Thursday, July 19, 2007

They Called Us Nuts

Take a look at this from Live Science - "Organic farming is often regarded as inefficient. But according to a new study, it could yield up to three times as much food as other methods that have come to be considered conventional."

"If farming were to switch to organic agriculture on the current amount of land that is being used for farming and livestock production, then that system could produce enough calories to feed the world without requiring people to change their dietary habits," said study team member Catherine Badgley, a research scientist at the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan.

Badgley and her colleagues admit that organic farming is labor intensive. But their review of yield data for the past 30 years on different agricultural methods found that in developed nations, yields were almost equal from organic and conventional farms. Developing countries—where farmers may not have access to expensive fertilizers—could almost triple their yield by using organic methods without putting extra farmland into production.

I have tried to be an organic gardener since the seventies and in the early years all of us were considered nuts for thinking that it was serious to consider it viable on a large scale. So there!

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