Actually, there are a lot of downsides to Organic Farming. Back 20 years ago when Jen and I were planning our apple cider business (long story), the organic certification allowed for the use of rotenone as an insecticide because it was plant based. Rotenone is a horribly toxic broad spectrum poison which will kill fish if allowed to run off into the streams.
To control coddling moth, the use of rotenone would have also killed off the polinator bees, beneficial orchard floor beetles and earthworms. A simple application of carbaryl or malathion would have targeted the moths and left everything else alone.
Anyway, set rant=off. Here is another inconvenient truth about organic farming from New Atlas:
The inconvenient truth about the environmental impact of organic farming
A new international study into the impact of agricultural land use on climate change has found organic food production is worse for the climate than conventional farming, due to the fact that it needs greater areas of land to grow produce.
The new research developed a novel metric for calculating the carbon footprint of specific land use. Called a "carbon benefits index," this calculation measures the agricultural output of a given hectare of land in terms of volume of product and carbon dioxide emissions. Homing in on the differences between organic food production and conventional food production, the study concludes that due to organic farming's inefficient yields, it generally results in a greater environmental impact than conventional farming methods.
"The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation," explains Stefan Wirsenius, a Swedish researcher working on the study. "Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas. For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference – for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent," says Wirsenius.
And, lest you think that New Atlas is some fringe, hand-waving, conspiracy theory website, the base data was published in Nature: Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change
Abstract
Land-use changes are critical for climate policy because native vegetation and soils store abundant carbon and their losses from agricultural expansion, together with emissions from agricultural production, contribute about 20 to 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate strategies require maintaining or increasing land-based carbon while meeting food demands, which are expected to grow by more than 50 per cent by 2050. A finite global land area implies that fulfilling these strategies requires increasing global land-use efficiency of both storing carbon and producing food....
More at the site.
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