Wed, 13 Jul 2005

Organic farms produce same yields as conventional farms

I honestly wouldn't have believed this if it wasn't backed by Cornell research. With livestock and vegetable operations I can attest personally to the fact that organic is every bit as productive as standard methods, but grain farms around here get some pretty spectacular yields with "Green Revolution" techniques - lots of herbicide/pesticide use. Going organic is generally dismissed around here by grain farmers as completely impractical for their crops. But this seems to prove otherwise, and is supported by some hefty data, and could help lower the cost of production. All those chemicals get expensive ...

For corn and soybeans, organic farming yields the same size crop with a lot less fossil energy input and impact on the environment than conventional farming, according to a new study whose lead author is David Pimentel of Cornell University. Bioscience (Vol. 55:7, 2005).

(link) [EurekAlert!]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time