Ukraine is one missed harvest. The article opened up with that as a motivating example, for some reason. increasing the amount of land used for farming does no

Ukraine is one missed harvest. The article opened up with that as a motivating example, for some reason. increasing the amount of land used for farming does not have an impact on its own unless you're deforesting, I guess. but dumping significant amounts of water and fertilizer and pesticide will have an ecological impact, esp on downstream water or maybe drying up the aquafors. So, organic seeks to reduce that impact by zeroing those contributing factors (except water!) This is not unclear, you're trying to slam dunk, I think. Less environmental impact = not as much, say, nitrate runoff, algae toxicity downstream, collateral insect kill off, and so on. On a per-extra-food-unit compared to current baseline (remember we're measuring only new hectares in my example) loss can be 50% and still world food production goes up b/c we're adding hectares. And if organic holds to its claims, we're doing so with less net impact on a per hectacre basis. Anyway, that's one hope of organic farming - its part of a responsible portfolio of cleaner food management that doesn't have unilateral decrees about practices (like TFA does). I'm more in tune with Precision Agriculture, which is a saner, 80/20 solution that has yet to prove itself on a worldwide scale.