Authors
Tomek De Ponti, Bert Rijk, Martin K Van Ittersum
Publication date
2012/4/1
Journal
Agricultural systems
Volume
108
Pages
1-9
Publisher
Elsevier
Description
A key issue in the debate on the contribution of organic agriculture to the future of world agriculture is whether organic agriculture can produce sufficient food to feed the world. Comparisons of organic and conventional yields play a central role in this debate. We therefore compiled and analyzed a meta-dataset of 362 published organic–conventional comparative crop yields. Our results show that organic yields of individual crops are on average 80% of conventional yields, but variation is substantial (standard deviation 21%). In our dataset, the organic yield gap significantly differed between crop groups and regions. The analysis gave some support to our hypothesis that the organic–conventional yield gap increases as conventional yields increase, but this relationship was only rather weak. The rationale behind this hypothesis is that when conventional yields are high and relatively close to the potential or water …
Total citations
20122013201420152016201720182019202020212022202320241941878913411413613713116114215767
Scholar articles