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Policy support for organic farming - measures, strategies and farm-level perspectives. Coordination (FOEL)

Project


Project code: 2815OE009
Contract period: 01.07.2015 - 30.04.2017
Budget: 146,558 Euro
Purpose of research: Applied research

Organic farming is regarded as a sustainable land use system and is therefore given specific political support in Germany. Although the interdependencies between organic farming and the provision of public goods are increasingly recognised, the potential of organic farming to meet the environmental and resource policy challenges of our time continues to be assessed differently.
The aim of the research project "was therefore among others to compare and evaluate the public services provided by organic and conventional agriculture in the areas of water protection, soil fertility, biodiversity, climate protection, climate adaptation, resource efficiency and animal wel-fare on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of scientific studies.
For each area, a comprehensive systematic literature analysis was carried out with the help of vari-ous databases between April 2017 and March 2018. In addition, conference contributions, project reports and other relevant publications were evaluated. A total of around 12,000 studies published on this topic over the past 30 years were evaluated. The quantitative analysis was based on the results of around 2,700 pair comparisons with one organic and one conventional variant each.
Across all indicators for the fields of environmental protection and resource conservation, organic management showed advantages over conventional management in 58 % of the pairs analysed. No differences were found for 28 %, and in 14 % of the comparison pairs, the conventional management was more advantageous. No clear picture was drawn regarding animal welfare. No substantial differences were found between organic and conventional livestock across all animal species and production forms in 46 % of the comparison pairs. The organic management showed ad-vantages in 35 % of the pairs. However, very few studies have been found considering animal welfare in a comprehensive sense.

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