August 2026

For decades I've been trying to get a definitive picture on whether organic agriculture is actually better for the environment. And if it is — where's the widespread adoption? When I started out, organic was treated as a fringe idea. Now, the pendulum has swung so far the other way that it's often treated as inherently virtuous, even beyond environmentalist circles. Perhaps it's for that reason that it's been remarkably difficult to find anyone willing to discuss it. That has made me even more keen to do it properly, and I finally found the perfect person to discuss it after realizing how relevant it was to his main focus, and another great interest of mine — the land sparing versus land sharing debate.

Andrew Balmford is a Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, whom I met many years back when he was on sabbatical in South Africa. He is one of the world's leading authorities on land sparing (using the land intensively on a smaller footprint, so we can leave more of nature intact) and land sharing (using the land gently but across larger areas and making it friendlier for wildlife). Organic is a somewhat classic example of land sharing, as we discuss. Andrew has spent the better part of two decades across five continents, measuring what different kinds of agriculture do to biodiversity. We talk about what the data show, why he thinks the conservation movement has got organic wrong, and what a serious plan to feed the world without wrecking it would actually require.

Links to resources:

• Sustainable high-yield farming is essential for bending the curve of biodiversity loss - 2025 paper by Andrew and co-authors in Philosophical Transactions B.

• Reconciling Food Production and Biodiversity Conservation: Land Sharing and Land Sparing Compared - 2011 article by Andrew and co-authors in Science.

• The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming - 2018 article by Andrew and co-authors in Nature Sustainability.

• Reflections on the Global Biodiversity Framework: Achievements, gaps, and future priorities - The 2024 essay compilation in One Earth that Andrew referred to in the discussion.