Posted on December, 17, 2018 at 09:57 am
By DAILY MAIL
Organic plants are worse for the environment than conventionally farmed foods, new research from Sweden suggests.
A lack of chemical fertilisers means more land is used to grow crops and as a result 70 per cent more carbon is emitted, the study found.
The authors claim that even organic meat and dairy products are – from a climate point of view – worse than their conventionally produced equivalents.
The study, which was published in Nature, was led by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
'Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas', said lead researcher Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor from Chalmers.
'For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference – for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 per cent,' he said.
Their research found the reason why organic food is so much worse for the climate is that the yields per hectare are much lower, primarily because fertilisers are not used.
To produce the same amount of organic food, you therefore need a much bigger area of land.
'The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation,' said Dr Wirsenius.
'The world's food production is governed by international trade, so how we farm in Sweden influences deforestation in the tropics.
'If we use more land for the same amount of food, we contribute indirectly to bigger deforestation elsewhere in the world', he said.
Because organic meat and milk production uses organic feeds, it also requires more land than conventional production, he found.
'This means that the findings on organic wheat and peas in principle also apply to meat and milk products', he said.
'We have not done any specific calculations on meat and milk, however, and have no concrete examples of this in the article'.
The researchers used a new metric, which they call 'Carbon Opportunity Cost' to evaluate the effect of greater land-use contributing to higher carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation.
This metric takes into account the amount of carbon that is stored in forests, and thus released as carbon dioxide as an effect of deforestation.
The study is among the first in the world to make use of this metric.
'The fact that more land use leads to greater climate impact has not often been taken into account in earlier comparisons between organic and conventional food,' said Dr Wirsenius.
'This is a big oversight, because, as our study shows, this effect can be many times bigger than the greenhouse gas effects, which are normally included.
In Sweden there are political goals to increase the production of organic food.
'If those goals are implemented, the climate influence from Swedish food production will probably increase a lot', said Dr Wirsenius.
However researchers do not mean that conscientious consumers should simply switch to buying non-organic food.
'The type of food is often much more important. For example, eating organic beans or organic chicken is much better for the climate than to eat conventionally produced beef,' said Dr Wirsenius.
'Organic food does have several advantages compared with food produced by conventional methods,' he said.
'For example, it is better for farm animal welfare.'
For consumers who want to contribute to the positive aspects of organic food production, without increasing their climate impact, an effective way to do so is to change diet.
Researchers found that replacing beef and lamb, as well as hard cheeses, with vegetable proteins such as beans had the biggest effect.
Pork, chicken, fish and eggs also have a substantially lower climate impact than beef and lamb.
Source: The Star