Viewpoint: Why organic isn’t ‘sustainable’

This article originally ran at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.

Relevant excerpt: Stanford University’s Sustainable Choices website defines sustainability this way: “the ability to provide for the needs of the world’s current population without damaging the ability of future generations to provide for themselves. When a process is sustainable, it can be carried out over and over without negative environmental effects or impossibly high costs to anyone involved.”

That definition is compatible with the notion that sustainability is favored by maximizing human ingenuity and the quest for progress—that is, for processes and products that are more efficient, less costly, and at the same time, less harmful to the environment. Organic food producers need not apply.

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“Sustainable” has become a buzzword that is applicable not only to agriculture and energy production but to sectors as far afield as the building and textile industries. Some universities offer courses or even degrees in “sustainability.” Many large companies tout the concept and boast a sustainability department, and the United Nations has hundreds of projects concerned with sustainability throughout its many agencies and programs.

But as with many vague, feel-good concepts–“natural” and “locavorism” come to mind–it contains more than a little sophistry. For example, sustainability in agriculture is often linked to organic food production, whose advocates tout it as a “sustainable” way to feed the planet’s expanding population. According to the Worldwatch Institute, “Organic farming has the potential to contribute to sustainable food security by improving nutrition intake and sustaining livelihoods in rural areas, while simultaneously reducing vulnerability to climate change and enhancing biodiversity.” This is wishful thinking, if not outright delusion.

What does “sustainable” really mean, and how does it relate to organic methods of food production, compared to the more advanced methods of today’s modern farming practices? Definitions vary widely; a typically subjective and circular definition comes from Dr. John E. Ikerd, extension professor at the University of Missouri:

A sustainable agriculture must be economically viable, socially responsible and ecologically sound. The economic, social and ecological are interrelated, and all are essential to sustainability. An agriculture that uses up or degrades its natural resource base, or pollutes the natural environment, eventually will lose its ability to produce. . . a sustainable agriculture must be all three–ecologically sound, economically viable and socially responsible. And the three must be in harmony.

The organic movement touts the sustainability of their methods, but its claims do not withstand scrutiny. For example, a study last year in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences found that the potential for groundwater contamination can be dramatically reduced if fertilizers are distributed through the irrigation system according to plant demand during the growing season. But organic farming depends on compost, the release of which is not matched with plant demand.

The study found that “intensive organic agriculture relying on solid organic matter, such as composted manure that is implemented in the soil prior to planting as the sole fertilizer, resulted in significant down-leaching of nitrate” into groundwater. Especially with many of the world’s most fertile farming regions in the throes of drought and aquifer depletion–which was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment on November 16–increased nitrate in groundwater is hardly a mark of sustainability.

Moreover, although composting gets good PR as a “green” activity, at large scale it generates a significant amount of greenhouse gases (and is also often a source of pathogenic bacteria applied to crops).

Organic farming might work well for certain local environments on a small scale, but its farms produce far less food per unit of land and water than conventional ones. The low yields of organic agriculture–typically 20%-50% percent lower than conventional agriculture–impose various stresses on farmland and especially on water consumption. A British meta-analysis published in the Journal of Environmental Management (2012) addressed the question whether organic farming reduces environmental impacts. It identified some of the stresses that were higher in organic, as opposed to conventional, agriculture: “ammonia emissions, nitrogen leaching and nitrous oxide emissions per product unit were higher from organic systems,” as were “land use, eutrophication potential and acidification potential per product unit.”

Lower organic crop yields are largely inevitable, given the systematic, arbitrary rejection of various advanced methods and technologies in organic farming. Organic affords limited pesticide options, difficulties in meeting peak fertilizer demand, and the lack of access to genetically engineered varieties. If the scale of organic production were significantly increased, the lower yields would increase the pressure for the conversion of more land to farming and on water supplies, both of which are serious environmental issues.

Another limitation of organic production is that it disfavors the best approach to enhancing soil quality–namely, the minimization of soil disturbance (e.g. no plowing or tilling), combined with the use of cover crops. Such farming systems have multiple environmental advantages, particularly with respect to limited erosion, the runoff of fertilizers and pesticides, and the release of CO2 from tilling. Organic growers do frequently plant cover crops, but in the absence of effective herbicides, often they rely on tillage (or even labor-intensive hand-weeding) for weed control.

One prevalent “green myth” about organic agriculture is that it does not employ pesticides. Organic farming does, in fact, use insecticides and fungicides to prevent predation of its crops. More than 20 chemicals (mostly containing copper and sulfur) are commonly used in the growing and processing of organic crops and are acceptable under USDA’s arbitrary organic rules.

Perhaps the most illogical and least sustainable aspect of organic farming in the long term will be the systematic and absolute exclusion of “genetically engineered” plants–but only those that were modified with the most precise and predictable techniques. Except for wild berries and wild mushrooms, virtually all the fruits, vegetables and grains in our diet have been genetically improved by one technique or another–often as a result of seeds having been irradiated or via wide crosses, which move from one species or genus to another in ways that do not occur in nature.

Therefore, the exclusion from organic agriculture of organisms simply because they were crafted with modern, superior techniques makes no sense. In recent decades, we have seen advances in agriculture that have been more environmentally friendly and sustainable than ever before. But they have resulted from science-based research and technological ingenuity from farmers, plant breeders and agribusiness companies, not from ignorant, arrogant social elites disdainful of modern insecticides, herbicides, genetic engineering and “industrial agriculture.”

As genetic engineering’s successes continue to emerge, the gap between modern, high-tech agriculture and organic methods will become a chasm. Genetically engineered, drought-resistant crops have begun to emerge from the development pipeline, and earlier this month, USDA approved genetically engineered potato varieties–dubbed “Innate” by their developer, the J.R. Simplot Company–that are bruise-resistant and contain 50-70% less asparagine, a chemical that is converted to acrylamide, a carcinogen, when heated to high temperatures.

The advantage of lower levels of acrylamide is obvious, but the bruise resistance is important to sustainability: According to Simplot, “with full market penetration for its varieties sold in the U.S., Innate will reduce annual potato waste by an estimated 400 million pounds in the food service and retail industries and a significant portion of the estimated 3 billion pounds discarded by consumers.” And Simplot is performing advanced field testing of second-generation Innate potatoes that will contain an additional trait: resistance to a destructive fungus called “late blight,” which caused the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century and is still with us.

Potatoes that are resistant to bruising and late blight represent major advances in sustainability, because every serving of French fries or mashed potatoes made from them represents less farmland and the consumption of less water.

In an article entitled “The Organic Fable,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen had some pithy observations about the popularity of organic food: “Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.”

Stanford University’s Sustainable Choices website defines sustainability this way: “the ability to provide for the needs of the world’s current population without damaging the ability of future generations to provide for themselves. When a process is sustainable, it can be carried out over and over without negative environmental effects or impossibly high costs to anyone involved.”

That definition is compatible with the notion that sustainability is favored by maximizing human ingenuity and the quest for progress—that is, for processes and products that are more efficient, less costly, and at the same time, less harmful to the environment. Organic food producers need not apply.

Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.

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