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As global health care demand continues to increase, medicinal plant productivity must progress without exhausting critical environmental resources. Hence, it is important to explore practices that can improve the quality, safety, and sustainability of medicinal plants, as well as ecological stability. Organic farming has recently gained significance as a sustainable cultivation alternative owing to increased awareness of the adverse effects of conventional cultivation method. Here, this study aimed to investigate the feasibility of organic farming as a solution for sustainable cultivation of medicinal plants from multiple perspectives and long-term benefits to the environment. Organic agricultural practices of medicinal plants were evaluated from a multi-dimensional perspective (environment, economy, and society) using extensive research data and literature and field surveys. Data from medicinal plant cultivation in Inner Mongolia were acquired for 76 sites from four data stations between 2014 and 2021. Data analysis revealed that organic medicinal plants can improve safety by reducing pesticide exposure risks. Simultaneously, organic agriculture of medicinal plants can improve biodiversity by effectively reducing pesticide and fertilizer use, which also provides natural safe products for health care. With the improvement of quality, the retail price will have a certain advantage, which will improve the income of farmers. Moreover, organic agriculture enhanced profitability because of the higher organic premium on medicinal plant products and improved ecosystem stability by increasing plant diversity. The findings of this study suggest that organic cultivation strategies can improve the quality and safety of medicinal plants and further provide a basis for promoting the sustainable development and ecological stability of medicinal plants. However, not all medicinal plant cultivators are guaranteed to adopt organic farming practices, but if all technological elements are correctly applied, the system can be maintained sustainably to expand the area of organically cultivated plants in the future.

To provide high-quality Astragalus mongholicus Bunge to domestic and foreign markets and maintain sustainable development of the A. mongholicus industry, Firstly, we evaluated the impact of environmental factors and planting areas on the A. mongholicus industry. The maximum entropy method (MaxEnt) was utilized to simulate the suitability distribution of A. mongholicus and establish the relationship between the active component contents of A. mongholicus and ecological factors through linear regression analysis. The random forest algorithm was subsequently used to perform feature selection and classification extraction on Sentinel-2 imagery covering the study area. Furthermore, the planting, processing, and sales of A. mongholicus in Guyang County were investigated, and the roles of stakeholders in the value chains were analyzed. The results demonstrated that precipitation of the warmest quarter, minimum temperature of the coldest month, standard deviation of seasonal temperature changes, range of mean annual temperature, and mean diurnal range [mean of monthly (max temp - min temp)] were the five environmental variables that contributed the most to the growth of A. mongholicus. The most influential factor on the distribution of high-quality A. mongholicus was the mean temperature of the coldest quarter. The classification results of image features showed that the planting areas of A. mongholicus was consistent with the suitable planting areas predicted by MaxEnt, which can provide data support to the relevant departments for the macro development of the A. mongholicus industry. In the production of A. mongholicus, 10 value chains were constructed, and the study demonstrated that the behavior of stakeholders, target markets, and the selected planting area had a significant impact on the quality of A. mongholicus.