Extension Communications |
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6/20/03 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contacts: ISU Extension Releases Organic Crop Research Results This is the sixth crop season that Iowa State University (ISU) Extension researchers are comparing the yields of organic and conventional crop production. The results of the economic returns from 1999 to 2001 were published in a recent edition of the American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, Vol. 18 (2) 59-69. In the study led by Kathleen Delate, assistant professor, Agronomy and Horticulture, at the ISU Neely-Kinyon Research Farm in southwest Iowa, identical hybrid varieties of corn and soybeans are being grown using conventional and organic methods. In the conventional plots, an alternating cycle of corn and soybeans is being grown. In the organic plots, oats and alfalfa are added to the corn-soybean rotation. Each crop in each rotation is planted every year. The organic plots were started in 1998 at the Neely-Kinyon Farm, but economic analysis began in 1999, and is reported in the journal article. "In the first three years we found that soybean yields were not statistically different between conventional and organic, and that organic yellow dent feed corn yields were equivalent in organic and conventional plots," Delate said. "And in the fourth year the organic corn yield and soybean yield in one treatment surpassed the conventional yield. Those yields were in fields that followed two years of alfalfa. The only year organic corn was less than conventional was in 1999, when a white milling variety was grown." A number of parameters are being measured in the research including: economics, weeds, plant pathogens, soybean cyst nematodes, pest insects, beneficial insects, plant tissue nutrients, yields, grain quality and chemical, biological and physical soil quality. Craig Chase, farm management field specialist, ISU Extension, works on
the economic component of the research. "One of the questions you
get with looking at an organic system is labor," he said. "The
assumption is that there's a lot more labor in an organic system than
a conventional system. In this case we haven't seen that." "What we found was that on a rotational average, even without premiums, the organic system had a higher return than the conventional system, so premiums weren't as big an issue as we thought, even when you add labor and start charging $10, $20, $50 an hour for labor." "The only time the conventional system consistently held an economic advantage over the organic was when you add compost costs, labor and no premiums," says Chase. "What we have seen through our research is that organics is definitely a competitive system economically and should be looked at very positively as an alternative to conventional systems." Delate says the research, supported by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and the USDA Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems Organic Agriculture Consortium, is scheduled to continue for at least six more years. You can see a copy of the project's current results on the Web at http://extension.agron.iastate.edu/organicag/researchreports/orgeconomics.pdf. -30- Editors: Below are two tables showing yield and economic results for this research project. Table 1. Yields by crop and rotation, 1999-2001
* Returns within columns followed by the same letter are not significantly different (Analysis of variance, Tukey's test, p=0.05). |
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