The environmental impacts of organic farming methods are mixed. Organic uses substantially more land, but also uses fewer environmentally damaging fertilizers (definitely uses some though). Organic farms tend to use compost and green fertilizers as well as more traditional techniques like cover crops to make up for the relative inefficiency of forgoing chemical fertilizers. It's much more important to buy local in season crops than organic/regular
The biggest increase in GHG / environmental impact from food production overall is land use change, so the fact that organic farming takes up (way) more space means it's already lost in terms of environmental impact, particularly for climate change.
As far as pesticides are concerned, organic pesticides (yes, they do use them) are much weaker than chemical ones, and they often end up having to use many times more volume (I've read up to 8x more) to get the same effect.
You are correct about buying in season (and probably correct about the fertilisers IDK), but in terms of buying local, sometimes it's actually more environmentally friendly to purchase imported products if the country you are importing them from has a more efficient climate for growing said crop (even when taking into account shipping GHG emissions)
Thank you this is pretty much everything I wanted to say and more organized than I was willing to put effort in for.
I also want to add that many organic pesticides have more harmful environmental effects, not only because they have to use more (but that doesn’t help), copper sulfate being an obvious example.
The problem with organic fertilizers is a lot of the synthetic fertilizer use is still happening, just upstream of the organic farm. At best they're using things like manure and food processing industry byproducts that otherwise don't have an outlet (but which are overwhelmingly derived from conventionally grown crops); at worst (and this is a non-trivial amount of organic fertilizer) they're applying conventionally grown and otherwise edible soybeans.
Let's not forget that in the us steel slag and its derivatives are considered organic fertilizer. Theyre less popular with the decline of the steel industry. Also dried blood, sorry vegans.
State regulations have gotten better about heavy industry wastes due to all the soils getting contaminated with heavy metals, but yeah, a ton of organic produce is not technically vegan due to the high prevalence of slaughterhouse residues and fish emulsions in organic production.
The environmental impacts of organic farming methods are mixed. Organic uses substantially more land, but also uses fewer environmentally damaging fertilizers (definitely uses some though). Organic farms tend to use compost and green fertilizers as well as more traditional techniques like cover crops to make up for the relative inefficiency of forgoing chemical fertilizers. It's much more important to buy local in season crops than organic/regular
The biggest increase in GHG / environmental impact from food production overall is land use change, so the fact that organic farming takes up (way) more space means it's already lost in terms of environmental impact, particularly for climate change.
As far as pesticides are concerned, organic pesticides (yes, they do use them) are much weaker than chemical ones, and they often end up having to use many times more volume (I've read up to 8x more) to get the same effect.
You are correct about buying in season (and probably correct about the fertilisers IDK), but in terms of buying local, sometimes it's actually more environmentally friendly to purchase imported products if the country you are importing them from has a more efficient climate for growing said crop (even when taking into account shipping GHG emissions)
Source
Thank you this is pretty much everything I wanted to say and more organized than I was willing to put effort in for.
I also want to add that many organic pesticides have more harmful environmental effects, not only because they have to use more (but that doesn’t help), copper sulfate being an obvious example.
The problem with organic fertilizers is a lot of the synthetic fertilizer use is still happening, just upstream of the organic farm. At best they're using things like manure and food processing industry byproducts that otherwise don't have an outlet (but which are overwhelmingly derived from conventionally grown crops); at worst (and this is a non-trivial amount of organic fertilizer) they're applying conventionally grown and otherwise edible soybeans.
Let's not forget that in the us steel slag and its derivatives are considered organic fertilizer. Theyre less popular with the decline of the steel industry. Also dried blood, sorry vegans.
State regulations have gotten better about heavy industry wastes due to all the soils getting contaminated with heavy metals, but yeah, a ton of organic produce is not technically vegan due to the high prevalence of slaughterhouse residues and fish emulsions in organic production.