrogen is heavily applied for grazing and hay/silage in my area ,after around 7 years the ground is exhausted which leads to ploughing and reseeding, a lot of farms mix in with manure from the sheds,which extends the period before reseeding ,the moral of the story is nitrogen only feeds the roots of a particular crop, it adds very little to the soil,were as applying rotted down muck bulks the soil up in lost minerals.now heres the thing legislation is making it more difficult for farmers to store and apply manure ,including slurry,while at the same time trying to reduce the amount of bought in nitrogen applied to the land,complicated by rules of when you can plough,eg any pasture not been ploughed in the last 15 years its illegal to plough, unless you a get special permission or you apply any type of fertiliser, and any piece of land classed as semi wild you have to have permission to plough and fertilise, it gets better every square inch of ground in the UK has been graded,for its soil type,location ,altitude, rivers,streams, ect ect, and is regularly spied upon by satellites,farmers have been stopped to dredge rivers(hence more flooding) it’s become a bureaucratic nightmare to do anything on your own holding,to much interference from the state telling farmers how to farm,via secret lobbyists like rewild Britain XR green slime and the such, which causes clashes in the local communitys = https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-50117566, a very rare victory for the farmers,as a footnote from me ,this area is not a intensive farming area,its mainly sheep on mainly marginal land, steep valleys Moreland and tons of forestry,some ancient and protected, a point sadly missing on the eco nuts, perhaps they should try there rewilding in the southeast of England, nope to much money down there so they pick on poor marginalised communities,
Look, some people choose to do things differently than you do.
That’s ok.
I don’t pour pesticides on my lettuce. I’m sorry if that offends you.
Organic farmers use pesticides.
And selected fertilisers. And animal remedies, including antibiotics, anthelminthics, etc.
Organic certification is just a system of protocols for quality assurance.
Sustainable agriculture is whatever looks like being viable at any time.
Science proves that real food is bad for the environment. You couldn’t make it up. Thankfully we have industrial agriculture to save us all.