Agriculture

Agriculture is the act of cultivating and planting certain crops or keeping livestock. Agriculture is for humans to produce the greatest amount of food in the smallest amount of area. That way, we can insure our survival.

There are two categories in agriculture: animal farming and plant farming. Animal farming is where we keep livestock and feed them to get the greatest amount of meat. Plant farming is when we plant crops and toil the soil so that they receive the greatest amount of nutrients and sunlight. That way, when we harvest the crops, we can have enough food.

Agriculture is the symbol that humans have gone from hunting and gathering to having a proper civilization. It enabled us to have a stable food supply. However, this food supply relied on nature and the environment; if a drought suddenly came crops would die. This supply of food also enabled more people to survive, and so enabled humans to live in large groups with larger populations. More people mean a greater need for food and so humans started to use places that were supposed to be the environment to cultivate crops. In this article we will be focusing on plant farming.

We can find out how much people a community can support by finding the carrying capacity of agriculture. To calculate the carrying capacity of a piece of land, we can use Hectares as a unit of calculation.

 Total hectares of land used for agriculture × crop yield every year per hectare = carrying capacity

Number of crops each person consumes each year                per Hectare

The carrying capacity is also greatly influenced by the type of crop, the method of growing the crop, and the geographic position. If we calculate the carrying capacity of different regions we will find that It is able to sustain the whole population. A lot of people still die of hunger. 30% of food are wasted, some crops go to livestock and some crops get used for industrial purposes. For cereals, 20% is used for industrial purposes, 35% used to feed live stocks and only 45% is directly eaten by humans. Food produced is concentrated in specific areas so, some people get more food than they need, and some people don’t get enough food at all. If crops were grown in Canada, crops wouldn’t yield very well. If they were planted in south Asia, crop yields would be very high.

I think the answer to this problem would be to use new technologies either to enable areas unsuitable to grow crops to grow crops, transport crops faster or to increase crop yield. We could use new scientific methods of growing our crops, such as making the farmland into a man-made food chain. Like keeping fish in canals going through the crops. The crops feed fish in the canals next to it and the fish waste in turn fertilizes the crops. Another example of a new technology would be to use hydroponics or soilless fertilization.

      Big scale agriculture can lead to a lot of problems. If we expand agriculture into nature, it will mean deforestation. Such as In the Amazon rainforest. It has the world’s greatest amount biodiversity, and also produces 25% of the worlds oxygen. A lot of ranchers, loggers, and farmers, cut down large pieces of the forest. It leads to both the decrease of oxygen produced by the Oxygen-carbon cycle and the loss of biodiversity. Too much deforestation and use of chemical fertilizers, will also lead to desertification, making large pieces of ground unsuitable for vegetation. Chemical fertilizers are also a great factor towards the pollution of the environment, it could be brought into rivers and lakes by runoffs causing acid rain and destruction of the biodiversity of animals. Agriculture that is not done properly can impact the environment greatly and negatively.

Agriculture can actually have some positive effects on the environment if done properly. Small scale Agriculture can recreate and afforest some places that have undergone desertification. We can plant strong tall crops, such as planting apple trees in the middle of deserts. A green land in the middle of the desert can help sustain some animals who are dying of lack of water. It can block desert storms that could destroy many trees and other vegetation, which will help us recreate the environment.

             We can try to develop agriculture in a sustainable way. Instead of clearing large pieces of land to grow crops, we can find large pieces of land that have already undergone desertification to grow crops. We can plant crops and at the same time recreate some certain areas. We can dig man-made canals across barren land so that other organisms can also flourish there and recreate the land for us all. We can also increase the crop yield so that we don’t need to use land from the environment, we can instead reuse the land we have already used. Chemical fertilizers also contribute a lot to the pollution of the environment, they disturb both the phosphorus cycle and the nitrogen cycle. So instead of chemical fertilizers, we can use the waste of animals. For example, planting crops next to where cows graze. The cows eat part of the crops and expel waste materials, the waste can in turn fertilize the crops. Another example would be growing coffee under the canopy of trees in the Amazon rainforest. Animals pass here and there leaving waste materials behind which can fertilize the coffee. There are lots of ways to grow crops in a renewable and sustainable way. We can also keep fish in canals going through the crops. Hydroponics (growing crops without soil in water) is also a way to improve crop yield and enable barren areas to grow crops. We can use the advance of technology to develop agriculture in a good way.

By Leo Ji