Organic Farming Competes with Chemical-Intensive Practices on Resilience, Input Costs, and Profitability

(Beyond Pesticides, September 23, 2025) A study published in European Journal of Agronomy, based on a 16-year, long-term experiment (LTE), finds that organic crops (cotton production with wheat and soybean rotations) in tropical climates are competitive with chemical-intensive (conventional) systems when evaluating systems’ resilience (to weather and insect resistance), input costs, and profitability. One of the underlying assumptions of continuous pesticide use is that they will continue to serve as effective weapons in the never-ending war against insects, weeds, and fungal diseases that threaten the economic viability and sustainability of the farming operations. While organic systems faced reduced yields due to pest pressures from pink bollworm infestations, their relative decline was much smaller than that of the chemical-intensive operations. This study’s findings indicate that a different direction is not only possible, but necessary, for the long-term financial viability of farms. Farmers understand that the health of the soil is a compounding investment that will help or hurt you depending on the actions taken yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The authors state in the study introduction that the long-term study is critical when studying organic productivity and profitability because short-term studies fail to capture. “Critical variables like soil health, pest dynamics, and nutrient cycling often change slowly and can have cumulative effects over the long term,” the authors note.

The authors note that the study does not explore in detail the adverse impact of chemical-intensive farming on water, biodiversity, and climate, and the costs associated with these “externalities.” The authors write: “It is important to note that this study focuses on farm-gate transactions and does not account for the broader environmental and social externalities associated with each production system. A true cost accounting framework, which incorporates the internalization of these externalities – deemed crucial for achieving the sustainability of agri-food systems (Sandhu, 2021, Sandhu et al., 2019) – would likely alter the perceived balance of productivity and profitability between organic and conventional production systems.” See the previous Daily News, Study Shows Value of Organic Practices in Lowering Environmental Impact of Agriculture, which addresses the benefits of organic land management as a public good.