Intensive farming, designed to give the greatest food yield per hectare, is widely believed to create higher levels of pollution and damage to the environment than organic farming. But the reality is that the opposite is the case: a global research team measured what they call 'externalities' – the environmental costs such as greenhouse gas emissions, fertiliser and water use – of producing a given amount of food on both high-yield and low-yield farms. In its study of dairy farming in Switzerland, it found that high-yield systems were actually less damaging to the environment than organic, which by contrast took up twice as much land for the same volume of milk and caused at least one-third more soil loss than conventional dairy farming.