Organic Agriculture

Discussion

Aaron Newton and Sharon Astyk:

"To discover whether we can feed the world, first we need to ask whether increased yields have actually meant more available food and nutrition. In fact, this question has been answered—even the World Bank admitted in 1986 that more food does not mean less hunger. Access to food is the primary issue—if it were not, the US would have no hungry people instead of 35 million food-insecure people. Food access is the most important issue in feeding the world, as economist Amartya Sen, among other people, has discussed at length. In Donald Freebairn’s analysis of more than 300 research reports on Green Revolution results, he found that 80 percent of them showed that inequity increased with the adoption of Green Revolution techniques.3

If the Green Revolution had responded to real material shortages of food worldwide, the environmental costs might be worth it. But it did not. As Freebairn documents, the food supply was sufficient to feed the world’s population in 1950, just as it is now. Claims that Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution saved “a billion lives” are almost certainly wildly overstated—there was sufficient food to go around before the Green Revolution, had equitable distribution been in place, just as there is now. In fact some analysts have suggested, whether rightly or wrongly, that population growth itself is a product of that growth. (That last is a subject we’ll return to shortly.)

And, as we’ve noted, industrial agriculture actually undermines our ability to continue to feed the world, by contaminating soil, increasing global warming, depleting water stocks and promoting erosion.

Dissecting figures about hunger in World Hunger: 12 Myths, Lappé, Collins, et al. note that though figures at first seem to suggest that the Green Revolution made real gains in hunger reduction because total food available between 1970 and 1990 rose by 11 percent and the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, this is not really true. If you take China out of this discussion, the figures look very different. Removing China from the equation, the number of hungry people in the developing world rose from 536 to 597 million. And,

- In South America, while food supplies rose almost 8 percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent.… In South Asia there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also 9 percent more hungry people. The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million almost begs the question: which has been more effective at reducing hunger, the Green Revolution or the Chinese Revolution?

This suggests that first of all, though absolute food availability is relevant, it is not as relevant as distribution and economic justice. And because China was a comparatively late adopter of Green Revolution seeds and techniques, it also suggests that the Green Revolution itself may be less important than improved agricultural techniques that apply just as much to organic agriculture as to chemical agriculture.

It is commonplace to assume that organic agriculture yields less than conventional agriculture and that we would have to endure enormous losses in yield were we to give up chemical inputs. The yield increases of the Green Revolution are commonly articulated in isolation, without discussion of comparisons with organic yields. To determine how important the Green Revolution was, then, we need to go through the outputs of the Green Revolution and ask whether increased agricultural yields depend upon Green Revolution techniques. If, for example, agricultural yields depended on mechanization, we would expect mechanized agriculture to consistently out-yield hand labor. If they depend upon chemical inputs, we would expect organic agriculture to be heavily out-yielded by conventional industrial agriculture. And if they depend on plant breeding, we would expect older varieties to be out-yielded by newer ones.

Are these things true? Well, not in absolute terms. That is, small farms, which generally speaking use much less mechanization, fewer inputs and are more likely to use older plant varieties and save seed than large ones, actually are more productive per acre in total output than large farms. At the extreme ends of this, we can see this disparity in Ecology Action’s biointensive gardening methods, which offer yields per acre much, much higher than industrial agriculture can achieve—without fossil fuel inputs, using open-pollinated seeds.

But on a larger scale this is true as well. In Deep Economy, Bill McKibben argues that the 2002 Agricultural Census confirms this greater productivity of small farms using more hand labor—small farms produce more food per acre by every measure, whether calories, tons or dollars.5 What mechanization does do is reduce the amount of human labor required. However, in a world with 6.6 billion humans and growing, human labor is a widely available resource.

It is also true that organic agriculture as a whole can consistently match yields with conventional agriculture, suggesting that we do not depend on artificial fertilizers or pesticides. In a 2007 paper, “Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply,” the authors demonstrated that organic methods would offer a substantial net increase in yields in the Global South, while continuing comparable yields in the Global North. In a world-wide organic only policy “farms could produce between 2,641 and 4,381 calories per person per day compared to the current world equivalent of 2,786 calories per person per day.”

In other studies, agronomist Jules Pretty studied 200 sustainable agricultural projects in 52 countries and observed that, per hectare, sustainable practices led to a 93 percent average increase in food production. Grain yields, as discussed in his volume Agri-Culture, had average yield increase of 73 percent over studies including 4.5 million farmers.6

The Rodale Institute has been running test plots of conventionally farmed corn and soybean rotations (the practice of most Midwestern farms) against organically grown plots, where soil is maintained wholly by cover crops, and another where a fodder crop is grown and fed to cows whose manures are returned to the soil. The difference in total yields between the three plots is less than 1 percent. And during drought years, the organic plots dramatically out-yielded conventional ones because of higher organic matter in the soil. The cover-crop-fed plots produced twice as many soybeans as the conventionally farmed ones.7

As we go into increasingly difficult times, one of the great strengths of organic agriculture is its resilience in the face of less-than-optimal conditions; when fertilizer prices spike, in drought or flooding years, organics can continue to produce successfully. In times of stress, organic agriculture tends to out-yield conventional—and what is coming is many more stressful years.8

Even the much touted problem of lowered yields as fields stripped by conventional agriculture are converted to organics can be overcome, as a German study found. Making the first crop a nitrogen-fixing legume can prevent an initial drop in yield.9

Moreover, most of those assuming that industrial agriculture must "feed the world" are assuming that a few grain exporting nations—the US, Canada, Brazil—must feed the poor world. But yields could be doubled in poor nations. Not with commercial fertilizers, already out of the reach of many poor farmers, but organic cover crops, composting and new techniques could have dramatic results in enabling poorer nations to feed themselves and also in creating an agriculture of richer soil, higher in humus, that can withstand difficult weather. For example, in Benin in the 1990s, the government experimented with subsidizing seed for cover cropping, and found that eroding soils could be repaired with a comparatively small investment in velvet beans, which also reduced weeding. Maize production tripled, without the importation of expensive commercial fertilizers.10

So although, seen in isolation, the Green Revolution did increase yield of grain, organic and sustainable agriculture have kept pace and in some cases exceeded the results of Green Revolution techniques. We need not depend on chemical agriculture, mechanization or any other fossil (or eventually renewable) fueled technology to feed ourselves." (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4652)

More Information

"Evidence demonstrating organic agriculture’s productive potential has been steadily accumulating. The roots of this research can be traced at least back to the seminal 1970s study conducted by Washington University’s Center for the Biology of Natural Systems under the direction of Barr y Commoner. See

1. Robert Klepper et al., A Comparison of the Production, Economic Returns, and Energy-intensiveness of Corn Belt Farms That Do and Do Not Use Inorganic Fertilizers and Pesticides, CBNS Report AE 4 (St. Louis, 1975).

More recent studies include

1. Catherine Badgley et al., “Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22 (2007): 86–108;
2. Joshua L. Posner, John O. Baldock, and Janet L. Hedtcke, “Organic and Conventional Production Systems in the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trials: I. Productivity 1990–2002,” Agronomy Journal 100 (2008): 253–60;
3. UNEP-UNCTAD Capacity-Building Task Force on Trade, Environment, and Development, Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa (New York and Geneva, 2008).