Welcome!
What has the scientific community discovered about the quality, nutritional characteristics and production practices used in organic agriculture? Use the menu on the left to check out summaries, grouped according to topic, of peer-reviewed, scientific studies by international scientists and researchers regarding many aspects of organic agriculture.
Selection of Articles
The goal of this project is to capture existing data from peer-reviewed articles in the scientific community to provide information about organic agriculture so that users can draw their own conclusions. Information also can be used to help focus future research. The original literature review was done in 2006 and 2007 by David Kwaw-Mensah, a doctoral student in the Department of Agricultural Education and Studies at Iowa State University. He worked under the direction of Jerry DeWitt, tenured professor in the ISU Department of Entomology and director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Summaries of new scientific research will be added to this web site on a periodic basis as they become available. Read more about the project here.
This project does not make any attempt to recommend organically grown food over conventionally grown food, or to infer that organically grown food could provide nutritional health benefits, perceived or otherwise.
Research cited on this web site was selected if two conditions were met:
- The research was published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal or publication, and
- The research involved a comparison or specific trait of organic food.
This web site contains summaries of the original articles, with appropriate references listed for a full review of articles. Descriptions about the scientific findings and conclusions are those of the original author, and not this project.