Having lived and worked on a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) which used Biodynamic farming practices I was astonished at how much food was grown on only 2 acres of land using no machinery and only a few hands. This transformative experience led me to question all the disinformation put forth by the Government/Agriculture industry. I believe now that we could indeed feed the world quite well using various organic agricultural practices. I believe we would then see a panoply of health benefits that at this point seem difficult to imagine as we have become so immersed in our carbon based food system. Here is an article I came across recently which was originally published in 2001 by the Univ. of California. It is a constant struggle to combat the disinformation put out by the Agri. lobbyists, this article may be of assistance. Link to the entire article is listed below. A few excerpts:
"Not surprisingly, agribusiness conglomerates and their supporters dismiss organic farming, claiming it produces yields too low to feed a growing world population. Dennis Avery, an economist at the Hudson Institute — funded by Monsanto, Du Pont, Dow, and Novartis among others — had this to say in a recent ABC News' 20/20 broadcast. "If overnight all our food supply were suddenly organic, to feed today's population we'd have plowed down half of the world's land area not under ice to get organic food ... because organic farmers waste so much land. They have to because they lose so much of their crop to weeds and insects." In fact, as a number of studies attest, organic farming methods can produce higher yields than conventional methods. Moreover, a worldwide conversion to organic has the potential to increase food production levels -- not to mention reversing the degradation of agricultural soils and increase soil fertility and health."
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"One of the criticisms of organic agriculture has been that there is not enough nitrogen available naturally, therefore only chemical fertilizers can provide adequate supplies to sustain current yields. This is clearly not the case as shown by both the Rothamsted and Rodale experiments, where manure-based systems can provide enough nitrogen not only to sustain high crop yields but also to build up the nitrogen storage in the soil. Animal manure is not in short supply by any means. EPA estimates indicate that US livestock operations generate one billion tons of manure per year; most of this is not utilized in agriculture, instead it leaches nitrogen and phosphorus into our waterways, thus threatening wetlands and river systems and in many cases drinking water supplies. Organic agriculture, and especially small diversified farms, could allow us to once again couple livestock production to crop production, thus cycling this valuable byproduct back into the soil and eliminating costly environmental degradation."
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"Federal commodity programs and subsidies are geared towards large-scale chemically intensive agriculture and artificially inflate figures for industrial agriculture. Furthermore, this type of economic comparison ignores external costs that conventional agriculture creates.A number of European nations have started to factor these expenses into their agricultural support programs. In several European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, farmers get government support during their conversion to organic and continue to receive support for environmental services that they provide to their communities, such as wildlife corridors and the elimination of toxic runoffs which contaminate underground water sources. These programs helped foster an almost 100-fold increase in organically farmed land in Europe, from 29,000 acres in 1986 to 2.4 million acres in 1996. Similar programs in the U.S. could help the conversion of more farms to organic methods. These price supports do not have to be subsidies, rather a compensation to organic farmers for each of the ecological and social services that they provide."
"Even in the United States, the smallest farms, those 27 acres or less, have more than ten times greater dollar output per acre than larger farms (US Agricultural Census, 1992). Conversion to small organic farms therefore, would lead to sizeable increases of food production worldwide. Only organic methods can help small family farms survive, increase farm productivity, repair decades of environmental damage and knit communities into smaller, more sustainable distribution networks — all leading to improved food security around the world."
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html