Danish Government Report Says Organic Farming Is Not Practical
July 16, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—A Swiss organic research farm recently announced in the journal Science that “organic farming is practical” because its organic crop yields over 21 years were only 20 percent smaller than the yields from its conventional plots.
Well, maybe. But government officials in Denmark don’t agree.
A couple of years ago, the Danes appointed a top-level technical committee, the Bichel Committee, to assess the impact of imposing organic farming on all Danish farms. The Bichel Report didn’t get much press at the time, perhaps because the results were so embarrassing to all the politically correct folks who love to hate modern high-yield farming.
The Bichel Committee said an organic farming mandate would slash Danish grain production by 62 percent, cut pork and poultry production by 70 percent, and reduce potato output by 80 percent. Virtually overnight, Denmark would cease to be a country producing an abundant, high-quality food supply for its own population, plus billions of dollars worth of high-value farm exports (pork, cheese, frozen French fries) for sale to the rest of the world.
Instead, Denmark would barely be able to feed itself. Danish consumers would be forced into lower-quality diets, with far less pork, poultry, and potatoes. Denmark’s current export customers would have to find new sources of supply, perhaps clearing millions of acres of their forests for additional farmland.
Only Denmark’s dairy production would survive the organic shift with its output virtually intact—because dairy cows eat grass.
Denmark would have lots of grass under an organic regime. But Denmark would not revert to the green, cattle-dotted pastures of the olden days. Actual pasture area would be cut in half. Instead, the new feed production system would require a 34 percent increase in fodder beet area and a 160 percent increase in grass in rotation. These crops would be chopped in the field and hauled to the cows in their cement feedlots. Otherwise, even Denmark’s dairy production would be cut substantially.
The biggest reason for the lower yields of organic farms is not that organic fields suffer more from weeds and insects than conventional fields—though they do. The organic mandate’s biggest disadvantage is that much of Denmark’s farmland would have to be shifted from grain and food crops to grass and hay to for the cattle to produce enough manure to maintain soil fertility.
The manure from the Danish cattle feedlots would have to be spread across all its farm fields in order to maintain soil productivity. Cattle manure would become Denmark’s biggest and most important farm product.
Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, a noted expert on nitrogen, says America would need another 900 million cows to replace the 11 million tons of inorganic N we currently take from the air. The cows would need virtually all of our farm and forestland for forage, leaving our citizens without food or national parks.
Plants can’t grow without nitrogen. But organic farmers refuse to use nitrogen taken from the air, which is 78 percent N; they claim that inorganic N poisons the soil. (This is, of course, utter nonsense.) Test plots at England’s Rothamsted experiment station have been growing wheat with inorganic fertilizer for 158 straight years now—and are getting twice the wheat yield the Swiss organic researchers recently reported in Science. When will the “soil poisoning” set in?
The Swiss organic farming researchers not only got half the Rothamsted yield when they grew wheat, but they could grow wheat only three years out of seven, because of the need to rebuild soil nitrogen with grass and legume rotation crops.
Why are we supposed to want this organic food so urgently?
Canadian researchers at the University of Guelph have just tested organic and conventional foods—again—and found no significant nutritional differences.
The pesticides the organic farmers use are just as dangerous as the pesticides used by high-yield farmers, which is not very dangerous at all. (We encounter 10,000 times more natural pesticides in our fruits and vegetables than we get from farmers’ pesticide residues.) But organic farmers use pyrethrum, which the EPA now rates as “a likely human carcinogen,” and their copper-based fungicides are toxic to most living things. In addition, organic food may have a higher risk of contamination from the dangerous pathogens that lurk in manure.
The Bichel Committee report makes it clear from the highest levels of a sophisticated European government that a shift to organic farming would lower people’s standards of eating—and force us to clear far more wildlife habitat for farming. In return, we would get a “manure landscape.”
What a deal!
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and the Director of the Center for Global Food Issues. He was formerly a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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