10.5061/DRYAD.HF305
Ponisio, Lauren C.
University of California, Berkeley
M'Gonigle, Leithen K.
University of California, Berkeley
Mace, Kevi C.
University of California, Berkeley
Palomino, Jenny
University of California, Berkeley
de Valpine, Perry
University of California, Berkeley
Kremen, Claire
University of California, Berkeley
Data from: Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap
Dryad
dataset
2014
conventional
meta-anlaysis
organic
2014-12-12T20:36:30Z
2014-12-12T20:36:30Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1396
741657 bytes
1
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Agriculture today places great strains on biodiversity, soils, water and
the atmosphere, and these strains will be exacerbated if current trends in
population growth, meat and energy consumption, and food waste continue.
Thus, farming systems that are both highly productive and minimize
environmental harms are critically needed. How organic agriculture may
contribute to world food production has been subject to vigorous debate
over the past decade. Here, we revisit this topic comparing organic and
conventional yields with a new meta-dataset three times larger than
previously used (115 studies containing more than 1000 observations) and a
new hierarchical analytical framework that can better account for the
heterogeneity and structure in the data. We find organic yields are only
19.2% (±3.7%) lower than conventional yields, a smaller yield gap than
previous estimates. More importantly, we find entirely different effects
of crop types and management practices on the yield gap compared with
previous studies. For example, we found no significant differences in
yields for leguminous versus non-leguminous crops, perennials versus
annuals or developed versus developing countries. Instead, we found the
novel result that two agricultural diversification practices,
multi-cropping and crop rotations, substantially reduce the yield gap (to
9 ± 4% and 8 ± 5%, respectively) when the methods were applied in only
organic systems. These promising results, based on robust analysis of a
larger meta-dataset, suggest that appropriate investment in agroecological
research to improve organic management systems could greatly reduce or
eliminate the yield gap for some crops or regions.
DataForSubmittingMeta-dataset of studies comparing organic and
conventional yields.