[Tagbert]

As Sri Lanka recently found, it is difficult to feed all of your people by switching to organic. As much as I appreciate the benefits of organic and do try to buy it when reasonable, I recognize that organic farming takes more land, water, and labor to produce the same volume of food as non-organic. It works for a low volume, premium price model for some people but not for everyone.

I feel like our best bet to reduce the need for pesticides would be using GMO techniques to make our crops resistant to pests but the same people pushing for organics tend to dismiss GMOs out of hand.

[MarkMarine]

That’s because GMO means roundup resistant in a whole huge section of its use case, and farmers are just making it rain roundup on the food. I read an article about (American) farmers using roundup to get wheat to dry and open after harvest. Basically coating the wheat right before sale.

[wing-_-nuts]

>As Sri Lanka recently found, it is difficult to feed all of your people by switching to organic.

Oh come now. I don't really think we can use a country who had to suddenly switch from using inputs to making due without them as a good test case for organic farming. Those are absolutely less than ideal conditions.

Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output (maybe at a higher labor cost, I dunno).

Some of our cereal crops aren't good candidates for going organic but it absolutely makes sense for a lot of of fruits and vegetables, especially the soft skinned varieties that are more apt to absorb pesticides.

[biorach]

> Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output

You'd really need to cite some sources on that

[wing-_-nuts]

For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6320530/

Again, it certainly wouldn't replace the cereal crops, but for fruits and vegetables that are perishable and prone to absorbing pesticides, I could easily see small scale local agg replacing our current system if the price of carbon were accurately reflected (i.e. carbon tax)

[biorach]

that study doesn't show that "organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output"

It's about cultivating vegetables in a specific, labour intestine, urban environment, and is partly speculative.

It's not about organic farming yields in general which are generally significantly lower that those of conventional farming.

[wing-_-nuts]

I'm not defending a thesis here. You asked for a source for the assertion that one could have high yields under organic farming and I provided one. I understand organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture, but your original assertion (I hate we don't have thread context in reply windows) was implying that we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture. I highly doubt that. Maybe organic would require more labor or different automation than simply dousing everything with roundup and pesticides, but we could do it. We simply have to decide to prioritize health and environmental impacts over cost.

[biorach]

I was looking for a source for :

> Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture _nearly always_ yields higher per acre output

_nearly always_

Your second assertion is accurate:

> organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture

I didn't at any stage say "we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture" - maybe you're mixing me up with some other commenter. What I do think is that currently we are not in a position where we could feed the world's population only with organic (not just fruit and vegetable - grains, meat etc also).

Parts of Africa are facing grain shortages due to disruptions in the supply in Ukraine. This shows how tight supplies are.

Those chemicals ( and I'm no fan) do enable a massive increase in yields. There's no "simply" - I agree with you that a move away is desirable, but it is far from simple or easy.