Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Organic farming can feed the world, U-M study shows
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food on 
individual farms in developing countries, as low-intensive methods on the 
same land—according to new findings which refute the long-standing claim that 
organic farming methods cannot produce enough food to feed the global 
population.

Researchers from the University of Michigan found that in developed 
countries, yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms. In 
developing countries, food production could double or triple using organic 
methods, said Ivette Perfecto, professor at U-M's School of Natural Resources 
and Environment, and one the study's principal investigators. Catherine 
Badgley, research scientist in the Museum of Paleontology, is a co-author of 
the paper along with several current and former graduate and undergraduate 
students from U-M.

"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you 
can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture," Perfecto said.

In addition to equal or greater yields, the authors found that those yields 
could be accomplished using existing quantities of organic fertilizers, 
without putting more farmland into production.

The idea to undertake an exhaustive review of existing data about yields and 
nitrogen availability was fueled in a roundabout way, when Perfecto and 
Badgley were teaching a class about the global food system and visiting farms 
in Southern Michigan.

"We were struck by how much food the organic farmers would produce," Perfecto 
said. The researchers set about compiling data from published literature to 
investigate the two chief objections to organic farming: low yields and lack 
of organically acceptable nitrogen sources.

Their findings refute those key arguments, Perfecto said, and confirm that 
organic farming is less environmentally harmful yet can potentially produce 
more than enough food. This is especially good news for developing countries, 
where it’s sometimes impossible to deliver food from outside, so farmers must 
supply their own. Yields in developing countries could increase dramatically 
by switching to organic farming, Perfecto said.

While that seems counterintuitive, it makes sense because in developing 
countries, many farmers still do not have the access to the expensive 
fertilizers and pesticides that farmers use in developed countries to produce 
those high yields, she said.

After comparing yields of organic and non-organic farms, the researchers 
looked at nitrogen availability. To do so, they multiplied the current farm 
land area by the average amount of nitrogen available for production crops if 
so-called "green manures" were planted between growing seasons. Green manures 
are cover crops which are plowed into the soil to provide natural soil 
amendments. They found that planting green manures between growing seasons 
provided enough nitrogen to replace synthetic fertilizers.

Organic farming is important because conventional agriculture—which involves 
high-yielding plants, mechanized tillage, synthetic fertilizers and 
biocides—is so detrimental to the environment, Perfecto said. For instance, 
fertilizer runoff from conventional agriculture is the chief culprit in 
creating dead zones—low oxygen areas where marine life cannot survive. 
Proponents of organic farming argue that conventional farming also causes 
soil erosion, greenhouse gas emission, increased pest resistance and loss of 
biodiversity.

For their analysis, researchers defined the term organic as: practices 
referred to as sustainable or ecological; that utilize non-synthetic nutrient 
cycling processes; that exclude or rarely use synthetic pesticides; and 
sustain or regenerate the soil quality.

Perfecto said the idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic is 
"ridiculous."

"Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been 
conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical 
companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies—all have 
been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have 
these inputs to produce food," she said.