still no free lunch
From Worldwatch Institute:
Farmers today can grow two to three times as much grain, fruit, and vegetables on a plot of land as they could 50 years ago, but the nutritional quality of many crops has declined, according to a new report from The Organic Center, a group based in Boulder, Colorado. “To get our recommended daily allowance of nutrients, we have to eat many more slices of bread today than people had to eat in the past,” notes report author and Worldwatch Institute food expert Brian Halweil. “Less nutrition per calorie consumed affects consumers in much in the same way as monetary inflation; that is, we have more food, but it’s worth less in terms of nutritional value.”
An abundance of nothingness.
Plants cultivated to produce higher yields tend to have less energy for other activities like growing deep roots and generating phytochemicals—health-promoting compounds like antioxidants—the report explains. And conventional farming methods, such as close plant spacing and the application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, often cause crops to absorb fewer nutrients and have unhealthy root systems and less flavor, and sometimes make them more vulnerable to pests.
Using GM crops pumped up with fertilizers and pesticides to increase yields, without worrying about soil quality, sounds a bit like stuffing ourselves with corn flakes and popping pills to compensate for lack of nutrition. In fact, Kellogg's adds the missing vitamins and minerals for us, so everything's OK, right? Some people think the fertilizer industry is part of a conspiracy hatched by Big Oil. If only it were that simple.
Organic farming methods, on the other hand, use manure or cover crops to provide nutrition to crops, have more balanced mixtures of nutrients, and tend to release the nutrients more slowly, the report explains. According to Benbrook, this means plants “develop more robust root systems that more aggressively absorb nutrients from the soil profile, and produce crops with higher concentrations of valuable nutrients and phytochemicals.” Organic food may have as much as 20 percent higher nutritional content for some minerals, and 30 percent more antioxidants on average, than conventional fare, the report concludes.
The press release doesn't mention water consumption, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the weaker root systems of modern methods also require more water than organic farming. Certainly modern farming is heavily dependent on cheap energy and abundant water, both of which are disappearing fast.

