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Near Watsonville, California, a tractor-mounted vacuum in a field of organic strawberries sucks up Lygus bugs that can cause up to $200 million in damages to the state’s berry crop each year. California leads the United States in the number of organic farms (3,061 in 2021) and the number of certified organic acres (more than 800,000), where pesticides are off the menu. Organic agriculture has increased in the US since passage of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, but pesticide use has more than doubled since then. Broad metastudies show that organic crops typically yield around 20 percent less than conventional crops, although that gap narrows to around 9 percent when multi-cropping and crop rotations are used. Some long-term field trials comparing the two production methods show that certain organic crops yield higher during drought or other poor growing conditions.

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Near Watsonville, California, a tractor-mounted vacuum in a field of organic strawberries sucks up Lygus bugs that can cause up to $200 million in damages to the state’s berry crop each year. California leads the United States in the number of organic farms (3,061 in 2021) and the number of certified organic acres (more than 800,000), where pesticides are off the menu. Organic agriculture has increased in the US since passage of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, but pesticide use has more than doubled since then. Broad metastudies show that organic crops typically yield around 20 percent less than conventional crops, although that gap narrows to around 9 percent when multi-cropping and crop rotations are used. Some long-term field trials comparing the two production methods show that certain organic crops yield higher during drought or other poor growing conditions.

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