The DOI matches its Crossref record; 140 of the 140 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap
Open accessAbstract
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.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“Such simplified systems are known to substantially reduce both biodiversity and ecosystem services relative to more diversified forms of agriculture ( 127 -129 )”
From Environmental impacts of genetically modified crops (2024) · cites this paper as [128]
Citations
Cites
Conducting Meta-Analyses in R with the metafor Package
Viechtbauer, W. (2010) · Journal of Statistical Software · doi:10.18637/jss.v036.i03 · Cited by 20,464
Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2006) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511790942 · Cited by 13,597
A safe operating space for humanity
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E. F., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H. J., et al. (2009) · Nature · doi:10.1038/461472a · Cited by 13,333
Global Consequences of Land Use
Foley, J. A., DeFries, R., Asner, G. P., Barford, C., Bonan, G., Carpenter, S. R., Chapin, F. S., Coe, M. T., Daily, G. C., Gibbs, H. K., et al. (2005) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1111772 · Cited by 13,272
Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People
Godfray, H. C. J., Beddington, J. R., Crute, I. R., Haddad, L., Lawrence, D., Muir, J. F., Pretty, J., Robinson, S., Thomas, S. M., & Toulmin, C. (2010) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1185383 · Cited by 11,943
Wasserman, S. S., Hedges, L. V., & Olkin, I. (1988) · Journal of Educational Statistics · doi:10.2307/1164953 · Cited by 10,377
Solutions for a cultivated planet
Foley, J. A., Ramankutty, N., Brauman, K. A., Cassidy, E. S., Gerber, J. S., Johnston, M., Mueller, N. D., O’Connell, C., Ray, D. K., West, P. C., et al. (2011) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature10452 · Cited by 8,476
Soil Carbon Sequestration Impacts on Global Climate Change and Food Security
Lal, R. (2004) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1097396 · Cited by 8,376
Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture
Tilman, D., Balzer, C., Hill, J., & Befort, B. L. (2011) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1116437108 · Cited by 7,692
Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems
Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1156401 · Cited by 6,626
Research works printed but not linked: 5
- FAO, 2009, How to feed the world in 2050
- McIntyre BD, 2009, IAASTD international assessment of agricultural knowledge, science and technology for development: global report
- Cassman K, 2007, Editorial response by Kenneth Cassman: can organic agriculture feed the world-science to the rescue?, Renew. Agric. Food Syst., 22, 83
- Pretty JN, 2001, Reducing food poverty with sustainable agriculture: a summary of new evidence
- Smil V. 2005 Feeding the world: how much more rice do we need? In Rice is life: scientific perspectives for the 21st century (ed. K Toriyama KL Heong B Hardy) pp. 21–23. Manila PH: International Rice Research Institute.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Safeguarding pollinators and their values to human well-being
Potts, S. G., Imperatriz-Fonseca, V., Ngo, H. T., Aizen, M. A., Biesmeijer, J. C., Breeze, T. D., Dicks, L. V., Garibaldi, L. A., Hill, R., Settele, J., et al. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature20588 · Cited by 2,138
Organic agriculture in the twenty-first century
Reganold, J. P., & Wachter, J. M. (2016) · Nature Plants · doi:10.1038/nplants.2015.221 · Cited by 2,130
Sustainable intensification of agriculture for human prosperity and global sustainability
Rockström, J., Williams, J. N., Daily, G. C., Noble, A., Matthews, N., Gordon, L. J., Wetterstrand, H., DeClerck, F., Shah, M., Steduto, P., et al. (2016) · AMBIO · doi:10.1007/s13280-016-0793-6 · Cited by 1,286
Landscapes that work for biodiversity and people
Kremen, C., & Merenlender, A. M. (2018) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aau6020 · Cited by 1,125
Self-citationBiological control using invertebrates and microorganisms: plenty of new opportunities
LENTEREN, J. C. V., Bolckmans, K., Köhl, J., Ravensberg, W. J., & Urbaneja, A. (2017) · BioControl · doi:10.1007/s10526-017-9801-4 · Cited by 1,111
Metadata
- Authors
- Ponisio, L. C., M'Gonigle, L. K., Mace, K. C., Palomino, J., de Valpine, P., & Kremen, C.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, 130 Mulford Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
- Corresponding author
- Ponisio, Lauren C.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2015-01-22
- Volume
- 282
- Issue
- 1799
- Pages
- 20141396
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- PMC
- PMC4286047
- OpenAlex
- W1992197367
- Cited by
- 871
- References
- 140
- Citations by year
- 2026: 58 · 2025: 65 · 2024: 87 · 2023: 104 · 2022: 88 · 2021: 98 · 2020: 74 · 2019: 66 · 2018: 63 · 2017: 75 · 2016: 57 · 2015: 35
- FWCI
- 65.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Organic Food and Agriculture
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant and soil sciences
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agronomy and Crop Science › Agronomic Practices and Intercropping Systems
- Keywords
- organic farming, conventional farming, yield gap, agricultural diversification, multiple cropping, crop rotation, Fabaceae, perennial crops, agroecology, food production
- MeSH terms
- Conservation of Natural Resources, Food Supply, Fabaceae, Soil, Crops, Agricultural, Biodiversity, Organic Agriculture
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
