by Nathanael Gonzales Siemens, Nic Podoll, and Léa Vereecke
A
s the USDA rolls out funding opportunities for climate-smart agriculture this year, and with organic agriculture being specifically recognized and targeted for significant funding, it is important to understand and evaluate the various critiques of organic agriculture. To achieve a realistic perspective, we need to talk about what organic agriculture is, what it is not, and why climate-smart agriculture IS organic agriculture.
and builds its inherent fertility. Over the past few decades, agronomic research has proven that these methods work to build healthy soils, produce more resilient crops in times of stress, result in comparable yields over time, use less water, significantly lower energy and fertility inputs, and make farms more profitable (Liu et al, 2022; Schärer et al, 2022; Easwaran et al, 2021; Rodale Institute, 2011).
Tillage as a tool
A more complicated aspect of organic agriculture is calculating the yields and the correlated land area required to produce enough food to feed the world. While this is a real and pragmatic concern, it is important to remember the reality is that we currently produce far more food than is consumed. What we have is a broken food system and food distribution problem which the current production model continues to perpetuate. This cannot be the solution. Food deserts in developed countries continue to be a problem and are especially concentrated in communites that have been historically underserved and discriminated against. At the same time, we are wasting 1.3 billion tons of edible food annually. Producing this massive amount of wasted food requires 28% of the world’s agricultural area (FAO, 2013) - a land footprint that would constitute the second largest country on earth. With this issue addressed properly, organic agriculture can feed the world and can do so rather easily. No form of agriculture can be climate-smart without a competently designed food system and well-informed consumers to support it.
Is organic agriculture “a step back in time to Dust Bowl era agriculture,” relying on heavy tillage, and would widespread adoption of organic practices cause a repeat of that environmental disaster? Outside of the prohibited use of chemical substances, modern organic agriculture has little in common with the large-scale agricultural practices that caused the Dust Bowl, which would not have qualified as organic today. In fact, as farms began transitioning to modern conventional agriculture during that time, it was the departure from many of the hallmarks of sound agricultural practice that caused this disaster. Synthetic mineral fertilizers, prohibited in organic agriculture, were already in heavy use by that time. Diverse crop rotations and cover cropping, cornerstones of organic production, were being practiced less and less. Continuous wheat or corn production, with heavy fall tillage that left soil bare over the winter (typically period of greatest erosion potential across the Midwest) were not only common but encouraged. While tillage is a tool in the organic farmer’s toolbox, it is meant to be used sparingly, and with an objective beyond preparing seed beds and killing weeds. It is done with the purpose of incorporating organic matter such as animal manure or green manure from cover crops that feeds the soil biology
ORGANIC BROADCASTER | 16
The complicated calculation of yield
So, how much land is needed to farm organically? This question is a hot topic in the corridors of government, university lecture halls, and around farm kitchen tables. Several compounding factors make this a complex answer. For example,
