Abstract
<p>Our review concludes that organic standards need to account for a broader set of criteria in order to retain claims to ‘sustainability’. Measurements of the ecological, economic and social outcomes from over 96 kiwifruit, sheep/beef and dairy farms in New Zealand between 2004 and 2012 by The <em>Agricultural Research Group on Sustainability</em> (ARGOS) project showed some enhanced ecosystem services from organic agriculture that will assist a “land-sharing” approach for sustainable land management. However, the efficiency of provisioning services is reduced in organic systems and this potentially undermines a “land-sparing” strategy to secure food security and ecosystem services. Other aspects of the farm operation that are not considered in the organic standards sometimes had just as much or even a greater effect on ecosystem services than restriction of chemical inputs and synthetic fertilisers. An organic farming version of the <em>New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard</em> will integrate organic standards and wider agricultural best practice into a broad and multidimensional sustainability assessment framework and package of learning tools. There is huge variation in performance of farms within a given farming system. Therefore improving ecosystem services depends as much on locally tuned learning and adjustments of farm practice on individual farms as on uptake of organic or Integrated Management farming system protocols.</p>
Highlights
Maintaining biodiversity and other ecosystem services to sustain efficient food and fibre production is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005)
Organic agriculture often leads to enhanced ecosystem services, as emphasised by several papers in this special journal issue (Delate et al, 2015; Abbott, 2015; Cambardella, 2015) and our selection of examples from the Agricultural Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) project (Figure 2, Table 1)
Productivity of organic farming is often reduced compared to integrated management” (IM) and conventional farming and this could undermine land-sparing approaches to achieving global food security while conserving ecosystem services over larger spatial scales
Summary
Maintaining biodiversity and other ecosystem services to sustain efficient food and fibre production is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Market assurance and certification schemes have emerged as a global response to encourage and reward sustainable agriculture and inform consumers (Campbell et al, 2012b) Such schemes often stipulate best farming practices and many establish explicit standards, sustainability assessments, monitoring and audits that seek to future-proof ecosystem services in production landscapes. They are designed to assure consumers and regulators that the food and fibre has been produced in an ethical and sustainable way, and that foods are safe and nutritious to eat. The project sought well-replicated and long-term research of whole working farms from different land use intensities It compared economic, social, environmental and farming practice outcomes between Organic, “integrated management” (IM) and “conventional” orchards and farms (Campbell et al, 2012a, b). ARGOS provided a well-replicated and relatively long-term comparison of outcomes on real working farms following different market assurance protocols with outcomes on a reference group of non-assured (“conventional”) farms
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