The Carbon Footprint For Organic Food By Benedict T. Palen, Jr.

There is no doubt that the popularity of organic foods has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 10 years.  Consumers believe that organic foods are healthier for them, and safer for the environment.

But is the latter really true?  I have addressed that question in a couple of ways, and a thoughtful reader might come to a different conclusion about the carbon footprint of organic foods after considering my rationale.

There are climatic limitations on where organic crops can be grown. For example, avocado production is limited to a few relatively small areas of the US, with heavy imports from Mexico during times of the year when there is no US production available to the markets.   This means that, far from the “local food” movement that has become so much in vogue in many areas of the US, significant transportation costs, and petroleum based emissions, play a larger role than consumers might expect when comparing the organic versus conventional avocados.  The same examples can be made of a variety of other crops, which, even if fairly widely adapted in parts of the US, offer organic availability only in limited production areas, which may be further away from most consumer demand centers than the non-organic versions of the same crop.    While the US has country of origin labeling for many products, would it not be sensible to have labeling about the carbon footprint of a certain product?  To be true to the health and environmental benefits that are often part and parcel of organic marketing, would it not be important to disclose this to consumers?

     The other element of this question has to do with farming practices.   Farmers use herbicides and pesticides to control weeds and bugs, respectively.   Without those products, weeds and bugs can lead to greater use of water for the crops (because weeds consume water that the crop would otherwise use, and bugs can increase plant stress, thus increasing plant water needs).    And, because many organic crops will not produce the same quantity as, say, the same crop conventionally grown on a given acre, the result can be that more land, and more water, and needed to grow X amount of organic crops to match the same conventional crop quantity raised on fewer acres of land.

     All of this said, there is not necessarily something “bad” about organic crops.  The fact is, though, that many consumers buy into the sometimes over-hyped notion of organics without considering the environmental costs associated with those crops.

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