Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?

[Ought Six]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...climate-change

[veggiecanner]

I would be curious to know how many years of organics were used before the comparison was done.

[Kassy]

Do you mean in the number of years the plots were used to harvest broccoli or wheat?

And would that make much difference?

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Aside if you want to feed the world the first thing to do is kill the subsidies for biofuel and laws requiring it's use. We'll get back to that once it works (and that'll probably be from adapted bacteria or something like that, much more practical then breaking down plants).

[Kassy]

Most of the organic farms in the study were young, under four years old so still in a phase were the soil is being built up.

Still curious how long this process would take before there is an optimum organic production.

[Ought Six]

Full organic production cannot really match high intensity agriculture. But high intensity agriculture is probably not sustainable in the long term. It uses too much chemical stuff that is growing more expensive and hard to find by the day, and it generates a lot of pollution. I think new methods like integrated pest management and no-till plowing, combined with many of the techniques used by organic farmers will create a new agricultural paradigm that can yield adequate levels of production and also be sustainable. Farther down the road, we will likely be eating a lot of vat-grown foods like processed algae and cloned meat.