Where is organic farming applied?

Organic farming vs. Conventinal farming?

• Okay so I am writing a Bioethics paper for Organic farming. This is what I have to include: - Arguments for and against organic farming - Who is affected by the possible outcomes ...show more

• Answer:

  The environmental impact of a product is too complex to cover comprehensively in a few hundred words, so I began with one aspect of it, land use, and looked at how recently released data shows that conventional farming produces more food on less land than organic farming. Several organically inclined readers of this column were disappointed with that finding, and a few dismissed it as insignificant in the larger picture of environmental impact. Before moving to other aspects of the ecological analysis, I want to briefly discuss the dangers of that viewpoint. The things we produce are neither wholly good nor wholly bad for the environment. Most of the choices we make involve balancing different kinds of environmental harms. Consider the quandary of paper bags vs. plastic bags. The former require large amounts of water and tree farms on land that could be put to other uses, while the latter involve the extraction of petroleum and take ages to biodegrade. Choosing between the two can seem like a kind of environmental Sophie’s choice. The same goes for food. As world population grows and the need for calories grows along with it, the environmental benefits of organic farming won’t matter if we have to sacrifice precious acres of biodiversity hot zones and old-growth forest to organic farms. Let’s move on to energy use. Although the data are incomplete, most studies suggest that organic farming uses significantly less energy than conventional. The Rodale Institute, which promotes organic farming, has been investigating this question for more than 30 years. It grows organic and conventional corn, wheat and soy side by side on test plots and measures the energy inputs for each. According to the nonprofit organization’s numbers, farming one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of organic corn requires 10,150 megajoules of energy. (That’s the approximate amount of energy in 78 gallons of gasoline.) By contrast, one hectare of conventionally grown corn requires 17,372 megajoules, 71 percent more than the organic crop. What accounts for this enormous difference? It’s not the pesticides and herbicides that some consumers are most concerned about. Rather, it’s nitrogen-based fertilizer, which represents 41 percent of the energy used in the conventional technique. “Corn is a heavy feeder, and conventional farmers have to pound their plots with nitrogen,” says Mark Smallwood, executive director of the Rodale Institute. “The manufacture and transport of synthetic nitrogen requires a tremendous amount of oil.”