Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture.

Organic agriculture is proposed as a promising approach to achieving sustainable food systems, but its feasibility is also contested. We use a food systems model that addresses agronomic characteristics of organic agriculture to analyze the role that organic agriculture could play in sustainable food systems. Here we show that a 100% conversion to organic agriculture needs more land than conventional agriculture but reduces N-surplus and pesticide use.

The challenges of including impacts on biodiversity in agricultural life cycle assessments.

Agriculture is considered to be one of the main drivers for worldwide biodiversity loss but the impacts of agricultural production on biodiversity have not been extensively considered in Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). Recent realisation that biodiversity impact should be included in comprehensive LCAs has led to attempts to develop and implement methods for biodiversity impact assessment. In this review, twenty-two different biodiversity impact assessment methods have been analysed to identify their strengths and weaknesses in terms of their comprehensiveness in the evaluation of agricultural products.

Impacts of feeding less food-competing feedstuffs to livestock on global food system sustainability.

Increasing efficiency in livestock production and reducing the share of animal products in human consumption are two strategies to curb the adverse environmental impacts of the livestock sector. Here, we explore the room for sustainable livestock production by modelling the impacts and constraints of a third strategy in which livestock feed components that compete with direct human food crop production are reduced. Thus, in the outmost scenario, animals are fed only from grassland and by-products from food production.

How the Organic Food System Supports Sustainable Diets and Translates These into Practice.

Organic production and consumption provide a delineated food system that can be explored for its potential contribution to sustainable diets. While organic agriculture improves the sustainability performance on the production side, critical reflections are made on how organic consumption patterns, understood as the practice of people consuming significant amounts of organic produce, may also be taken as an example for sustainable food consumption. The consumption patterns of regular organic consumers seem to be close to the sustainable diet concept of FAO.

Environmental impacts of organic and conventional agricultural products--are the differences captured by life cycle assessment?

Comprehensive assessment tools are needed that reliably describe environmental impacts of different agricultural systems in order to develop sustainable high yielding agricultural production systems with minimal impacts on the environment. Today, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used to assess and compare the environmental sustainability of agricultural products from conventional and organic agriculture. However, LCA studies comparing agricultural products from conventional and organic farming systems report a wide variation in the resource efficiency of products from these systems.

The role of multi-target policy instruments in agri-environmental policy mixes.

The Tinbergen Rule has been used to criticise multi-target policy instruments for being inefficient. The aim of this paper is to clarify the role of multi-target policy instruments using the case of agri-environmental policy. Employing an analytical linear optimisation model, this paper demonstrates that there is no general contradiction between multi-target policy instruments and the Tinbergen Rule, if multi-target policy instruments are embedded in a policy-mix with a sufficient number of targeted instruments.

Greenhouse gas fluxes from agricultural soils under organic and non-organic management--a global meta-analysis.

It is anticipated that organic farming systems provide benefits concerning soil conservation and climate protection. A literature search on measured soil-derived greenhouse gas (GHG) (nitrous oxide and methane) fluxes under organic and non-organic management from farming system comparisons was conducted and followed by a meta-analysis. Up to date only 19 studies based on field measurements could be retrieved.

Enhanced top soil carbon stocks under organic farming.

It has been suggested that conversion to organic farming contributes to soil carbon sequestration, but until now a comprehensive quantitative assessment has been lacking. Therefore, datasets from 74 studies from pairwise comparisons of organic vs. nonorganic farming systems were subjected to metaanalysis to identify differences in soil organic carbon (SOC).