What happens on our farms has huge consequences for our climate and impact on climate change. In New Zealand, nearly half of our national greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. The way we farm can make or break the health of our atmosphere.

The good news is that organic farming is climate-friendly, and could even counteract climate change if practiced on a large enough scale.

Agriculture’s climate problem stems from the way industrial farming is practiced. Soil erosion has caused massive carbon loss from soils into the atmosphere. And the synthetic nitrogen fertilisers used in conventional farming are very bad for our climate. First, these fertilisers are manufactured using intensive fossil fuel energy. Then, when the fertilisers are applied to soil, the result is a release of nitrous oxide, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

Organic farming offers a clear and promising alternative, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and getting carbon back into soils, where it belongs. Organic soil practices eliminate the need for synthetic fertilisers, and enable soil to store more carbon. One of the most comprehensive comparisons of organic and conventional farm soils found that organic soils had 26% more long-term carbon-storage potential.

Organic practices can also make farms more resilient to climate change, by improving soil health. A 40-year comparison of organic and conventional farms found that organic cropping systems can produce yields up to 40% higher in times of drought than conventional systems. That trial also found that organic farming used 45% less energy and released 40% fewer carbon emissions.

Some truly exciting research is now showing that shifting to regenerative organic farming practices could actually counteract climate change on a global scale. Organic farm soils have the power to pull huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. The Rodale Institute has calculated that if all the world’s farms switched to regenerative organic agriculture, farm soils could completely sequester all of our current carbon emissions. The practices necessary to achieve this are simply an intensive version of smart organic practices: cover cropping, composting and designing crop rotations that reduce the need to till the soil.