Organic Farming Outperforms Wildflower Strips on Profits While Both Improve Farm Biodiversity

What makes more sense when farming wheat—strips of wildflowers along fields or organic farming? Both options provide financial support via the European Union as environmentally friendly and sustainable farming practices. An international research team, including researchers from the University of Göttingen, has compared the ecological and economic benefits of these two farming methods in fields planted with winter wheat.

They found that both measures increased biodiversity by 20% to 30% compared with conventionally farmed wheat fields. From an economic perspective, the organic fields were the most profitable. Although yields were only half as high as those of conventionally farmed wheat, profits were 1.5 times higher. The results were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

How the fields were compared

The researchers compared winter wheat fields managed in three different ways: conventionally farmed wheat with a strip of wildflowers; organically farmed wheat; and conventionally farmed wheat with no environmental intervention as a control. They studied nine landscapes in the Göttingen area over a two-year period.

The team found that the organically farmed fields contained the highest number of wild plant species, even though flower strips—including the sown wildflowers—had a similar number of species.