Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 150 (2012) 121122

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Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment
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How sustainable is organic farming?
Jens Leifeld

Agroscope Reckenholz-Tnikon Research Station ART, Air Pollution/Climate Group, Reckenholzstrasse 191, CH-8046 Zurich, Switzerland
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 27 July 2011
Accepted 19 January 2012
Available online 15 February 2012
Keywords:
Organic farming
Soil carbon sequestration
Substrate use efciency
Climate
a b s t r a c t
Organic farming is supposed to be environmentally friendly due to abandonment of external inputs such
as mineral fertilizers or pesticides. Albeit conversion to organic farming frequently comes along with a
decline in crop yields, proponents of organic farming emphasize the sustainability of that system particu-
larly because of improving organic matter-related soil quality. Based on recent research on mechanisms
driving soil organic matter turnover, however, it rather appears that low-input agro ecosystems may
convert to smaller efciency in terms of substrate use by heterotrophs which may affect soil organic
matter storage in the long run. A compilation of eld data conrms an inferior use efciency in some
organic soils and thus questions the claim of an overall sustainable use of the soil resource in organic
farming systems.
2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The expansion of modern, resource-intensive agriculture has
multiplied yields of the worlds major crops wheat, rice, and
maize by a factor of 2.63.6 over the last fty years. Between 69%
(maize) and 96% (wheat) of this increase was due to higher yields
per hectare rather than an increase in cropland area (FAOSTAT,
2011). This increase has been achieved at the expense of costly
high-energy inputs and unwanted environmental effects such as
nutrient losses, soil degradation, and compromised biodiversity
(Tilman et al., 2001). Organic agriculture, on the other hand, com-
prises a set of management practices aimed at environmentally
friendly production by avoiding the use of synthetic fertilizers
and pesticides and by strong reliance on closed on-farm nutrient
cycling, including biological nitrogen xation and crop rotations,
to support soil fertility by enhancing soil organic matter content.
Its current per-area contribution of 0.037Gha is still small relative
to the 4.9Gha agricultural land worldwide, but this is continuously
increasing (FIBL and IFOAM, 2011).
Co-benets claimed lately for organic agriculture are reduced
nitrogen losses to the environment and, more importantly,
enhanced soil carbon sequestration, which together may offset
between 60 and 92% of contemporary agricultural greenhouse gas
emissions if all land were converted to organic practices (Scialabba
andMller-Lindenlauf, 2010; Niggli et al., 2009). Hence, the current
mechanistic understanding of howorganic matter builds up in soil
is not consistent with the assertion of organic farming as a means
to sequester soil carbon.
The size of the soil organic matter pool is mainly driven by
input rates of various forms of plant residues and their processed

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E-mail address: jens.leifeld@art.admin.ch
derivatives, such as manure, and turnover rates of fresh and trans-
formed organic matter in soil (Buyanovsky and Wagner, 1998).
Agriculture extracts between one third and one half of the net
primary production, leaving less matter available for soil carbon
build-up (Bolinder et al., 2007). Due to their reliance on natural
fertility, crop yields of organic systems are often well below those
of conventional agriculture. This is particularly the case when con-
ventional practices refer to high-input agriculture with optimum
yields in which harvests may be 1672% higher than in organic
farming (e.g., Nguyen et al., 1995; Gunst et al., 2007) but less
so for (sub)tropical subsistence farming where organic farming
eventually may outperform. The situation is less severe for N-
xing crops such as grass/clover mixtures, an inherent element
of crop rotations on mixed farms in temperate regions, where
yields may equal those of conventional systems (Kirchmann et al.,
2007; Gunst et al., 2007). For other crops, however, yield dif-
ferences may become even more pronounced and reach 50% in
the long term due to the continuous net extraction of nutrients
in organic agriculture (Gosling and Shepherd, 2005; Kirchmann
et al., 2007). It appears that in many organic systems the over-
all organic matter inputs must be smaller when corrected with
respect to differences in organic fertilizer distribution, crop rota-
tions at the farmand regional scales, and systemfeedbacks related
to closed nutrient cycles (Leifeld and Fuhrer, 2010; Faerge and
Magid, 2003).
How should the presumably smaller inputs lead to enhanced
soil carbon stocks? It has been argued that demonstrated changes
in microbial populations will change the efciency of the decom-
posers, thereby converting a higher share of the residues into
long-lived stabilized organic matter and less into CO
2
(Mder
et al., 2002; Fliessbach et al., 2000). Stability and use efciency
can be approximated by means of relatively simple measurements.
0167-8809/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.agee.2012.01.020
122 J. Leifeld / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 150 (2012) 121122
CO
2
per unit SOC in ORG, normalized to CON
3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0
q
C
O
2

