The provision of food causes environmental impacts that range from local through to global
in scale. Organic farming, used in general here to mean farming practices with a greater
emphasis on long-term sustainability, is one general approach to reduce these impacts. Whilst
organic farming may be argued to be superior to conventional farming on the basis of local
impacts, it is not often clear how organic farming performs relative to conventional farming
in terms of wider, global impacts. In this paper we present a comparative assessment of onfarm
and indirect energy consumption, land disturbance, water use, employment, and emissions
of greenhouse gases, NOx, and SO2 of organic and conventional farming in Australia.
A hybrid input-output-based life-cycle technique is employed in order to ensure a complete
coverage of indirect requirements originating from all upstream production stages. Using data
from a detailed survey of organic farms, the results show that direct energy use, energy related
emissions, and greenhouse gas emissions are higher for the organic farming sample than for a
comparable conventional farm sample. Direct water use and employment are significantly
lower for the organic farms than for the conventional farms. However, the indirect contributions
for all factors are much higher for the conventional farms, leading to their total impacts