As a rule, you should be extremely critical of anyone claiming that any one agriculture practice is definitively worse or better. It is very complex, and very dependent on a huge range of factors....
Exemplary
As a rule, you should be extremely critical of anyone claiming that any one agriculture practice is definitively worse or better.
It is very complex, and very dependent on a huge range of factors. I'm going to argue against the article, not because I think that organic farming is automatically better for climate change - because on its own it isn't. But to show that it isn't necessarily worse either - it depends on too many factors to make a hard judgement like the one in the title.
This article rests on the assumption that organic agriculture is worse for climate change if the drop in yield is replaced by imported crops that are taken from land that use to be native grass. This is not a safe assumption to make - global crop yields are dynamic as demand for different crops fluctuate. For example, extra food could be gained by cutting food waste, a reduction in the demand for grain-fed meat, or a reduction in bio-fuel production.
yields are not static - the soil building practices described in the article would slowly increase yields over time, while typical agriculture tends to require more added pesticides and artificial fertiliser through time.
I don't have the spare time to read into the studies themselves, but based on the article it doesn't sound like the greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing and transporting artificial fertiliser and pesticides were considered in the equation.
When we consider only climate change in the environmental equation, we ignore the impact of excess artificial fertiliser and pesticides on the local environment.
Anyway, I don't think anyone really believes that we can just swap to organic methods and everything will be fixed. There are environmental problems with the food production industry that go deeper than a simple substitute can solve. If you want an environmentally friendly diet, organic farming will play a role - but you should also cut down on meat, try to eat local seasonal food, and buy food with minimal processing and packaging.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking when reading this. Usually organic farming is talked about in respect to top soil depletion, eutrophication and other ecological problems, not climate warming.
When we consider only climate change in the environmental equation, we ignore the impact of excess artificial fertiliser and pesticides on the local environment.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking when reading this. Usually organic farming is talked about in respect to top soil depletion, eutrophication and other ecological problems, not climate warming.
As a rule, you should be extremely critical of anyone claiming that any one agriculture practice is definitively worse or better.
It is very complex, and very dependent on a huge range of factors. I'm going to argue against the article, not because I think that organic farming is automatically better for climate change - because on its own it isn't. But to show that it isn't necessarily worse either - it depends on too many factors to make a hard judgement like the one in the title.
This article rests on the assumption that organic agriculture is worse for climate change if the drop in yield is replaced by imported crops that are taken from land that use to be native grass. This is not a safe assumption to make - global crop yields are dynamic as demand for different crops fluctuate. For example, extra food could be gained by cutting food waste, a reduction in the demand for grain-fed meat, or a reduction in bio-fuel production.
yields are not static - the soil building practices described in the article would slowly increase yields over time, while typical agriculture tends to require more added pesticides and artificial fertiliser through time.
I don't have the spare time to read into the studies themselves, but based on the article it doesn't sound like the greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing and transporting artificial fertiliser and pesticides were considered in the equation.
When we consider only climate change in the environmental equation, we ignore the impact of excess artificial fertiliser and pesticides on the local environment.
Anyway, I don't think anyone really believes that we can just swap to organic methods and everything will be fixed. There are environmental problems with the food production industry that go deeper than a simple substitute can solve. If you want an environmentally friendly diet, organic farming will play a role - but you should also cut down on meat, try to eat local seasonal food, and buy food with minimal processing and packaging.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking when reading this. Usually organic farming is talked about in respect to top soil depletion, eutrophication and other ecological problems, not climate warming.