Is sustainable agriculture the key to todays problem of increasing environmental degradation?
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Question by blackest rider: Is sustainable agriculture the key to todays problem of increasing environmental degradation?
What do you think? Answer below!
6 Responses to Is sustainable agriculture the key to todays problem of increasing environmental degradation?
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All agriculture is sustainable so long as sufficient seeds and young animals are raised for the next crop or harvest.
However, the population of the planet has doubled in about 40 years to 6 billion. We might expect it to rise to 10 billion by 2030 and to 40 billion by 2100. There is no possibility of feeding this population with current agricultural methods or food-crops.
Also, that number of people cannot possibly live in the territories we currently occupy. More and more land must be given over to housing, water collection, water treatment and sewage management, transport and so on.
The answer must lie in two scientific developments:
1. Genetic modification of crops to produce higher yields, longer storage life, greater nutritional value.
2. Changes to current agricultural processes where vast areas of land are given over to rather low-yield old fashioned crops. New high-concentration crops must produce 50 tonnes per hectare instead of the current 5-10 tonnes, in controlled environments, with appropriate additives, collected by industrial methods and distributed around the world by new transport technologies.
Otherwise, the end of the human race will not come by disease or nuclear war but by bad old-fashioned famine. If today’s farming methods are still in use in 2050, we might expect two-thirds of the human race to die of starvation. Not in USA, of course, because the administration will make sure that fertile areas of the Earth are under US military control. It will just be everyone else who starves to death.
Victor
February 4, 2012 at 8:17 am
I live on a farm and if somthing isn’t done there wont be no farming. Everey thing you grow and try to feed, in the end you dont make anything. It to expensive to fertilize and spray crops to come out in the end. It is to expensive to feed animals and then take them to sell and not get enough to pay your feed bill, and we grind our own feed. The small farms will be gone before you know it and then watch the price of food and clothing sky rocket. The economy doesn’t help us right know and neither is obama.
moosedog2638
February 4, 2012 at 9:01 am
I think Victor works for Monsanto.
He seems to know a lot, if you lived in a box and never left the city his comments might seem to make a lot of sense. Some of the scary things he says may indeed come to pass, but not because of ‘natural’ causes.
First, GMO, Genetically Modified Organism are flat out dangerous. you can do your own research use your own logic and common sense to make a decision on that.
The federal govt and companies that create GMOs are doing more to damage not only our agricultural abilities but the environment as well.
One right after the other the family farm is being pushed out of existence. Farm land is being reduced, and more and more held by a few large agri-corps. Agriculture itself is so legislated on the small scale that very very soon it is going to be illegal to grow your own vegetables in your own garden. Huge tracts of farm-able land sits, all through the United States. There are more places than less in the U.S. where you can drive for hours through land that could be farmed? Why is it not? Laws. Thats the only reason.
I find it interesting that some talk about “sustainable farming” sustainable farming was pioneered in the 1800s and perfected right up to the 1940s. By that time the small independent farmer pretty much had it down, crop rotation etc.
I feel for Moosedog, he’s so close to the problem and even he doesnt see the big picture. He thinks its all just economics, but it’s not. Its a systematic plan that has been well executed over many years.
This is not conspiracy theory craziness, this is observation of a few facts.
If demand is greater than supply, the price goes up.
If the total number of farmland decreases and total amount of product supplied decreases then demand must exceed supply and thereby drive prices up.
If prices increase due to normal factors, then the original supplier (the farmer) should realize a higher profit for their produce.
We have less farmland and fewer farms.
We have less produce from that farmland and fewer farms.
We have larger population that must consume that produce. Making the demand obviously exceed the supply, driving the prices up.
That would mean a greater dollar income to the farmer. But as Moosedog may testify the individual farmer is not realizing an increase in income.
Why?
Where is the money. Your paying more for a gallon of milk at the grocery store than ever before. But the independent dairies all over the nation are dumping their milk because they cant make enough money to sell it. Independent dairies across the nation are not making more for a gallon of milk then they made 5 years ago, yet the retail price of milk has gone up ten fold in that time period. Half of the dairy farms that were around ten years ago are now gone. Where’s the money going? I don’t know, but I know it’s not getting down to the farmer.
meh. who cares. your not listening anyway.
jackiniraq
February 4, 2012 at 9:37 am
No. As long as you do not describe what you mean by “sustainable agriculture”, every form of agriculture is sustainable. Also you have to describe “environmental degradation” and where it is situated.
Remember “the” environment does not exist because you have show us where it is.
Hope you are helped with this answer.
EUGAIA
February 4, 2012 at 10:13 am
nope.. population reduction is the answer.. we are currently over 6.7 billion people.. every mouth to feed, every one wanting toilet paper for their bums… more people also = more pollution etc..
CF_
February 4, 2012 at 10:46 am
I won’t go into detail, but jackiniraq is wrong on several accounts.
About this environmental degradation, it’s obvious you’re a young person. I’m sure I’ve been around a lot longer than you and take my word for it that the environment (at least in the US) is in much better shape than it was 40 years ago. And a heck of a lot better shape than in the early part of the 19th century. Just about all of the EPA “Superfund” clean up sites are from businesses that were in operation pre-1970.
I remember when in 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Ohio actually caught fire and burned for several days. It was so polluted with industrial wastes that once it caught fire, it had to burn itself out. And how Lake Erie was so polluted that the game fishing business was nearly gone but now the water is clean and game fishing is thriving. I also remember seeing signs along the Potomac River in 1978 that forbade swimming because the water was polluted badly enough to be dangerous to human health. And bald eagles being put on the endangered list because DDT thinned their egg shells (they have now been removed from the endangered list). When I was a kid, roadside littering left highways looking like a trash dump. In the early 1980’s I worked on “RAMP” projects reclaiming abandoned strip mines left over from the 1930s where the pH of the runoff water tested 1.8-2, stronger than vinegar. Let’s not forget high levels of lead in vegetables grown in fields and gardens near heavily traveled roads because of leaded gasoline. And health problems in large cities because of smog. And let’s not forget rubber being a major air pollutant in Los Angles from automobile tire wear. LA later became the first US city to require the use of longer wearing radial tires. Look up any of the key words I used and you’ll see that I’m not making any of this up.
bikinkawboy
February 4, 2012 at 11:26 am