Making the positive impact of organic agriculture visible
Last week the team of Impact Institute presented a paper on the benefits of organic agriculture written for the Robin Food Coalition, a group of front-running organisations in the Dutch food space.
Often when sustainability of food is assessed, the positive impacts of organic agriculture are underplayed. The paper provides evidence for these positive impacts, explains why organic farming is often overlooked, and offers research on making organic agriculture more visible in mainstream sustainability reporting instruments.
How is organic agriculture better?
- Organic agriculture supports more varied ecosystems, that are necessary to reverse the global biodiversity decline.
- Organic farming systems produce fewer greenhouse gasses compared to conventional ones, primarily because they avoid synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
- Researchers agree that organic farming practices produce more soil carbon, which contributes to mitigating climate change, even though mostly not considered in greenhouse gas emissions.
- Organic soils are found not only to store more carbon, but to be healthier, too! They are more resilient against drought and extreme rainfall, pests and nutrient cycling.
- Organic farming also leads to better water quality, by eliminating pesticide leaching and reducing nitrate pollution.
- Next to environmental benefits, organic food also is found to have higher nutrient concentration.
Why are benefits of organic agriculture so overlooked?
The reason the benefits are often underplayed is manyfold. First, the focus is often on limited, product level metrics, such as GHG emissions and land use per kilo. Diet-level metrics, product-mix level metrics, and scenarios including the protein transition, should also be used by policy and business sustainability assessments of the food system.
Additionally, comparing impacts only per unit of product (i.e. per kg) entirely ignore the fact that similar products can have different nutritional content and health value. Neither can a product-level lens show the actual impact on people, the environment and the climate. The impact of agriculture must be assessed at the hectare, farm or landscape level as well.
Academics have also raised the issue that Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models, the dominant method for evaluating sustainability of products, are biased in favor of conventional systems, because organic farming benefits such as nutritional value, soil health, and nutrient fluxes are not commonly well captured in LCA studies. Improvements to datasets and models on pesticides, biodiversity and soil health are required for organic agriculture’s benefits to show up in LCA studies.
About the Robin Food Coalition
The Robin Food Coalition supports consumers, companies, and farmers committed to real and healthy food. Their mission is to build a broad movement for sustainable food production, increasing the number of farmers dedicated to organic practices and making organic food the norm. Together, we are shaping a future where sustainability and health are at the forefront of our food system.
Recommendations for sustainability assessments and frameworks
Mainstream sustainability assessment and reporting frameworks such as CSRD and The Science-Based-Target Network have large room for improvement when it comes to capturing the benefits of organic agriculture. Read the recommendations in the paper below.
