Abstract
Organic agriculture is widely accepted as a strategy to reduce the environmental impacts of food production and help achieve global climate and biodiversity targets. However, studies concluding that organic farming could satisfy global food demand have overlooked the key role that nitrogen plays in sustaining crop yields. Using a spatially explicit biophysical optimization model that accounts for crop growth nitrogen requirements, we show that, in the absence of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, the production gap between organic and conventional agriculture increases as organic agriculture expands globally (with organic producing 36% less food for human consumption than conventional in a fully organic world). Yet, by targeting both food supply (via a redesign of the livestock sector) and demand (by reducing average per capita caloric intake), public policies could support a transition towards organic agriculture in 40–60% of the global agricultural area even under current nitrogen limitations thus helping to achieve important environmental and health benefits.
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Data availability
Data and material requests should be addressed to corresponding author.
Code availability
The full model code and documentation are freely available via the following GitHub repository: http://github.com/Pie90/GOANIM_public/.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to M. Kvakic and B. Ringeval for their suggestions and help in the model construction. This work was funded by Bordeaux Sciences Agro (University of Bordeaux) and the INRA-CIRAD GloFoodS metaprogramme.
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P.B., S.P. and T.N. designed the study; P.B. collected the data, coded the model and performed the calculations; P.B., V.S., T.N., L.S. and N.R. were involved in the model set-up and improvement. All authors were involved in the interpretation of results and contributed to writing and revising the manuscript.
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Barbieri, P., Pellerin, S., Seufert, V. et al. Global option space for organic agriculture is delimited by nitrogen availability. Nat Food 2, 363–372 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00276-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00276-y
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