Organic farming is not only kinder to the environment than conventional, intensive agriculture - but it has comparable yields of both products and profits. Without loss of production, organic farming can rebuild spent soils, prevent pollution and even combat the greenhouse effect. An extract from a radical 'green' manifesto? No - these are the implications of a sober report in Nature the result of a 15-year study to compare the performance of organic with conventional farming.
In the report, Laurie Drinkwater and colleagues from the Rodale Institute, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, sought to test the contention - a tenet in land management for decades - that the amounts of carbon and nitrogen in the soil are controlled by their net inputs, irrespective of their sources, artificial or organic. This seems odd to ecologists, who have long known that the passage of carbon and nitrogen through an ecosystem is profoundly affected by the numbers and types of species present, the quality of the organic 'litter' available for decomposition, and so on.
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