Organic farming is not what it claims to be. Organic farmers also spray poisons - and not in short supply. Whether synthetic or natural is irrelevant. This is what the advocates of an industrial model of agriculture are increasingly claiming, thus damaging the reputation of organic farming. Reason enough for a fact check. The negative impacts of pesticide use on the environment, biodiversity and health have increasingly become the focus of European policy.1 In 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Biodiversity Council IPBES, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued alarming reports warning of the impacts of land use on biodiversity and climate. In response to these challenges, the EU Commission presented its Farm to Fork strategy in May 2020. This is intended to initiate the transition to a fair, climate- and biodiversity-friendly agricultural and food system in Europe. Key measures include halving the use and risks of pesticides and expanding organic farming to 25 % of EU farmland by 2030.

Yet – or perhaps because of this – advocates of the industrial farming model declare that organic farming is not what it claims to be. In doing so, they essentially argue mainly two claims:

1. Organic farmers use pesticides, and do so with similar frequency to conventional farmers.

2. Natural pesticides allowed in organic farming are of comparable toxicity to the (mostly synthetic) pesticides only allowed in conventional farming.

If these claims were true, not only would the expectations of organic consumers be disappointed; but it would also have to be questioned whether the planned expansion of organic agriculture under the Farm to Fork strategy will be able to make the hoped-for contribution to the protection of pollinators and the restoration of biodiversity. However, if the claims are untrue, such insinuations would not only discredit the European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy but also cause significant economic damage to the European organic sector, which employs hundreds of thousands of people. According to market analyses, the avoidance of pesticide residues is a main motive for the purchase of organic products.23 Therefore, we subjected the above claims that organic products would not meet this expectation to a fact check: We conducted a systematic toxicological comparison of Active Substances (AS) approved only in Conventional agriculture (ConvAS) with the natural Active Substances approved in Organic agriculture (OrgAS) in Europe4. The results of this fact check are published in the Scientific Journal Toxics and will be summarized in the following.