Sustainable Agriculture: Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?

As the global population increases, adequate food supply becomes an increasingly considered problem. Many farms nowadays adopt unsustainable agricultural practices in order to generate a large amount of food and feed the growing population. These farms are usually intensive, commercial farming companies that not only farm to produce the food necessary but also farm to sell crop for cash.

Intensive farming practices involve monoculture – which involves only planting one type of crop across mass amounts of soil, causing the depletion of certain nutrients in the soil and thus soil degradation –the excessive use of inorganic fertilizers – which causes soil toxification – and excessive irrigation – which can cause problems such as soil erosion, salinization, and degradation.

Although large amounts of foods are produced via these processes, the soil usually becomes infertile after the harvest of crops in these systems and unable to produce anymore crops in the future.

Thus, it is important to farm sustainably: ensuring the health of the plantation environment while generating enough food. Common practices to ensure sustainable agriculture involve multiculture farming, rotational farming and grazing, drip irrigation, and even vertical farming.

In today’s world of rapid environmental changes and population growth, it becomes increasingly important to regulate our farming practices to ones that are sustainable.