This is and isn’t true. It is true that organic farms may produce less chemical-enriched runoff. What isn’t true — and perhaps surprisingly so — is that its lack of “scale” is good for the environment.
Let’s use the smaller, family-owned organic farm as an example. If no pesticides at all are used on organic crops, there is a significant drop in the amount of usable food produced per unit of land. According to Scientific American, organic farms produce around 80 percent of what the same size conventional farm does — with some even stating that organic farming produces half of a conventional farm’s yield.
While this isn’t a deal-breaker on a small scale, if the whole world adapted to this way of farming, we would need to clear much more of Earth’s ice-free land (which is already dwindling) in order to meet our food needs, which would wipe out numerous animal habitats, and leave even less room for an expanding population.
In fact, Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues estimates that modern high-yield farming has saved 15 million square miles of wildlife habitat, and that if the world switched to organic farming, we’d need to cut down 10 million square miles of forest. What’s so “green” about that?