What are the advantages and disadvantages of organic farming?

advantages. 1. You can rip off hippies by overcharging for organic. disadvantages. 1. Unsustainable farming. 2. lower yields 3. by using ineffective organic chemicals, you have to treat plants many times, sometimes making it actually worse. 4. destroys soil long term 5. it's a con

You don't say advantage or disadvantages to whom? One person's advantag is often another's disadvantage. Advantages: 1. Has a generally positive public image. 2. Can sometimes be such that there is less purchased inputs. Usually this relies on getting waste from someone else. And not counting labor and such as a purchased input. 3. Often offers a price advantage at farm level per unit of production. 4. Tends to keep prices high, since cost of production is higher and low prices rapidly drops production. 5. Still seems to have some tendency towards local production though the larger trend is towards transporting organic production even farther than conventional. Disadvantages. 1. Foundational beliefs are not based on truth but on New Age mysticism beliefs about life forces and the ability of man to destroy it. 2. Antiestablishment streak results in not using things even when they are in every way organic. For instance many antibiotics are organic, a substance produced by a living organism that has effects on another no different really than pyrethrin from chrysanthemums which kills insects and is permitted. People who started it were relying on philosophy and not science in many ways so even their divisions of things into organic and not permitted are not consistent with anything. 3. You are going to have to compete with cheap labor from India and China and apparent fraud in certification being common, just hard to prove. There is no audit on production quantities, only on practices. 4. Large organic farms are in a much better position to have the expertise, the labor and the capital to suceed compared to small farms. So we see an accelerating move to large mega farms taking over organic production very rapidly. Especially since they in particular appeal to large retailers. 5. It can be a specialty product to appeal to a high priced market but it is incapable of producing sufficient food for the world population. It's a calorie thing. You can do well with many fruits and vegetables, but field crops you just can't get the total nutrients necessary to keep production where it currently is, much less increase it. You have to go back to producing inputs like nitrogen on a large number of acres, much like when farms produced the fuel for production as hay for horses, it took a lot of the land for producing feed for horses. So organic results effectively in reducing the acreage producing crops for food. Even if it would equal production per acre, the acres are reduced. And you do hear that it can equal the production but what that usually is is comparing the very best organic production in centers with all sorts of experts working with typical yield for an area. They don't compare with the best nonorganic yields. Marv