Organic Farming is Actually Worse for Climate Change: The practice cuts greenhouse-gas emissions only if you ignore the inconvenient fact that it requires a lot more land.

There are three alternatives:

Keep the weeds and sort them out from the harvest. This is not economically viable.

Tilling. The main drawbacks is that you put a lot of nitrates into the soil and 20ish years later, these nitrates show up in your ground water. So it is not possible drinking water protection areas. The soil errosion is not so much an effect of the direct tilling, but of the fact that the soil is left barren over a winter afterwards. Using some cover foilage over the winter (like glover, which you can conviniently use as cattle food in the next year) helps quite a bit with this. The other option is to add top soil in some way to make up for the errosion (terra preta or something).


Found this article a little biased. Yes, the yield of biologically diversified crop systems has been found to be less, but I’ve found that number is quite contested. HOWEVER, this is only in the short term—I.e., through a one crop rotation. WE NEED TO START THINKING LONGTERM. If we consider that biologically diversified farming is more resilient to drought, disease, and extreme environmental changes the yields are actually very similar in the long term. Further, biologically diversified farming promotes natural pollinators, which is starting to become a necessity with the sharp decline in bee populations... Also, this article didn’t consider all the emissions generated by the creation, transportation etc of fertilizers, pesticides etc... I think this meta analysis sums up everything very well...

There is, of course, no evidence for that assertion: it's just ideology.

When I saw this headline I thought that OP was going to get it in the ear for going against the zeitgeist and, indeed, the forces are gathering.

When you compare two systems, you need to specify the objective function: what are you trying to optimise? Are you maximising yield, yield stability, biodiversity, cost per unit produced or land use, labour efficiency or aesthetics? You can make the country pretty and full of yokel labourers with one set of policies, grimly productive with another. But first - as with any policy initiative, ahem Brexit - you need to say exactly what you are trying to achieve and how you are going to measure progress.

Do you have any idea what you are talking about. So you want agricultural system where we 80% of the population works on farms to produce enough food for the other 20%. You want a system that is so unnnesseraly complicated that you can't even use machinery anymore.

You want to stop using efficient technology's like the Haber Bosh process because because right now we use CH4 as a hydrogen source when H2O is just as good if you have a better source of energy and replace it with nitrogen binding crops.

What are you gonna do when you start to lose nutrients because people use medication and their "biosolids" are no longer safe for use on farmland.

How do you want to feed population centers with 5 million inhabitants.

Lastly What crops are you actually talking about growing?

Forgive me, but the way you've phrased your comment is rather confusing- it sorta suggests that we shouldn't be feeding the entire world, which I'm assuming is not what you mean?

If you want to argue that food should be sourced as locally as possible, I don't disagree, but one has to remember that it's logistically impossible for countries like Japan or the UK to not import vast amounts of food from overseas. Moreover, the lower yields from organic farming translate to increased land demands, which translates to larger transport distances and more deforestation, which means more CO2 emissions. Efficiency in agriculture is kind of important.

You mean they reduced pesticide use, reduced water use, increased yields and saved topsoil because roundup ready is one of few ways to actually practice no till farming.

Yes its true old formulations had a toxin in it. Its not in there anymore we checked, we checked to find any know toxins in there the newer formulations are safe (after 2000) Its the most studied pesticide in the world.

So yeah even that roundup ready that uses more of a less harmful pesticide. (you calculate environmental/health effect by taking the sum of product of every pesticide you used * its danger to human en environment.) Because the more dangerous pesticides are no longer necessary for no till farming.

So yeah roundup ready means allows no till farming that saves topsoil and in turn increases C in soil, increases amount of water available, slows the loss of nutrients reducing need for fertilizers and a whole lot of other advantages simply because weeds become less of a problem. The problem in the us is bad government oversight resulting in resistance developing in weeds and indicate application methods causing it to end up in waterways.


The easiest way to accomplish this is to change what we produce. Instead of intensive monocrops for animal feed, we could produce legumes and vegetables to feed the same number of people on a much smaller area, with dramatically less inputs and water.

We really need to think about the long term consequences of any practices. A GMO designed for a better nutritional profile or for drought resistance could be used in a sustainable way. A GMO designed for herbicide resistance will encourage monocropping which damages the soil and requires more inputs. So it depends.

You'll probably be interested by regenerative agriculture.