Organic farming stands the test of time

August 5, 2005 - It might seem like a hip new trend, but various forms of organic agriculture have been around for some 6,000 years. Although it practically disappeared in North America during the latter half of the 20th century, organic farming has taken off recently as consumers and farmers have both discovered the benefits of a more holistic approach to agriculture.

Organic farming is rooted in ancient knowledge passed down through generations. Long before science could tell us why certain farming methods would produce greater crop yields, organic farmers were learning the hard way what worked and what didn't - and sharing their knowledge with others.

With the advent of industrial farming and the green revolution, organic farming was relegated to the status of "quaint" or "old-fashioned" - something practiced by hippies on communes, certainly not by serious farmers. But while the green revolution initially produced higher crop yields, it also created new problems, from fertilizer and pesticide run-off, to soil erosion and reduced soil fertility. Today, new studies are showing that organic agriculture can often match and sometimes exceed yields from conventional agriculture, while eliminating the need for pesticides and conserving soil quality.

The Rodale Farming Systems Trial is the longest-running comparison of organic and conventional farming in the United States. For 22 years, researchers have been planting crops at the Rodale farm in Pennsylvania using conventional agriculture, as well as two organic farming systems - one based on animal manure for fertilizer and the other based on nitrogen-fixing legumes.

Recently, a review of the trial was published in the journal Biosience. Researchers measured the economic feasibility of each farming system, along with their environmental impacts, energy consumption and other indicators. They found that for some crops, like corn and soybeans, organic farming systems produced the same yields as conventional systems, but used 30 per cent less energy, less water and no pesticides.

In fact, during drought years, corn yields in the organic systems were 30 per cent higher than those in the conventional system. Researchers say that the organic systems were able to perform better in drought conditions because of their soils contained much larger amounts of carbon and organic matter. Increased organic matter also led to an increase the diversity of creatures in the organic plots, including twice the number of earthworms. In turn, increased diversity helped reduce damage from insect pests, by introducing more natural predators.

One might expect the organic systems to have many beneficial environmental effects, but the researchers also found that the organic systems could be as profitable or more profitable than conventional systems. Although the organic systems required more labour (to remove weeds, for example, rather than spray them with a herbicide), consumers were willing to pay a premium for organics, so the profit margins were often better.

The researchers argue that organic technologies such as: using off-season crops, using more extended crop rotations, increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil, and improving natural biodiversity should be more widely adopted. They conclude: "Some or all of these technologies have the potential to increase the ecological, energetic, and economic sustainability of all agricultural cropping systems, not only organic systems."

In other words, many organic practices simply make sense, regardless of what overall agricultural system is used. Far from being a quaint throwback to an earlier time, organic agriculture is proving to be a serious contender in modern farming and a more environmentally sustainable system over the long term. With consumers expressing a preference for organics and farmers are seeing the benefits, this is one trend that's likely to stay.