Organic farms done properly have better yield than their chemical competitors ...
Careful with that axe, Eugene ;-)
It's a bit complicated. Organic methods can easily generate much higher yields per unit area than conventional agriculture. BUT that doesn't mean that profits are much higher. Comparisons between conventional and organic nearly all show markedly similar profitability. One difference I remarked on when I first became involved in farming was that organic farms carried much smaller debt loads. This made a big difference in the 1980s when interest rates rose considerably. Hardest hit were the Australian farmers who had been sold loans in US currency as the exchange rate also hit them and many were bankrupted.
Someone above said this isn't really about the science and this is true. It's about economics. And choice. If I'm an organic farmer and my neighbour decides to grow GM, then my farm is decertified due to contamination.
A related issue is that conventional farming (i.e. artificial fertilisers/synthetic pesticides/hybrid seed outperforms organic under ideal conditions. In bad seasons, the reverse is true. Prices tend to be considerably higher in bad seasons and lower in ideal growing seasons. Maximising your yields when prices are lowest and minimising them when prices are highest never made any sense to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
