Organic Farming Yields Far Better Crop Resistance and Resiliance

IPCC projections and models used to discuss climate change in the future tense: something we could head off. No more. As we’ve noticed, climate change discussions have switched tenses — glaciers will melt has become glaciers are melting. Agriculture will be stressed has become agriculture is stressed.

There’s a corollary. Talk of climate change prevention has become talk of mitigation and adaptation.

For cities, that means flood walls. For farms, it means a transition to agro-ecological farming methods, ways of farming that harmonize with natural processes rather than relying on external, artificial-or-chemical inputs, or genetic engineering, to increase yields.

That transition will have many benefits.

The first is that it will actually prevent climate change. Organic farming — one way of carrying out agro-ecological farming — has been shown to increase carbon sequestration in soil relative to non-organic methods. Furthermore, extensive research, most recently by agronomist David Pimentel of Cornell, has shown that transitioning to organic and local farming could cut energy inputs into the U.S. food system by 50 percent.

"United States agriculture is driven almost entirely by these non-renewable energy sources. Each person in the country on a per capita consumption basis requires approximately 2,000 liters per year in oil equivalents to supply his/her total food, which accounts for about 19 percent of the total national energy use," Pimentel said.

In addition to cutting fossil fuel use and decreasing carbon emissions, a shift to organic farming and the resultant increases in carbon sequestration will make agriculture more resilient and more resistant to onrushing anthropogenic climate change.

Resistance and resilience are technical terms: as ecologist Alison Power observes, resistance is a system’s ability to not be affected by a “perturbation,” such as a sudden drought or hurricane. Resilience is the measure of the agricultural system’s ability to respond to a “perturbation” that does affect it—in other words, how quickly it returns to its former level of functioning, or how close to its former level of functioning it can get to.

There is strong evidence that organic-farming systems, which are usually a mix of diverse-plant communities—the furthest thing from the plains of monocultures that are the mainstay of American agriculture—are both more resistant and more resilient than other types of planting systems.

For example, a study carried out in Central America after Hurricane Mitch hit in 1998 showed that hillside farms, where many poor farmers are forced to work the land, that used practices such as agro-forestry, inter-cropping, or the planting of cover crops like the “velvet bean,” were far less damaged than those that did not.

The study covered over 300 communities and 24 regions in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, and showed that well-diversified plots had less soil erosion, more topsoil, greater moisture levels in the soil, and lower economic losses, by percentages of 20 to 40 percent, than their conventionally-farming neighbors.