A trip to your local farmer’s market can easily prove the superiority of small farms vs. the Soviet-style, mechanized farming model, requiring massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide we have today as advertised in the NYTimes

I now read NYTimes mostly for a good laugh. There are occasional well written articles such as the one on the Navy’s new ship (04/25/08), but consider previous articles on food which suggested that the poor can only afford highly processed, low quality stuff like McBurgers. So wrong this is almost laughable, as if commonly found, highly nutritious items like legumes, etc are not available, and probably an order of magnitude more healthful and nutritious than “junk food”.

“Are Organic Crops as Productive as Conventional?”
Scientists investigate yield differences between organic and
conventional cash grain and forage crops in the Upper Midwest

MADISON, WI, March 24, 2008 — Can organic cropping systems be as productive as conventional systems? The answer is an unqualified, “Yes” for alfalfa or wheat and a qualified “Yes most of the time” for corn and soybeans according to research reported by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and agricultural consulting firm AGSTAT in the March-April 2008 issue of Agronomy Journal.

The researchers primarily based their answer on results from the
Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trials, conducted for 13 years (1990-2002) at Arlington, WI and 8 years (1990-1997) at Elkhorn, WI. These trials compared six cropping systems (three cash grain and three forage based crops) ranging from diverse, organic systems to less diverse, conventional systems. The cash grain systems were 1) conventional continuous corn, 2) conventional corn-soybean, and 3) organic corn-soybean-wheat where the wheat included a leguminous cover crop. The three forage based systems were 1) conventional corn-alfalfa-alfalfa-alfalfa, 2) organic corn-oats-alfalfa-alfalfa, and 3) rotationally grazed pasture.

In this research they found that: organic forage crops yielded as much or more dry matter as their conventional counterparts with quality sufficient to produce as much milk as the conventional systems; and organic grain crops: corn, soybean, and winter wheat produced 90% as well as their conventionally managed counterparts. In spite of some climatic differences and a large difference in soil drainage between the two sites, the relatively small difference in the way the cropping systems performed suggested that these results are widely applicable
across prairie-derived soils in the U.S. upper Midwest. The researchers also compared their results to other data analysis done on this topic in the U.S. Midwest.