Organic agriculture is a relatively untapped resource for feeding the Earth’s population, especially in the face of climate change and other global challenges. That’s the conclusion my doctoral candidate Jonathan Wachter and I reached in reviewing 40 years of science comparing the long-term prospects of organic and conventional farming.

Hundreds of scientific studies now show that organic agriculture can produce sufficient yields, be profitable for farmers, protect and improve the environment, and be safer for farm workers. Thirty years ago, there were just a couple handfuls of studies comparing organic with conventional agriculture. In the last 15 years, the number of these kinds of studies has skyrocketed.

The review study, “Organic Agriculture in the 21st Century,” is featured as the cover story for the February issue of the journal Nature Plants. It is the first to compare organic and conventional agriculture across the four goals of sustainability identified by the National Academy of Sciences: productivity, economics, environment, and social wellbeing.

The yield question

Critics have long argued that organic agriculture is inefficient, requiring more land to yield the same amount of food. It’s true that organic farming produces lower yields, averaging 10 to 20 percent less than conventional. Proponents contend that the environmental advantages of organic agriculture far outweigh the lower yields, and that increasing research and breeding resources for organic systems would reduce the yield gap. Sometimes excluded from these arguments is the fact that we already produce enough food to more than feed the world’s 7.4 billion people but do not provide adequate access to all individuals.