Jeff Tkach, Chief Impact Officer of the Rodale Institute, says yes
The global food system underwent a radical shift after the Second World War: synthetic chemical inputs became the new normal in agriculture. That change may eventually lead to catastrophe. We need to transition the world’s farms to regenerative organic agricultural models, which maintain and improve soil health, increase the nutrient quality of foods, produce larger crop yields during extreme weather events and have the potential to reverse climate change through carbon sequestration. Future generations can then secure access to abundant food sources on the land they inherit from us.
Research shows that 30 per cent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive in the past 40 years due to soil degradation, mostly caused by unsustainable conventional farming practices. Estimates are that by 2050, soil erosion may reduce crop yields by up to 10 per cent, the equivalent of removing millions of acres of land from production. This reduction in the world’s agricultural land could coincide with dramatic growth in global population. The UN estimates that by 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.7 billion.
Obviously we can’t afford to lose farmable land as billions of people who need nourishment are added to the global roster.
Research also shows that regenerative organic farming is the path forward. Rodale Institute, the US-based research institution I help lead, has for 75 years conducted groundbreaking research on agricultural practices. Our Farming Systems Trial, the longest-running side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional grain growing in North America, measures the differences in soil health, crop yields, energy efficiency, water use and contamination and nutrient density of crops. The trial’s decades-long research reveals that organic systems produce comparable yields to conventional ones after a five-year transition period, are more resistant to floods, use 45 per cent less non-renewable energy and release 40 per cent fewer carbon emissions.
Critically, our research finds that organic systems during droughts produce yields up to 40 per cent larger than conventional ones. Transitioning Canadian farms to regenerative organic practices could help protect farmers from the kind of hardship they faced in 2021’s drought, which shrank Canada’s field crop production by more than 30 per cent. That was just one of many recent extreme weather events across the globe that reveal the agricultural status quo to be unsustainable.
Conventional farming practices degrade soil quality. By contrast, regenerative organic farming builds healthy soil through enhanced soil organic carbon, which allows soil to absorb more rain and retain moisture during droughts. Research has consistently proven that regenerative organic farming is a resilient and reliable model for food production, largely because it works with the earth and natural cycles. It’s about time we stop fighting nature.
Darrin Qualman, Director of Climate Crisis Policy and Action at the National Farmers’ Union, says no
Can organic agriculture feed our world? No. Organic agriculture cannot produce the tonnage of grains, oilseeds, vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy and other products we are currently producing. Leaving aside pesticide use, nitrogen flows would be inadequate. Leading experts in global nitrogen flows (including Jan Erisman and Vaclav Smil) calculate that pre-industrial/natural flows of nitrogen would be enough to produce only about half of current agricultural tonnage. Though rarely noted, humans, largely via fossil-fuelled Haber–Bosch nitrogen fertilizer factories, have tripled the tonnage of nitrogen flowing across Earth’s land surface and through its plants. Via nitrogen fertilizer, we have supercharged and supersized our food systems.
Moreover, the necessary nitrogen fertilizer inflows are, at least partly, necessitated by nitrogen outflows. We push nitrogen in—to our fields, crops, food supplies and dining tables—but also through. That expanded food tonnage and the nitrogen it carries mostly flows through us and continues on via our toilets and sewer systems and, in far too many cases, is carried by our rivers to deep ocean burial or is released to the atmosphere in reactive forms, where it wreaks havoc: destroying ozone, driving warming, creating smog or acidifying rain. We may wish for organic agriculture’s production-without-fertilizers, but that ignores our very real megatonne outflows.
