As any old-school farmer and author Robert A. Heinlein could have told them; TANSTAAFL
MIT Technology Review...
Nature Communications Paper...
Also,
New Scientist...
MIT Technology Review...
Nature Communications Paper...
Sorry-organic farming is actually worse for climate change
The practice cuts greenhouse-gas emissions only if you ignore the inconvenient fact that it requires a lot more land.
Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming which would be fantastic if they didnt also require more land to produce the same amount of food.
Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.
Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional land required is taken into account. In the new paper, researchers at the UKs Cranfield University took a broad look at the question by analyzing what would happen if all of England and Wales shifted entirely to these practices.
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The practice cuts greenhouse-gas emissions only if you ignore the inconvenient fact that it requires a lot more land.
Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming which would be fantastic if they didnt also require more land to produce the same amount of food.
Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.
Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional land required is taken into account. In the new paper, researchers at the UKs Cranfield University took a broad look at the question by analyzing what would happen if all of England and Wales shifted entirely to these practices.
>
New Scientist...
"The key message from my perspective is that you can't really have your cake and eat it," says Laurence Smith, now at the Royal Agricultural University in the UK, who was part of the team that performed the analysis. Smith is a proponent of organic farming and says "there are a lot of benefits to the organic approach". But his analysis shows organic farming has downsides too.
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