The best organic amendments to use and which is already used is most of developed countries of the world are the green manures.

Best wishes

Its true

We need both in fact!

The conservation agriculture nowadays is an option to be used for the climatic change adaptation and the scarcity of water.

As I have practically experienced in guava, mango and other vegetables production past 17 years, adoption of full package of practice yields are equal or more than conventional package practice.

See my publications: Kremen and Miles 2012 for one of the most thorough quantitative asssessments available. See also Miles et al. 2017 for a political and economic analysis of the necessary preconditionS of system transformation to sustainability and equity.

Organic agriculture does NOT assure residue free quality production, and those who claim it does are incorrect. It assures that a product is from a particular kind of regulated agrifood production system. The regulations set out what kind of agrifood system can be practised, and what inputs can and can't be used. It is simply not possible and is very wrong to claim that organic products are residue free, because we cannot control the quality of the wider environment. Spraydrift can travel for miles before it settles. Irrigation water can contain pollutants and agrochemical residues or their metabolites. Soils are extremely variable as are plants in their uptake.

So your question is the wrong one!

Organic farmers want the best possible yield from their systems while wishing to cause the least possible harm to the environment and biodiversity. Ultimately, many are prepared to take a hit on yield, which can be offset by clever marketing. However, there is evidence that in tropical agriculture in diverse mixed or polycultures, yields can actually be similar to or higher than in systems that rely on agrochemical inputs (see Ram's comment above). Perhaps this is due to the conservation of biologically active soils,, the greater efficacy of fertility building crops and other sensitive environmental ecosystem services?

Hi all,

Here is is the most thorough meta-analysis done to date on the tooic of yield differentials btw conventional and organic, and the influence of biological diversification (and research and development funding) on the yield gaps that do exist.

Ponisio, L. C., M'Gonigle, L. K., Mace, K. C., Palomino, J., de Valpine, P., & Kremen, C. (2015, January). Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap. In Proc. R. Soc. B (Vol. 282, No. 1799, p. 20141396). The Royal Society.

For the best overall total cost-benefit analysis of conventional and organic system across a range of ecological, social and economic performance metrics, I suggest the following:

Reganold, J. P., & Wachter, J. M. (2016). Organic agriculture in the twenty-first century. Nature Plants, 2(2), 15221.

Albie

Hi Albie,

I have the Kremen and Miles paper open on my desktop right now. I agree with your observations about pest control being a significant challenge in tropical systems.

I am not a scientist by the way, I was a practising organic farmer (UK) and now am a higher education specialist trust fundraiser in the UK's No.1 uni (also in global top 10) for agriculture and forestry. I lead on fundraising for agriculture, food and climate change.

Albie - goodness, Reganold is still going strong! I was saddened to hear of the death of Bill Friedland last week.

Laura

Bad news

Organic Practices

A package of practice viz; biodynamic and natural farming is to be adopted alongwith green manuring/ inter cropping/ cover cropiing/crop rotation/trap crop etc. to achieve the optimum production