Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture

By Adrian Muller, C. Schader, Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, J. Brüggemann, A. Isensee, K. Erb, Pete Smith, P. Klocke, F. Leiber, M. Stolze and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2017

653 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Organic agriculture is proposed as a promising approach to achieving sustainable food systems, but its feasibility is also contested. We use a food systems model that addresses agronomic characteristics of organic agriculture to analyze the role that organic agriculture could play in sustainable food systems. Here we show that a 100% conversion to organic agriculture needs more land than conventional agriculture but reduces N-surplus and pesticide use. However, in combination with reductions of food wastage and food-competing feed from arable land, with correspondingly reduced production and consumption of animal products, land use under organic agriculture remains below the reference scenario. Other indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions also improve, but adequate nitrogen supply is challenging. Besides focusing on production, sustainable food systems need to address waste, crop–grass–livestock interdependencies and human consumption. None of the corresponding strategies needs full implementation and their combined partial implementation delivers a more sustainable food future. Organic agriculture requires fewer inputs but produces lower yields than conventional farming. Here, via a modeling approach, Muller et al. predict that if food waste and meat consumption are reduced, organic agriculture could feed the world without requiring cropland expansion.

Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6eb5f1959ca77396004e4d86be09b1d2417e04ac

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. E. Schimmenti
2. V. Borsellino
3. M. Qaim
4. A. Tal
5. H. El Bilali

In Food Science

1. M. Qaim
2. A. Tal
3. H. El Bilali
4. E. Schimmenti
5. V. Borsellino

In Plant Science

1. Eva‐Marie Meemken
2. E. Schimmenti
3. V. Borsellino
4. M. Qaim
5. A. Tal
6. H. El Bilali
7. Glenn Stone
8. Arjunan Subramanian

Citations in the corpus

• Using Digestate and Biochar as Fertilizers to Improve Processing Tomato Production Sustainability (2020, background): “Processing tomato sustainability may be increased by adopting the OFS [43] and recently consumers are increasing the purchase of organic farming products [44].”
• Agri-Food Markets towards Sustainable Patterns (2020, background): “There is ample scientific evidence on the positive effects per unit area of organic farming practices compared to conventional agriculture, not only in terms of reducing pollution and environmental degradation, and of safeguarding biodiversity and soil conservation [345–349], but also in terms of lo”
• Biological control and integrated pest management in organic and conventional systems (2020, background): “However, more research, innovation, and technology transfer are needed to further close the gap (Muller et al., 2017; Niggli et al., 2017).”
• Making Conventional Agriculture Environmentally Friendly: Moving beyond the Glorification of Organic Agriculture and the Demonization of Conventional Agriculture (2018, background): “The most recent estimates suggest that, given present consumption patterns, the transition to a fully organic system would require 30% more land usage than conventional agriculture [37].”
• Organic Agriculture, Food Security, and the Environment (2018, background): “Indeed, in recent simulations, Erb et al. (2016) and Muller et al. (2017) showed that the predicted world population in 2050 could be fed even with lower yields and without the loss of additional natural habitat if only vegan diets were consumed.”