How much do they support the benefits claimed by the organic promoters?
Apprehension and scepticism has been been shown by several viewers of researchgate about organic farming/agriculture,of its productivity ,that it may not be able to feed the world. Some studies based on metadata analysis and published in reputed journals also support this confusion.
As a long term association with practical organic farming I have found and believe that the organic system development takes time ,according to the agro-climatic zone and level of management. After this gestation period all the apprehensions/scepticism will vanish.
Kindly share your results and experiences from long term organic farming, not only in terms of the yield level but all other tangible and non-tangible ,even social impacts of organic farming.I will specially appreciate the views from the dryland/rainfed areas ( 60% part of the world)where food security is still a challenge even after several decades of green revolution/chemical farming.
I request kindly share your experimental results or experiences about organic farming. That may provide solid information to move ahead in organic farming .Simply hypothetical discussions or showing results of 2-3 years may not give real and clear picture of organic farming.
Please find attached a table of content of a book intitled: "Long Term Field Experiments in Organic Farming". There is a section within ISOFAR (www.isofar.org) that gathers researcher all over the world around long term experiment in OF. Also, there is an attached slides of LTE on OF and most important learnt results.
http://www.isofar.org/publications/scientific-01.html
Dear Arun,
I evaluated the overall performance and sustainability (from the economic, environmental and social dimensions) of some cattle farms that hab been been producing following organic standards during more than 20 years. In summary, the differential chaacteristics to comment with regard to your question are the following:
- they were more profitable due to the facts that:
- they took active part in almost the whole agri-value chain: they had orgnaic crops, organic mill, organic livestock farms, trucks to ship the animals to the slargthouroses.
- the were really organized
- these was a hard process of designing themselves and cooperation within a small group of farmers. They did not receive any agricultural subsidy during most of the years (in Europe farmers receive subsidies coming from the called 'Common Agricultural Policy', within an specfic line of money is designed to support organic farmers)
- their education level was higher, which help them to improve the management in terms of both business and technical aspects. Maybe the fact that they had other sources of income different to the farm activity, allowed them to be less dependent of short term proftability of the farms, so that they were able to spend some time being lowly profitable while configurating all their network and way of producing and selling.
From the envromental side, some advantages were found, but as the convnetional farms to which they were compared were extensive (pasture-based ones) no major differences were found.
As you see, social aspects were and are key for the sustaianbility of these farms.
You can find more about this research on my profile. I attach one of the studies.
Regards,
Alfredo J. Escribano.
Data Comparative Sustainability Assessment of Extensive Beef Catt...
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