● lower stocking densities and production levels than in conventional systems (stocking densities on dairy farms on average 80% lower; on beef and sheep farms 40-80% lower). Organic certification Definitions of ‘organic’ farming vary internationally. Many countries operate national or ‘private’ standards, which do not have statutory status. The International Federation of Organic Farming Moveme...

A window of opportunity to promote organic farming is open for the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) that joined the EU in 2004. The development of organic farming has the potential to decrease the amount of nutrient leaching to the Baltic Sea and could help to stop the environmental degradation of the Sea. However, this requires a diverse set of institutions. This paper explores th...

During the last century, the changing forms of agriculture drastically influenced many native plant and animal populations. In the efforts to reduce these negative impacts on biodiversity, a number of agricultural enterprises began farming in a more environmentally friendly ways; in addition to conventional farm management, new forms of integrated and organic farming appeared, the latter having...

To promote global food and ecosystem security, several innovative farming systems have been identified that better balance multiple sustainability goals. The most rapidly growing and contentious of these systems is organic agriculture. Whether organic agriculture can continue to expand will likely be determined by whether it is economically competitive with conventional agriculture. Here, we ex...

Organic farming, a low intensity system, may offer benefits for a range of taxa, but what affects the extent of those benefits is imperfectly understood. We explored the effects of organic farming and landscape on the activity density and species density of spiders and carabid beetles, using a large sample of paired organic and conventional farms in the UK. Spider activity density and species d...

Five durum wheat cultivars were grown in a Mediterranean area (Southern Italy) under conventional and organic farming with the aim to evaluate agronomic, technological, sensory, and sanitary quality of grains and pasta. The cultivar Matt produced the best pasta quality under conventional cropping system, while the quality parameters evaluated were unsatisfactory under organic farming. The culti...

Both organic and conventional farming processes require energy input in the form of diesel fuel for farming equipment, animal feed, and fertilizer compounds. The most significant difference between the two methods is the use in conventional farming of mineral fertilizers and pesticides that are minimally employed in organic management. It is argued that organic farming is more environmentally f...

The organic agriculture represents a promising alternative for the future of European agriculture. It is consistent with the notion of sustainable development set forth already in the 1992 CAP Reform. Despite of increasing importance of organic farming, the research on organic farming is still limited. This scarcity of the research is especially true for New Member States of the enlarged EU. Th...

The growth of organic farming practices in the last few decades is continuing to stimulate the international debate about this alternative food market. As a p art of a PhD project r esearch about embeddedness in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), this paper focuses on the promotional aspects of organic farms websites from the Madrid region. As a theoretical tool, some knowledge categories drawn ...

Organic farming avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers and promises food production with minimal environmental impact, however this farming practice does not often result in the same productivity as conventional farming. In recent years, biochar has received increasing attention as an agricultural amendment and by coating it with minerals to form biochar-mineral complex (BMC) carbon retention ...