PepsiCo recently hired experts to conduct a carbon life cycle analysis on their Tropicana products, including orange juice.  Much to their surprise, "it wasn't running the factory or transporting the heavy juice containers, but the nitrogen fertilizers, which require natural gas to make and can turn into a potent greenhouse gas, that were the primary contributor," according to Wendy Gordon, founder of "The Green Guide" in an article at Huffington Post.

Good for PepsiCo for conducting the study.  It should assist them to make better decisions about how their actions are impacting our planet.  The author connects the dots for them, suggesting that organic farming would make a huge dint in that carbon footprint.  Gordon say that the Rodale Institute's Experimental Farm "provides strong evidence that organic farming practices can do just that -- combat global warming by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and incorporating it into the soil".

"The data come from the institute's Farming Systems Trial launched in 1981, which compared a conventional agriculture system to two types of organic farming systems. Over the course of 23 years, the trial revealed that the two organic systems increased soil carbon by 15 to 28 percent, while the conventional system showed none. For the organic systems that translates into about 3,670 lbs of CO2 per acre-foot per year -- and that's not even counting the reductions in CO2 emissions represented by the fact that organic farming uses just 63 percent of the energy required by conventional farming systems, largely because of the massive amounts of energy required to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer."