Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impacts are fully understood. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada are doing their part to change that.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, University of British Columbia, and University of Colorado Boulder discovered that organic farming significantly affects the amount of pesticide used in neighboring fields. The study, published in Science, found that the impact depends on the density and spacing of organic and conventional fields, and clustering organic fields together could provide the most benefits for all farmers.