Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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methods. Today we see how far organic farming has come - and realize the
challenges it still faces.
C
OMPARING ORGANIC AND CONVENTIONAL FARMS
What methods should be used to compare organic farms to their con-
ventional counterparts? This is a complicated question. The long-term
management actions of experienced organic farmers who are intimately
familiar with their own land would certainly provide different results than
an agricultural plot on a university research station in which researchers
simply remove the chemicals and attempt to begin organic production on
one field. While agricultural research is most often conducted under these
controlled conditions, organic methods show different results when studied
holistically - as a whole operating farm, rather than just one field under a
specific one- or two-year study. Then the issue of equitable comparison
arises: can two neighboring farms be identified that provide examples of
organic and conventional methods on similar soils, with similar crop types?
Organic farms tend to produce a larger number of distinct types of crops
that are not typical of conventional farms. Still there is comparative research
that addresses such concerns.
One comprehensive survey of organic agricultural productivity was espe-
cially thought provoking because it described the various types of compar-
isons that are possible (Stanhill 1990). Specifically, organic farming demands
a holistic research approach to reveal the inherent symbiotic relationships
that occur, and it is difficult for the reductionist methods of scientific in-
quiry to capture this complexity. Thus the author reviewed many types of
historical studies (some dating back to the 1940s) to draw conclusions about
organic productivity. This included an overview of 205 yield comparisons
for twenty-six crops and for milk and eggs from data gathered at fifteen
sites in North America and Europe. Data from comparative observations
of operating commercial farms, long-term replicated field plots studies,
and whole-system experiments were included. First, in thirty comparable
observations of active organic and conventional farms, organic crop yields
exceeded conventional in thirteen, were equal in two, and were less in fif-
teen. Second, in 104 crop seasons of controlled field experiments, organic
plot yields were lower than conventional 75 percent of the time (but only
half of these were statistically significant.). Attempts to study whole systems
over the long term run into the problem of consistency. Even in one lo-
cation, for example, results were mixed because the management methods
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