Organic farming doesn’t give the same crop yield as intensive farming.
My question is how much less is the yield?
A friend of mine recently claimed that if the whole world went organic, then 80% of the population would be wiped out.
Is there any truth to this?
Organic farming can give you much more crops than chemical farming. The problem is the purely organic farmer has less insect and weed control over the crop. Organic farming methods like planting multiple crops together doesn’t work for machinery picking, and cultivating. It takes a lot more manual labor to get the large output. The materials organic farms use for making the soil better at growing plants, won’t keep the current farms at high end production because there wouldn’t be enough to instantly make all fields highly productive. Current farming practices also kill off much of the organisms required to make organic farming work, and it takes years for them to increase. Farming organic doesn’t mean you’ll have higher or lower production than a person that uses oil source fertilizers and sprays. A large portion of the world would starve if all current farms switched to organic farming next year. Lack of workers, experience, organic materials in the soil, and pesticides would guarantee a large drop in production.
As an uncited anecdote, I remember watching a televison segment on organic farmers which featured an interview with an organic almond grower. He said that when he switched to organic farming, his brother (who was also an almond grower) bet him that he would never match his conventionally grown yield per acre. The organic brother said he was able to match his brother’s yield and win the bet.
I vaguely remember a statistic off *Bullshit *that said something like 1/3 of people would have to give up eating if all farming was organic. Something similar was backed up by Norman Borlaug (the greatest human being on earth). I apologize for the vagueness and uselessness nature of this post. 
“Non-organic” farming substitutes petrochemicals (in the form of fuels to power and make machinery) for labour, and also substitutes petrochemicals (in the form of pesticides and fertiliser) for the plant-to compost-to-field-to-plant fertilisation cycles and the mixed plant arrangements which organic farmers use.
Thus it has a higher short-term yield, requiring less labour on the field. On the other hand, it requires more labour outside the field, to make the machines and fuels. Plus, it leaves the farmer dependent on external support in a way that organic farming doesn’t.
How did you define efficiency again?
I think it is something that cannot be quantified. You are going to get different results for different crops in different areas using different farming techniques. Presumably crops that grow well organically would become less expensive, and crops that grow poorly more expensive. So all kinds of things would be different.
And a lot of the benefits of organic farming are things you can only see in the long term- better fishing because of less pesticide runoff, farms stay productive longer, etc. These aren’t so easy to measure.
Also keep in mind that in America 30% of food is thrown out. And a lot goes to less efficient or nutritionally worthless food- like high fructose corn syrup or grain fed meat. In the developing world, a lot of food is lost to inefficient transportation. So with some changes in lifestyle we could accommodate some loss of productivity.
Bear in mind- I saw that show, and the “organic” brother was surrounded by neighboring almond farmers who used pesticides.
So, the “organic” farmer may feel pure and virtuous, but he benefitted greatly by having neighbors who were killing the bugs who might have turned on his trees next.
This is probably another topic in itself, but wouldn’t vertical farms (the indoor kind) solve much of the pest problem associated with organic farming?