Organic food has become increasingly popular over the last several decades, and sales of organic food hit an all-time high in 2023. In a recent poll, one-third of respondents said that they eat organic food for the environmental benefits — but they probably shouldn’t be. Contrary to popular belief, organic food is often worse for the environment than non-organic alternatives, and is not a viable strategy for fighting climate change.
In 2017, researchers Michael Clark and David Tilman conducted a massive meta-analysis of existing research on the environmental impacts of organic and conventional farming. They looked at over 90 different foods, and compared their impacts in five categories:
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Land use
- Fossil fuel and energy use
- Eutrophication potential, or the pollution of water by excessive nutrients
- Acidification potential, or the reduction in pH of water due to sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide
…
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
This was one environmental category in which organic and conventional foods, on the whole, performed comparably to one another. On average, fruits, pulses and oil produced fewer greenhouse gasses when farmed organically, while vegetables, cereals and animal products produced more. But these differences were generally pretty small, making this category something of a wash.
Related on the SLP
Land Use
By contrast, the analysis of land use came to a clear and unambiguous conclusion: conventional farming requires less land than organic farming. This was true, to different degrees, in all seven food categories. The difference was pronounced with regard to organic animal products, which require almost twice as much land to produce than their non-organic counterparts.
