Research is showing that organic crop yields can be just as high as conventional cropping systems.

Dr. Brian McConkey is a research scientist studying cropping rotations at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Swift Current Research and Development Centre.

He says they were surprised that the organic wheat grown in the wheat-green-manure-legume rotation yielded just as well as the conventional wheat.

"Production practices for our conventional systems, and the certainly the wheat/pulse conventional system, is a fairly well accepted rotation and is known to produce very good wheat yields and yet the organic system matched it in wet years and dry years," explained McConkey.

The protein level in the organic wheat wasn’t as high as the best or over fertilized conventional treatments but it held up at about 12 per cent.