O
R
G
/
C
O
N
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
I
II III
IV
Fig. 1. Efciencies of organic (ORG) relative to conventional (CON) systems indi-
cated by metabolic quotients (Y) and respiration per unit soil organic carbon (SOC)
(X). A high substrate-use efciency or organic systems in conjunction with stable
soil organic matter is found in Sector I. Sector II indicates stable SOM, but a low
efciency, III is the most unfavorable state with smaller efciencies and higher res-
piration rates, IV groups labile SOM transformed with high efciency. Data were
taken from Fliessbach et al. (2007), Liebig and Doran (1999) and Friedel (2000).
Metabolic quotient qCO
2
of open symbols (Reganold et al., 1993) was estimated
based on the linear regression between the two variables fromthe other studies.
The example given below amalgamates data from four previously
published studies that compare high-input conventional and
organic farming (Fig. 1).
Increasing values along the x axis indicate higher specic
respiration rates in organically farmed soils than in their conven-
tional counterparts. Relative to conventional soils, use efciencies
decrease with increasing values along the y axis. Fifteen of the 19
soils indicate higher specic respiration rates under organic farm-
ing, i.e. a faster organic matter decay, and only 11 out of 19 values
show a higher efciency or smaller maintenance requirement for
organic than in conventional farming; many of which are close to
unity. One inherent obstacle in interpreting metabolic quotients is
the failure to separate dormant populations by means of the rela-
tively simple methods usually applied for measuring soil microbial
biomass, andit is not knownhowmuchthey contribute to the total.
In essence, more stabilized organic matter and higher substrate
use efciency do not seem to be typical features of organically
managed systems but likewise occur in conventionally ones. Why
is more carbon respired per unit carbon and microbial biomass
in many organic soils although the systems productivity and
thus input to soil is presumably smaller? One obvious possible
explanation is a decline in substrate use efciency caused by
nutrient depletion in organic systems, which is the opposite of
what has been claimed previously. Reduced nutrient availability
may foster microbial activity at the expense of reduced efciency
a mechanism known as nutrient mining (Craine et al., 2007).
This has been observed in a nutrient-depleted grassland system
(Ammann et al., 2007) in which reduced nutrient input increased
heterotrophic soil respiration and led to a decline in soil carbon
in the mid-term. In addition to the intentionally smaller nutrient
input by the farmer, large-scale conversion of conventional to
organic cropland means that fewer external nutrients may diffuse
fromconventional systems to organic systems directly via organic
fertilizer imports or indirectly through atmospheric deposition,
and in consequence the buffering effect of conventional agricul-
ture against nutrient exhaustion of organic systems may fade out.
Together this may turn organic systems towards nutrient mining
of the soil, which in the long run may further diminish soil organic
matter contents through negative feedbacks on productivity.
One argument questioning the sustainability of organic farming
inthe past has beenthat the productionof the same amount of cash
crops in organic farming may need between 16 and 100%more area
comparedto high-input conventional agriculture. Another possible
drawback of such systems requiring further consideration is the
non-sustainable use of the soil resource. Thus it appears that a third
way must be sought.
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