The organic production model is regarded as an important way to ensure food safety and achieve agricultural sustainable development. Presented in this paper is an emergy-based analysis of two typical popular chicken rearing systems in China, i.e., family operated organic rearing system and field rearing system in orchard, from the perspective of production efficiency, environmental impact and the overall sustainability. Emergy analysis capable of accounting for both economic aspect and the natural contribution to production on a common basis, allowing meaningful comparison across different systems, has been applied in many cases and proved to be a powerful tool to assessment of ecological economic systems and processes, with special focus on the agricultural field. According to the new development of emergy methodology, new emergy parameters, i.e., the renewability factor of each item was incorporated in this study to improve emergy accounting. System indices such as the emergy yield ratio (EYR), environmental load ratio (ELR) and environmental sustainability index (ESI) were applied to characterize the resource use, environmental impact and the overall sustainability of the studied systems. In addition, the similar evaluation results conducted in Italy(scatter rearing system in grassland and conventional scale rearing system)were also introduced for reference and comparison. The indices calculated for family operated organic system and scattering system in orchard respectively are as follows: the transformation, 4.24×10⁶ sej/J and 2.20×10⁶sej/J; EYR, 1.10 and 1.11; ELR, 3.10 and 3.44; ESI, 0.36 and 0.32. In consideration of the two concerned systems in China, it can be found that the lower transformity indicates that the family operated system is less efficient in food taking and consequently has lower efficiency in emergy conversion compared with scatter rearing system in orchard. The emegy yield ratio (EYR) for the two production system are both very low and close to 1, which simply means that each process only converts resources from outside into product without much addition from local resources. However, as indicated by ELR and ESI, family operated organic systems produces lower ecosystem stress and pressure on environment and correspondingly is more sustainable than scatter rearing system in orchard. Nevertheless, despite being close to the concept of organic production practice in consideration of rearing space for exercise and food taking, the field rearing system has a relative poor performance with regard to overall sustainability, which is attributable to large amount input of external purchased resources, e.g. the building materials, drugs, food and so on. Further comparison with systems in Italy shows that due to longer life cycle, chicken systems in China have relatively lower production efficiency and higher economic cost. With regard to environmental load and overall sustainability, their performance has already been better than conventional scale rearing system in Italy, but still far from the practice of scatter rearing system. Anyway, two so-called organic production systems concerned in this paper still heavily rely on purchase industrial resource and are less efficient in exploring the local resource and far from the real practice of organic production. Additionally, higher economic cost results in less competitive in world market. Therefore innovation in production techniques and institutional reforms associated with organic pattern are urgently needed in China.