Photo Credit: tlindenbaum
Today, less than 5% of the world’s agriculture is organic, or produced without the use of synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Dr. Catherine Badgely of the University of Michigan is the author of a well-known 2007 study , which claimed that crop yields from organic agriculture can compete with production from conventional farming practices.
Catherine Badgely: The brief message of our paper was that organics have potential to scale up to feed the entire world’s population today and potentially even larger.
Badgely’s paper has become part of an active debate between advocates of organic and conventional, large-scale farming.
Catherine Badgely: In the past two years, other studies have come out that have essentially reinforced the conclusions that our study came to.
Other studies have disagreed. Badgely, though, pointed to a 2008 UN report that said the spread of organic agriculture could increase food security in Africa. That’s partly because, Badgely said, many poor rural African farmers don’t have access to, or can’t afford, the modern fertilizers used in conventional farming. So, crop yields in parts of African have remained low. Badgely believes that organic farming can help.
Catherine Badgely: They have options for increasing their local productivity, and the well-being of their own local communities.
Badgely’s paper was published in July 2007, and she said the findings have been corroborated in succeeding papers by unrelated researchers.
Catherine Badgely: The potential is especially great in the developing world, where most food is grown by very traditional methods, that are often not taking advantage of the agro-ecological knowledge we use in organic practices.
She said that the function that organics serve in parts of the developing world, like the U.S., is very different from why it is needed in the developing world.
Catherine Badgely: The difference between the developed and developing world is probably more economic than agronomic, in the sense that many people in the developing world are desperate for income and food.
Badgely said agricultural methods alone cannot solve the problem of hunger, or the tricky economic aspects of the food system. But she said social capital is a valuable investment – perhaps even more so than the improved yields and fertilizers of the Green Revolution.
Catherine Badgely: So that’s why I think organic methods will do more for overall sustainability of agricultural systems in the developing world than taking strictly a Green Revolution approach.
I was curious about the article and looked into it a bit and found a rebuttal article published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems (the journal that Badgely published her findings) the same year that Badgely et al. (2007) published their article which is the basis for the interview above.
It appears that there were some flaws in thier experimental design and findings.
Isn’t the process of scientific descovery interesting?
Bracken, I think so too! What I find so interesting about the science of feeding people is that there are so many different aspects and perspectives to consider. Studies with a few variables in their design can produce different results. Badgley’s study was a bit of a lightning rod for people on both sides of the debate over whether organics can feed the world.
Here is an interesting spin… organic farming is less efficient, so…
as a 10th generation farmer in the USA, I had to give it up and make a living elsewhere. Large scale farming caused it, but big farming is more efficient so it has less carbon footprint, and efficient farming means more healthy CO2 eating plants per acre of land? Either way it is a great spin that makes a lot of sense.
as a side note, agriculture weigh scales help make it all more efficient.