Organic Farming

Here is an overview of some studies about good things related to organic farming.

I've a minor gripe related to lumping genetic engineering in with the rest of "conventional agriculture" as genetic engineering is borderline necessary if people want to reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, and it is mostly just selective breeding on a massively accelerated scale.

Aside from that, however, a lot of neat tidbits are bundled up in this little article along with one claim that really stands out:

There’s another benefit to switching to agro-ecology, but the benefit is more systemic: under pretty conservative assumptions, switching from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture in developing countries boosts productivity massively.

I can understand that the switch in certain places (i.e. those not well suited to corn belt developed conventional agriculture) could yield improved productivity. Overall, this statement is wildly misleading: if conventional agriculture was not far more productive in general it wouldn't be used (it is quite expensive), but there is no reference in to which "developing countries" and more importantly what is meant by the word "massively"--if this massive improvement only applies to farmland that currently yields 1% of global food production upping it to 2-5% (or really even 10%) that is a massive improvement that could have a huge local impact, but is really not meaningful on a global level.

The problem is that the bulk of the world's food production is guaranteed by conventional agriculture as practiced in the US, China, Canada, Russia, France...maybe Brazil and India fall in here, though conventional methods may not be as big a help there, and I know that India is in trouble precisely because they have been employing US style ag.

I wish I could dig up the link now, as it is from a rather knowledgeable farmer and discusses some of the downside of many/most farms going organic, because the biggest problem with everyone going organic is that it would result in the starvation of tens of millions to billions more than we experience now.

Organic farming is good, but organic farming is exactly what we had 100+ yrs ago in the world. It does not produce as much food, and it requires more labor to produce less (even with modern equipment). For our world to go back to organic farming today we would either need major changes in diet (e.g. way less meat for everyone, particularly Americans), or we will have to accept a global population drop due to much more starvation.

Of course, a callous person might go on to say that a global population reduction would be pretty good for the planet--as we need it--as well.