Abstract
Notwithstanding popular perception, the environmental impacts of organic agriculture, particularly with respect to pesticide use, are not well established. Fueling the impasse is the general lack of data on comparable organic and conventional agricultural fields. We identify the location of ~9,000 organic fields from 2013 to 2019 using field-level crop and pesticide use data, along with state certification data, for Kern County, CA, one of the US’ most valuable crop producing counties. We parse apart how being organic relative to conventional affects decisions to spray pesticides and, if spraying, how much to spray using both raw and yield gap-adjusted pesticide application rates, based on a global meta-analysis. We show the expected probability of spraying any pesticides is reduced by about 30 percentage points for organic relative to conventional fields, across different metrics of pesticide use including overall weight applied and coarse ecotoxicity metrics. We report little difference, on average, in pesticide use for organic and conventional fields that do spray, though observe substantial crop-specific heterogeneity.
Highlights
Notwithstanding popular perception, the environmental impacts of organic agriculture, with respect to pesticide use, are not well established
Our sample consisted of 99,533 fields, which were all permitted fields in Kern County between 2013 and 2019
Our analysis provides four main innovations: (1) for the first time, we have isolated the spatial location of thousands of organic fields using production and pesticide use data, (2) organic fields are generally smaller in size, part of larger farms, and on better soil than their conventional counterparts, (3) organic agriculture, on average, uses less pesticides than conventional production and this manifests in a lower probability of using any pesticides and similar use on fields that do spray, (4) different crop types vary considerably from the average, and in some cases, the reverse relationship is present and significant across pesticide metrics
Summary
Notwithstanding popular perception, the environmental impacts of organic agriculture, with respect to pesticide use, are not well established. We show the expected probability of spraying any pesticides is reduced by about 30 percentage points for organic relative to conventional fields, across different metrics of pesticide use including overall weight applied and coarse ecotoxicity metrics. On average, in pesticide use for organic and conventional fields that do spray, though observe substantial crop-specific heterogeneity. The crux of the debate, from the environmental sustainability perspective, is whether the reduction in negative ecological and environmental impacts on-field compensates for the reduction in yields[14,15] and increased yield variability[16] that has been observed for most organically produced crops in actual field surveys[8,16,17]
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