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Organic Agriculture Systems Continue to Outshine Conventional Systems in Multiple Studies
ORGANIC AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS CONTINUE TO OUTSHINE CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMS IN MULTIPLE STUDIES.
Rodale Institute has conducted one of the most substantial studies of organic and conventional agriculture. The Farming Systems Trial consists of more than 30 years worth of side-by-side comparison of conventional chemical based systems vs organic manure based and legume based systems. The findings were impressive; organic yields consistently match conventional yields, even outperforming those yields during times of more moderate drought. Organic systems also build soil matter, making it more sustainable versus conventional systems’ tendency to deplete it.
Not only does organic farming use 45% less energy, but it also produces less greenhouse gas emissions.
Rodale also suggested in a conclusion of its 30 year trial that organic agriculture is the solution for feeding the world now and in the future. A report from the Food and Agricultural Organizations of the United States (FAO) stated “organic agriculture has the potential to secure a global food supply, just as conventional agriculture is today, but with reduced environmental impact.”
The evidence of the profitability of organic systems in this, and many other studies, cannot be argued. Profitability is determined by many factors; crop yields, labor costs, price premiums, and cost savings.
Not only do cost savings due to reduced usage of nonrenewable resources and chemical pesticides increase profitability of organic crops, but cost-benefit analysis shows that it also helps to offset increased labor costs due to the need for manual labor versus mechanical labor that organic systems present. With this in mind, the need for manual labor presents a huge advantage not only for organic agriculture itself, but economically through job creation as well, providing 30% more jobs in rural areas.
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Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago
Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago
An organic farm marketer brought me a strange book to read and I can’t get it out of my mind. It was written by Cyril Hopkins, an agronomist at the University of Illinois in 1911. Already a century ago, science had committed the wisdom of the ages about maintaining soil fertility (Hopkins quotes Cato, Varro and Virgil from ancient Rome) to the finely wrought analysis and statistics of science. Soil scientists knew very well how to practice sustainable farming a century ago but then as now many people, including some fellow scientists, paid little attention. The strangeness of the book comes from the author’s efforts to write “The Story of The Soil” in the form of a novel, embedding his treatise on soil science in a more or less fictional love story. He had already written a factual book on how to restore and maintain fertility in America’s declining soils but, surprise, surprise, hardly anyone read it. I suppose he figured that maybe people would pay attention if a little sexual intrigue were woven into his pages of dry facts and figures about manure, lime, rock phosphate and clover rotations and what happens when you don’t do it correctly. I doubt his ploy worked except with those of us who think sustainable farming is a pretty sexy subject all by itself.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there was plenty of evidence that yields of farm crops were in decline, despite all the blazing glory shouted from the rooftops about the limitless fertility of our soils. All that was staving off a clear realization of that fact was that for two centuries and more, we always had new land to move to and repeat the process of mining the virgin nutrients out of it.
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