A recent NY Times article by James McWilliams examined the claim that organic agriculture can mitigate climate change and cited carbon sequestration research done by Rodale Institute.

McWilliams and Savage are right to highlight the complexity of the link between greenhouse gases, global warming and agriculture. For a true comparison between conventional and organic, however, the complete organic system of farming ought to be taken into account-all the way from field to fork. For that matter, so too should the conventional-from factory, to field, to fork.

To recap: so far our research is showing that organic agricultural practices sequester more carbon in the soil than conventional practices. As McWilliams notes, however, global warming isn’t just a carbon thing-methane and nitrous oxide are major factors as well. He’s right about that.

However, the claim that organic methods have a higher carbon footprint is still debatable. McWilliams writes, quoting Dr. Steve Savage:

83 percent of the U.S.’s agricultural production today is in row crops (corn, wheat, hay, and soy) grown on a large scale. It is on the basis of these premises that Savage calculates what would happen to GHG [greenhouse gas ]emissions if all these staples were produced organically. His answer, which he claims to have checked out with hundreds of scientists, is eye-opening to the extreme: organic methods lead to a “carbon footprint” that’s fourteen times higher than if conventional methods were employed.

This is based on some major assumptions and ignores a few facts about organic agriculture. For example:

1. Organic is, in part, about the absence of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers. But it’s really about an entire system that works in a way that mimics nature. Monoculture on a massive scale-devoting 83% of farmland to three crops-isn’t how nature works.

2. In an organic system, crop fertility is primarily based on cover crops and crop rotation. In fact, in the Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial, now in its 30th year, an organic legume system with no outside inputs of compost or manure has sustained equivalent crop yields to both the conventional and organic manure systems.

3. Compost is primarily a waste management practice. Compared to the most widely utilized manure-management practice of storing waste in lagoons, compost greatly reduces methane emissions. Composting is a widely accessible technology that can be implemented on farms of any size to reduce manure-linked methane emissions and eliminate waste transport-related emissions. In contrast, lagoon-based anaerobic digestion is currently only accessible to very large CAFOs, which pose tremendous risks to public health in terms of antibiotic use and nutrient pollution from storage lagoon spills. Further, compost has many indirect soil quality benefits.

4. The Rodale Institute has pioneered organic no-till farming practices. We’ve even designed and built the no-till roller crimper, which farmers can build themselves using plans from our website. It’s also available for purchase from I&J Manufacturing. Here’s how it works: In temperate regions, farmers can establish a winter annual cover crop like hairy vetch or rye, or a mixture of several cover crops in the fall. Then, in the spring, when the cover crops bloom, farmers can mount the roller-crimper on the front of their tractors, a planter on the back, and establish corn, soybeans, or vegetable crops into the mat of cover crop mulch. Usually the next thing farmers need to do is harvest.