What are cons of Sustainable agriculture?
Question by Courtney: What are cons of Sustainable agriculture?
There have to be at least 3
Can you help? Leave your own answer in the comments!
4 Responses to What are cons of Sustainable agriculture?
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limited amount of arable land- we can’t make more farmable land and maintain sustainability
limited amount of production- at the max of production (which is ever increasing thanks to technology) population would hit carrying capacity resulting in diseases and plagues during years of low production (same with non-sustainable except it would happen sooner, but at least it would be less severe)
it’s not the best “right now” solution in situations where food is limited and practices to get more outweigh future implications
soiltx
May 22, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Interesting…
I’d say that right now we don’t have much information on farming sustainably, I mean, today we have companies that specialize in pesticides, fertilizers, equipment, etc. and they know all about their products and can recommend something for every problem a farmer might encounter. On the other hand, most sustainable farmers have to figure out their problems themselves, or rely on other sustainable farmers and a very limited number of researchers for advice.
Food produced sustainably also costs more money. Although it is typically more nutritious, and eating well can reduce many health problems and could save money in the long run many people can’t afford it.
If all conventional farmers switched to sustainable farming, it would put many chemical companies out of business, and a lot of workers would be out of a job. However, sustainable farms are typically smaller and require more workers, so they would create jobs.
I think overall the pros of sustainable ag outweigh the cons, and I think we should support sustainable farms all we can. However, I think that if we’re going to start farming sustainably, we need to switch gradually. A gradual change would allow time to learn more, make smaller mistakes, learn more from those mistakes, and overall just give everyone (farmers and consumers alike) time to adjust. Also, many “cons” would cease to exist, for example, lack of information would eventually not be a problem, because we’d have time to research and learn, and chemical company employees would have more time to make a career change to working or even owning a farm.
Just my opinion 🙂
me :)
May 22, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Unless you are directly involved growing food,,,
1. You would go hungry
2. Your parents would go hungry
3. Food would be too expensive to buy because there would be so litle of it.
4. world starvation would be normal
I’m in Agriculture so I would be fine I can grow my own food. Can you ??
People have zero concept of what sustainable would entail…
logicalanswer
May 22, 2012 at 2:59 pm
From the above answers, I think it’s fairly obvious that the term “sustainable” means different things to different people.
One answerer seems to have it mixed up with “organic”.
Sustainable is supposed to mean production methods that will keep land in production indefinitely rather than wearing it out, using it up, or polluting it to the point it can’t be used to grow food. That does NOT mean no pesticide, herbicide, or chemical fertilizer use. It means managing your land for long term (multi generation) production.
The problems? Modern expectations, regulations and marketing discourages it.
Regulations prohibiting the use of livestock manure for fertilizer, or making it to expensive to use, prevent people from recycling the natural phosphorus sources and force us to use chemical and rock based sources.
Marketing “sustainable” has created so many misconceptions that people really have no idea who or what is going on. It is NOT going back to farming with horses and hand milking cows as those methods can not produce enough food if only one percent of America is growing it! Storage, transportation and other regulations also make it hard (and expensive!) to produce and market products from “sustainable” farming practices.
There’s just so much and most of it is regulation based that prevents sustainable practices from being viable.
SLA
May 22, 2012 at 3:35 pm