On the heels of the Bullshit episode on organic food, the rallying cry seems to be that organic food can’t feed the world, which means that people will starve to death if we all of a sudden adopt organic farming as the primary means of food production. While there are a number of things wrong with this argument, we’ll let a University professor with no ties to agri-business answer it.
Christos Vasilikiotis, Ph.D. is a prof at Berkeley. In his paper that we linked to above, “Can Organic Farming ‘Feed the World’?”, he examines this problem in depth and in clear language that most people will be able to understand. Some of the highlights:
Do we really need to embark upon another risky technological fix to solve the mistakes of a previous one? Instead, we should be looking for solutions that are based on ecological and biological principles and have significantly fewer environmental costs. There is such an alternative that has been pioneered by organic farmers. In contrast to the industrial/monoculture approach advocated by the biotech industry, organic agriculture is described by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) as “a holistic production management system which promotes and enhances agro-ecosystem health, including biodiversity, biological cycles, and soil biological activity.”
- Organic grain and soybean production in the Midwestern United States
A comprehensive review of a large number of comparison studies of grain and soybean production conduct by six Midwestern universities since 1978 found that in all of these studies organic production was equivalent to, and in many cases better than, conventional (Welsh, 1999). Organic systems had higher yields than conventional systems which featured continuous crop production (no rotations) and equal or lower yields in conventional systems that included crop rotations. In the drier climates such as the Great Plains, organic systems had higher yields, as they tend to be better during droughts than conventional systems. In one such study in South Dakota for the period 1986-1992, the average yields of soybeans were 29.6 bushels/acre and 28.6 bushels/acre in the organic and conventional systems respectively. In the same study, average spring wheat yields were 41.5 bushels/acre and 39.5 bushels/acre in the organic and conventional systems respectively.
Read it and draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is that the truth tends to come from people that aren’t on anyone’s payroll but an academic one.
