Go Organic! July 13, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Environment, Sustainable Living, genetic engineering.trackback
Organic agriculture is a lovely idea, but it’s only for bunny-hugging rich folks with a bad conscience and it certainly won’t feed the world, right!?
In order to keep feeding the planet’s growing population we need industrialised factory farming with high inputs of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides and high-tech genetically engineered crops, right!?
Wrong. In a new study, researchers from the University of Michigan have found that “organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming on the same amount of land”.
According to Ivette Perfecto (great name!), a Professor at the university’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and one of the study’s co-authors:
My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture.
[...]
Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies—all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food.
They found that “in developed countries, yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms. In developing countries, food production could double or triple using organic methods.”
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