So, organic agriculture cannot match current production tonnage. But it’s worth looking at what we’re doing with that tonnage. Currently we turn huge portions of our fertilizer-expanded food supply into biofuels for cars and trucks to power billions of kilometres of often unnecessary commuting. We plan to expand that biofuel production for cars and jets and perhaps even cruise ships. In addition to the hundreds of millions of tonnes of food we burn, we waste many millions more—about 40 per cent of our food in Canada and 30 per cent worldwide. We turn still millions more tonnes into colas, pop tarts, sugary cereals and other over-processed and nutritionally disfigured foods that drive obesity and ill health. We push most of our crop tonnage into livestock systems that inefficiently turn 5–10 calories in grain into one calorie in meat. (Grazing systems can be very positive and sustainable, but grain feeding is unavoidably inefficient.) We devote tens of millions of acres to growing cotton for fast fashion. Some propose that we use foodland to grow biomaterials to replace petroleum plastics. And soon we may begin planting biofuel crops for use in electricity generation. Our demands upon the land seem unlimited. In no way can organic production systems—without fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers and petrochemicals—produce this massive output tonnage.
What if we made better choices, proliferated improved diets, respected limits and incorporated intelligent restraint? Perhaps organic agriculture could feed that world. But it can’t feed ours.
Jeff Tkach responds to Darrin Qualman
Darrin Qualman said it all in his conclusion: organic agriculture can feed a world that makes better choices.
Industries that exploit and degrade the environment, like those that use tens of millions of acres of cotton for cheap, trendy clothing production, are clearly unsustainable. Some fast-fashion brands have already picked up on this. As a global community, we must recognize that we cannot continue to devote vital natural resources to what are essentially enterprises of waste. The earth won’t tolerate it for much longer.
Need an example? Agricultural pollution from conventional farming methods is a large contributor to the approximately 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the dead zone’s hypoxic waters kill fish, crabs and other marine life. And the department draws a direct link between the dead zone and nitrogen fertilizer and recommends a reduction in the latter’s use. In 2002 the agency even wrote: “Because two-thirds of the nitrogen in the Mississippi River comes from use of fertilizer and manure on agricultural lands, reducing agricultural nitrogen is a major component of the strategy for controlling the hypoxic zone.”
Is a marginal increase in corn yields on large conventional farms in the American Midwest worth the literal downstream effects—thousands of square miles of ocean that can’t support life? I don’t think so.
40 years of research shows organic is a resilient, reliable model that produces comparable yields.
The USDA isn’t the only American agency with concerning statistics on modern farming. The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates that agriculture currently accounts for 11 per cent of total US greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, Canada’s government estimates that between 1990 and 2020 greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian agriculture grew by 33 per cent. The US and Canada could make a significant dent in emissions figures if both countries transitioned more farms to organic, which method releases 40 per cent fewer GHG emissions. And both countries should begin transitioning farms now. With our global climate increasingly at risk, we can’t afford to continue with farming methods that so clearly imperil the environment.
We also can’t afford to continue to embrace the myth that organic food can’t feed the world. Studies claiming that organic yields are unequivocally less than conventional are generally short-term, meaning they collect data over just a couple of years. There is a serious dearth of long-term research on the differences between organic and conventional yields. Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial is one of those rare long-term research projects comparing organic and conventional agriculture in a real-world context. And after 40 years of diligent, continuous research, the science shows organic is a resilient, reliable and environmentally friendly farming model that not only produces comparable yields to conventional but outperforms it during extreme weather events.
But it’s not just farmers who need to change their behaviours. Consumers do too. As Qualman outlined, the world wastes too much food. The majority of waste occurs in developed countries, where every year we waste almost as much as sub-Saharan Africa’s entire net production. While improvements in infrastructure and supply chains are necessary, individuals can still do plenty to chart a better course. For example, consumers can buy more “ugly” produce to avoid contributing to the large quantity of retail produce that’s thrown away every day simply because of aesthetic irregularities. People can also shift their consumption to support regionalized food systems by shopping at farmers markets and co-ops, which would cut down on transportation costs and creates more-resilient supply chains. And these are just a couple of consumer habits that must change.
But while the developed world learns to curb its waste, the developing world can tap into its potential to contribute to global food security. With simple tools such as viable seeds and better crop varieties, farmers in developing nations can dramatically increase their productivity. If you pair those tools with basic infrastructure and weather information to better time planting and harvests, these small farmers in emergent nations could potentially triple their yields.
