Comment by hnmullany | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnmullany | Hacker News Reader

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Organic grown food is more nutritious and I'm glad we have a significant percentage of farms who have gone organic, but the yield gap is very well documented. Organic fertilizers release nutrients slowly and unpredictably and can't match artificial nitrogen for plant uptake.

E.g. a 25% average yield penalty in this meta-analysis:

Alvarez, R. (2022) ‘Comparing Productivity of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems: A Quantitative Review’, Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science, 68(14), pp. 1947–1958. doi: 10.1080/03650340.2021.1946040.

I studied the productivity benefits of adding beneficial fungi as part of my master's thesis. On average they provide a yield benefit, but it's not ubiquitous and they're far more likely to work in arid and semi-arid soils that have poor microbial diversity in their baseline. They don't tend to be as effective in temperate soils - partly because they have to compete with existing soil microbes.

> Organic grown food is more nutritious

This isn't categorically true if you're comparing the same variety of crop. Vaclav Smil does great work compiling data on this in his book "How to Feed the World". The overall environmental picture is also more complicated[1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for...

One big problem here is that 'organic' as-in certified organic, means something very different from Real Organic (as coined by the Rodale Institute). And among people who try to grow more organically (as in with nature, not the certified mess big-ag created to steal the term) there is a wide variety of ways people do it in a wide variety of places that have a wide variety of history.

That doesn’t mean the food is more nutritious.

I don't see any on data on nutrition in that reference.

Organic grown food tends to be higher in anti-oxidants and secondary metabolites, possibly because the plant immune system is activated more frequently due to better microbial biodiversity. From what I remember at least - it doesn't maintain any advantage in macronutrient density (carbs/nitrogen etc.)

In Smil’s book? There’s tons of foot notes.

There’s just not compelling evidence for your claim comparing the same varieties, the research exists.

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