School of Sustainability

Half the wheat, half as much again in profit

Somewhere in the farmland around Göttingen, there are winter wheat fields that have spent two years being watched. Researchers from the University of Göttingen and an international team walked nine landscapes, counting what grew and lived in them and totting up what each field earned. They were trying to answer a question that European farm policy currently answers with money in both directions: is it better to bolt a strip of wildflowers onto a conventional wheat field, or to farm the whole field organically?

The comparison was three-way. Conventional wheat with a wildflower strip along its edge; organic wheat with no strip; and conventional wheat with nothing done to it at all, as the control. The control matters: it is the plain field against which any gain is measured. Both options attract EU payments as environmentally friendly practices, so the choice is one real farmers face, on real forms, each year.

On the ecological side the two measures came out roughly level: both lifted biodiversity by 20 to 30 per cent against the plain conventional fields. On the economic side they parted company. The organic fields yielded only half as much grain — the figure that usually ends the conversation at the farm gate. But profits came in at one and a half times the conventional fields', once the lower yields were weighed against what organic wheat sells for and what the system costs to run.

The results were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. What they amount to is a quiet rebuke to the way these schemes are usually compared, which is by yield per hectare, as if a field were a factory floor. A field is a business and a habitat at once, and by those two measures together the field that changed everything came out ahead of the field that changed only its margins.

Regeneration International · Read the source