Sustainability of three apple production systems

Escalating production costs, heavy reliance on non-renewable resources, red uced biodiversity, water contamination, chemical residues in food, soil deg radation and health risks to farmworkers handling pesticides all bring into question the sustainability of conventional farming systems(1-4). It has b een claimed(5,6), however, that organic farming systems are less efficient, pose greater health risks and produce half the yields of conventional farm ing systems. Nevertheless, organic farming became one of the fastest growin g segments of US and European agriculture during the 1990s(7,8). Integrated farming, using a combination of organic and conventional techniques, has b een successfully adopted on a wide scale in Europe(9). Here we report the s ustainability of organic, conventional and integrated apple production syst ems in Washington State from 1994 to 1999. All three systems gave similar a pple yields. The organic and integrated systems had higher soil quality and potentially lower negative environmental impact than the conventional syst em. When compared with the conventional and integrated systems, the organic system produced sweeter and less tart apples, higher profitability and gre ater energy efficiency. Our data indicate that the organic system ranked fi rst in environmental and economic sustainability, the integrated system sec ond and the conventional system last.