How does buying organic foods help the environment and more sustainable?

Question

How does buying organic foods help the environment and more sustainable?

Answer 1

In my opinion it does not help either the environment are sustainability.  In General organic farming lowers yields so that more farmland is required to maintain our food supply.  this leads to less ability to rotate crops.  Organic foods also have much more waste than normal crops because of lower quality and less shelf life again increasing the land base required to provide the food supply.  Buying organic is highly overrated and unrealistic.

Answer 2

It doesn't.

Answer 3

idk

Answer 4

Sustainable and Organic are usually not possible together with the population of a First world nation.

There is not enough land in the US that we could grow everything organically.  

Much like when people say they eat only locally grown food, they are wrong.  If you say live in Hawaii it might be possible to grow the things in a normal person's diet, but "first worlders" tend to like things like Sugar from Sugar Cane, and Blue Berries  There is no region in the world you can grow both of these in a sustainable fashion.

Organic is about eating things that are better for you.  Sustainablity is about eating things that are good for the environment.  The two tend to be mutually exclusive.

Answer 5

Organic foods tend to be gentler on the land. You don't use salty fertilizers that essentially sterilize the soil, you don't use horrible pesticides that kill non-target insects.... It's just a lot less destructive. You also use more pre-emptive management methods like spacing trees out so that they have more sunlight and therefore less fungus (and you don't have to use fungicide).  Farmers rotate crops on the land so that the pest population doesn't get a chance to get thriving... There are all sorts of neat things to not use pesticides, but unfortunately at this time, they tend to be something that is seen as being too difficult.

A common fallacy is that organic crops are lower yielding. I wish I could remember the journal article I read that looked at that and debunked it essentially. They didn't look at all crops, but the ones they looked at had essentially the same yield. I think it might have been almonds or something like that...

Anywho, just because I have to deal with the damage of pesticides etc in my job, I am way more aware of it than most people. It's a bit apalling how much damage one improper application of a pesticide can do. Ick ick ick.

Answer 6

If everyone bought organic food then the non-organic food providers will go out of buisness. Most ways of growing non-organic foods have something to do with releasing green house gasses.

Answer 7

it supports biodiversity

Answer 8

organic foods by themselves are not always sustainable. for instance, many larger companies are now growing organic. however, because they are still growing in large monoculture production, they still attract pests that would not be present in the same numbers or ratios  if the land were managed properly.  In order for organic agriculture to be sustainable, proper land management needs to be present as well.

what one would hope by using organic food is that the food would be grown in a sustainable way, but that is not always the case.

Also many pesticides which are used in conventional agriculture can harm other organisms. Only a small amount of pesticides actually reach the target organism.