Study Shows Organic Agriculture Mitigates Climate Crisis in Contrast to Conventional Agriculture

The study refers to various studies focused on a comparative analysis of conventional to organic farming on energy use, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe), nutrient leaching, soil quality, and biodiversity. The consensus is that organic farming is more sustainable than conventional agriculture. For example, “[S]everal studies comparing conventional to organic agriculture found that the latter used 10%–70% less energy per unit of land for all analyzed crops.” However, measurements on a meta-analysis of soil quality and biodiversity show “significant variability across studies with 16% of them showing a negative effect of organic farming on species richness.” Drawing on this past research, the authors of this study accomplish what the previous research could not: “provide categorical supporting evidence… for the general expectation that organic farming is more environmentally sustainable than conventional farming.”

These researchers used U.S. state-level data from 1997 to 2010, excluding the years 1998, 1999, and 2009 due to bad data. Additionally, researchers drew GHGe data from the World Resources Institute, economic data (e.g. “real per capita GDP (in chained 2009 dollars), output share for utilities, manufacturing, oil and natural gas, and transportation” as a percentage of state GDP) from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce. Additional data was gathered from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

To determine a statistical relationship between GHGe and organic farming in the U.S., the researchers use a model based on the STIRPAT (Stochastic Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology) approach. Researchers summarize the benefits of this analytical method, “Given the importance of transportation to farming, this would help examine whether the potential environmental benefits of organic food production, if any, are substantial enough to outweigh the environmental harm of transportation output embodied in organic farming.” See Subsection 3.2 under Methods for a full breakdown of the empirical specifications of their methodology.

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