I’ll leave you with this: extreme weather events and a changing climate require us to reckon with how we feed the world. We need to take this opportunity to stand up, say enough is enough, and embrace positive change. We have no other choice.
Darrin Qualman responds to Jeff Tkach
My interlocutor says confidently that organic systems produce yields comparable to those of fertilizer- and chemical-augmented “conventional” agriculture. Having spent time on tractors and combines on organic farms and having done policy development with organic and non-organic farmers alike for a quarter-century, I’m not sure I share that certainty. The organic farmers that I know would be very interested to learn how they can match the output of their non-organic neighbours.
But in order to make a larger point, I will grant this idea that organic fields can match the output tonnage of non-organic.
My colleague, however, still has a problem with his argument: the demands we are placing on Earth’s lands are far too high, so it matters little if these demands are met using fertilizers and pesticides or met via systems that forgo those petrochemicals. We have production problems, yes, and these are well articulated by my colleague (e.g., soil erosion, water pollution etc.). But more than this, we have a demand problem, and it cannot be solved by changing our production methods.
No agriculture method—even organic or regenerative—can feed the world that lies ahead.
As my colleague notes, we are on track to add two billion people to the human cohort this century. Perhaps worse, we are on track to add double that number to the global middle class. And those newly admitted middle-class consumers—spurred on by giant meat and dairy corporations—will want to eat diets like mine: heavy in meat and dairy products. And, if produced by grain feeding, as is almost certain, all those animal products will be produced at 80–90 per cent losses. In other words, grain-feeding systems turn 5–10 grain calories into one meat or dairy calorie. Amid the fastest extinction crisis in 65 million years, it is hard to fathom how we can upsize our already supersized food system.
Worse, as I note in my opening argument, we are, in parallel to this increase in food demand, adding many other demands to our land base, asking it to produce biomaterials to replace plastic, feedstock for liquid and solid biofuels, and fibre for fast fashion and the consumer-indulgence economy. It is a huge error to assert that organic agriculture can meet these already massive and relentlessly growing demands. Granted, though, it is also folly to assert that non-organic agriculture can do so. Neither organic nor non-organic production methods can meet this insatiable demand.
My interlocutor paints a positive picture of regenerated soils, cleaner water, more nutritious crops and conveniently sequestered carbon. What he fails to include in his assessment is the reality that attempts to meet the vast and rapidly rising demand will make all those outcomes impossible. Taking this much from the land is incompatible with the care and stewardship needed to rebuild it.
Limits are a form of wisdom. Restraint is a form of stewardship. And reducing what we demand from the land is the only way we can make our production “sustainable.” Farmers have spent more than a century on an input-use and output treadmill—chasing ever higher yields and output while global food, fuel and fibre systems demanded ever-higher production. That must now end.
In a quest to increase production, Canadian farmers have, just since 2006, nearly doubled nitrogen fertilizer use. Fertilizer use cannot be doubled again. Canadian chicken production has doubled since 1993; it cannot be doubled again. Similarly, pork and beef production cannot again be doubled. Though hard to imagine, farmers need to cease chasing ever-higher yields and output. Farmers need to be supported in a move to find stability and security—to even thrive—in a world that doesn’t lash them each year to produce more than the year before.
Above, I grant that organic agriculture can match the yields of conventional. Here, I’ll grant for the sake of debate that organic agriculture can feed this world. But even as I do so, I would underscore the idea that no agriculture can feed the world that lies 20 or 50 years along the trendlines we are now seeing—along lines that race exponentially upward, doubling and redoubling, demanding more and more from a land base and water supply already damaged, depleted and inadequate. We must employ the best and most sustainable production methods, yes, but we must also reduce and limit our consumption.
Limits are a form of wisdom. Without limits, without intelligent restraint, our future world cannot be fed. A transition to organic or regenerative production methods does not change this fact.
