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Strategies for environmental protection in agriculture, such as organic farming methods, have been criticised as inefficient users of land for food production. This is based on ‘yield gaps’ that indicate a lower productivity per land area for organic crops. However, evidence linking yield gaps to a reduction in food availability or an increased use of land for organic food production is lacking.

Researchers have used the concept of ‘people fed per hectare’ to demonstrate that agricultural systems differ widely in the ways they deliver calories and protein from farm to plate, suggesting that crop yield alone is not a reliable indicator of food production at national or global scales. To apply this concept to the question of yield gaps, I compared the number of people fed per hectare by organic and conventional agriculture in Denmark. The land area and share of land uses under conventional and organic production were calculated from data published by the Danish government’s departments of agriculture and statistics. Food production was estimated using productivity statistics, estimates of organic-to-conventional yield gaps taken from the scientific literature, and nutritional information on agricultural products.

The results suggest that the different land uses in the two systems currently balance the effect of yield differences’ organic agriculture (as a whole in Denmark) uses a proportionally higher amount of its land for growing crops with a higher land-to-food efficiency, which compensates for the lower yields. This challenges the assumption that organic agriculture produces less food per land area, and suggests that demand for various agricultural products is important in determining land footprints in agriculture. Future studies concerning food production from agricultural systems should account for consumer demand for products with different land footprints.