Organic food worse for the climate?

[NickB79]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181213101308.htm

Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required. This is the finding of a new international study involving Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in the journal Nature.

The researchers developed a new method for assessing the climate impact from land-use, and used this, along with other methods, to compare organic and conventional food production. The results show that organic food can result in much greater emissions.

"Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas. For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference -- for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent," says Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor from Chalmers, and one of those responsible for the study.

The reason why organic food is so much worse for the climate is that the yields per hectare are much lower, primarily because fertilisers are not used. To produce the same amount of organic food, you therefore need a much bigger area of land./div]

[violetpastille]

1. The biggest crop in the US

is lawn.

We pulled ours up and are turning it into garden.

If everyone does --we can feed the entire nation plus more.

On topic though, if winter wheat isn't happy in Sweden, don't grow it. Try something else...oats?

If the waterways, wetlands and forests aren't being poisoned by fertilizers and pesticides they can sequester the carbon.

[Kali]

2. a big problem for organic is tilling

tilling the soil destroys it more than some conventional ag chemicals.

[BigmanPigman]

3. Farmed animals produce high levels of methane which contributes greatly

to Climate Change. We can't eat meat and dairy, can't eat organic, etc. I guess the only option is too eat meats and plants grown in labs. Yummy! Has anyone done a study on how much lab produced foods contribute to Climate Change before we sink all of our money and energy into those future enterprises?

[Finishline42]

4. Is there any bigger BS metric than how much more land it takes to grow organic?

How do they account for:
- how much land it takes to make fertilizers and pesticides?
- how much energy it takes to make fertilizers and pesticides?
- how much energy it takes to transport fertilizers and pesticides?
- the environmental impact on the soil by the use of fertilizers and pesticides?
- the environmental impact of the runoff of fertilizers and pesticides?

I would have thought that growing a crop would be a positive carbon capture activity? So more land growing more crops is a bad thing?

[NickB79]

5. Crops are rarely a carbon capture system

Annual crops that require yearly soil tilling and put down shallow roots (which are basically 90% of our food) are a carbon source, not a sink, as soil carbon built up over thousands of years is exposed to the air and oxidized away. A field of corn and soy is completely different from an untouched prairie in terms of carbon sequestration.

A permaculture system using deep-rooted perennials could certainly be a carbon capture system, but they are very rare in modern agriculture.

And because of this, the area of land needed to grow food for a given population is a very important metric, because land is finite and any new farmland brought into production requires land currently in forest and grassland (and actively sequestering carbon) to be cleared and plowed.

And beyond that, farm fields are a biological desert, even when they are organic. Clearing new land for organic farms will have a massive impact of wildlife, even if no synthetic herbicides and pesticides are applied to them. An oak forest isn't comparable to an organic field of corn.