Organic vs Conventional Food Production: what is difference in yields etc?

[rufuspollock]

What is evidence on organic food production vs conventional food production? What studies are there on productivity or organic vs chemical based farming?

One Example

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241746569_We_Already_Grow_Enough_Food_for_10_Billion_People_and_Still_Can't_End_Hunger

Actually, what this new study does tell us is how much smaller the yieldgap is between organic and conventional farming than what critics of organicagriculture have assumed. Smil’s (2001) claim that organic farming requirestwice the land base has become a conventional mantra. In fact, when weunpack the data from the Nature study, we find that for many crops and in many instances, the reported yield gap is minimal. With new advancesin seed breeding for organic systems, and with the transition of commercial organic farms to diversified farming systems that have long been shown to“over-yield” in comparison to monocultures, this yield gap will close evenfurther (see Vandermeer 1989).

The longest running side-by-side study comparing conventional chemi-cal agriculture with organic methods (over 30 years) found organic yieldsmatch conventional in good years and outperform them under droughtconditions and environmental distress (Rodale Institute 2012)—a criticalproperty as climate change increasingly serves up extreme weather condi-tions. A major study carried out in Africa by the United Nations DevelopmentProgram concluded that organic methods lowered costs and provided moreeconomic benefits to farming communities than conventional agriculture(Pretty et al. 2008). Moreover, farming like a diversified ecosystem rendersa higher resistance to extreme climate events, which translates into lowervulnerability and higher long-term farm sustainability (Holt-Giménez 2002;Philipott et al. 2009; Rosset et al. 2011).

The Nature article examined yields in terms of tons per acre and didnot address efficiency (i.e., yields per units of water or energy) nor environ-mental externalities (i.e., the environmental costs of production in terms ofgreenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, etc.) and fails tomention that conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massiveprivate and public sector support for crop genetic improvement, dwar fingfunding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1