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Are the claimed benefits of organic agriculture justified?

Nature Plants volume 2, Article number: 16099 (2016) Cite this article

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To the Editor — The key points on which we would like to focus are crop yield levels, soil fertility, leaching of nutrients and energy aspects, which we believe are not satisfactorily analysed in the paper by Reganold and Wachter1. In our opinion, the selection of references to support their message is biased. They cite a number of reviews and meta-analyses to demonstrate the advantages of organic agriculture, but several of these do not take into account important boundary conditions — such as how organic crop yields are affected by nutrient transfer from conventional to organic agriculture, and the requirement for more arable land to produce sufficient food with organic methods. Here we comment on several misconceptions about organic agriculture reproduced in their paper.

The results in the five references cited by Reganold and Wachter that show relatively small yield differences between organic and conventional agriculture are all derived from experimental sites or paired farms separated by a few metres to a few hundred metres2. Yield differences admittedly approach insignificance at small scale, but at large scale3 and over the long-term4, organic yield levels are considerably lower. According to official Swedish yield statistics available since 2004, representing about 0.5 million hectares of agricultural land, the yield reduction in organic agriculture is much higher than reported in single-field studies used in meta-analyses and is, for example, 46% for cereals, 50% for potatoes and 20% for forage crops5. The much lower organic crop yield at large scale compared with plot or field scale is mainly due to lower inputs of nutrients through insufficient supply of manures and organic amendments to all organic farms at the national level. In other words, the rate of animal manure addition to experimental plots and organic fields often greatly exceeds the amount of organic manure that organic systems can produce. Nowak et al.6 demonstrate that, on average, 73% of phosphorus and 53% of potassium used in organic agriculture is imported from conventional agriculture. These factors are generally ignored in evaluations of organic crop yield by meta-analyses. A discussion is ongoing within the EU to prohibit nutrient transfer from conventional to organic agriculture, a regulation that would certainly challenge the sustainability of organic agriculture and future food supply through organic methods.

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References

  1. Reganold, J. P. & Wachter, J. M. Nature Plants 2, 15221 (2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Soil and Environment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, PO Box 7014, Uppsala, 75007, Sweden

    Lars Bergström & Holger Kirchmann

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  1. Lars Bergström
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  2. Holger Kirchmann
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Correspondence to Lars Bergström.

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Bergström, L., Kirchmann, H. Are the claimed benefits of organic agriculture justified?. Nature Plants 2, 16099 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.99

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