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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

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I am not OP but this is a nice meta-study

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.0008...

Looking at yields only (which is a small part of the study; sustainability depends on many other factors) it looks like log response ratio for organic vs conventional is -0.4 (but depends on crop type, etc, see figs 5,6). This response ratio means organic yields were typically ~2/3rds of conventional across US, EU for most produce types.

I think a real path forward is reduction of pesticide/herbicide usage through highly targeted techniques, as well as greater embrace of biodiversity in the field (even at some cost to yield). However it is also not reasonable to switch to all organic right now, since we would then produce only 2/3rds the food we have now.

I think where move from conventional is most critical is for animal products. “Conventional” in the US comes with lots of cruelty. Even if we net eat less meat supporting meat sources that treat animals better is important, and will not likely cause net decrease in calories produced.

I recommend the studies from the Royale Institute.

They looked at yields on a longer term and discovered, that after a transition phase of around 5 years the numbers were comparable, but with organic agriculture realizing better yields in times of draught.

Additionally they looked at caloric yields per acre. I just grabbed an explanatory blog post from said institute:

https://rodaleinstitute.org/blog/can-organic-feed-the-world/

Rodale compares their own experimental farm, not organic yields on real commercial organic farms (many of which are run for more than 5 years). Their conventional yield is also on their farm, not real conventional farms.

Edit: Looking a bit further rodale has rest years that they don’t count for their organic fields. 25% of the years they literally don’t grow anything on a given plot, but they only compare the growth years.

It is a scientific institute. So it isn't an organic farm either. So I am not sure if this argument applies in any direction.

It I am totally aware of studies like Verena Seufert et al. showing reduced yields between 5 to 39% depending on the context and used methodologies.

Edit: Regarding rest years. At least were I live both, organic or non organic farmers do that. Not sure how it is in other parts of the world.

Considering much food is thrown out and wasted, perhaps lower yields would make us find better ways to reduce waste.

The problem is that we currently have starvation due to poor distribution of food. Rich people can afford higher prices and will continue to waste (in fact, lots of rich people already eat organic), while the poor will feel the squeeze.

Ignoring that it's not always a good idea to distill a complicated system to a single factor like distribution or scarcity, I believe the calorie numbers frequently stated often do not discount for the fact that roughly a third of crop yield is fed to livestock, nor are typically the variety used for human consumption.

I read years ago that the starvation wasn’t necessarily distribution, but rather corruption that prevented the distribution. Is that incorrect?

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