I found this very informative piece the other day while doomscrolling on Twitter.  This is out of the periodical Foreign Policy, and addresses a very rapid conversion of an entire country to organic agriculture, and the subsequent upset to its economy:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis/

The long and short of it is that in 2019 the president of Sri Lanka promised to transition his country's entire agriculture to organic, and in April 2021 made good on his word and banned the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by the country's farmers.

For those of you close to production agriculture, the subsequent results should not really be surprising.  Only six months into the ban, production of rice fell by 20%, and the drop in tea production, which is a very big part of Sri Lanka's exports, resulted in economic losses of $425 million.  Coupled with a huge reduction of tourism due to Covid-19, the economy went into crisis, with higher inflation, a depreciating currency and talk about defaulting on government debts.

The ban on synthetic fertilizer has since been lifted, although the subsidies for its purchase previously in place have not come back, so the economic hangover is still lingering.  

While a lot of this economic catastrophe has to do with a headstrong leader apparently not constrained by enough policy-making guardrails, the mathematics of modern crop production reveals what is unavoidable.  Simply put, the concentration of nutrients for agricultural production supplied by synthetic fertilizers cannot be replaced by organic fertilizers.  Whereas in our early history humanity expanded production by farming more land, that is no longer possible to a great extent (even more so in the case of an island nation like Sri Lanka), so we have to get more out of the land which is still available.  This synthetic fertilizers have done quite handily, resulting, in combination with improvements in plant breeding and irrigation, in more than a doubling of crop yields worldwide since World War 2.  Meaning that, as the article points out, of the 8 billion people alive today, 4 billion are being sustained by the increased crop output made possible by synthetic fertilizers.

Rather than this all being an exercise in "I told you so", I think more than anything this should serve as a lesson in being more gradual and deliberative in the implementation of agricultural policy.  Bearing in mind the yield limitations set by the lower nutrient concentrations of organic fertilizers, organic agriculture has a lot going for it to be sure, and has its place absolutely, and here on the Central Coast we have some very smart people doing very good work on it. But none of the experts I know in this would ever advocate a 100% commitment in such a short period as was done in Sri Lanka.