By most estimates, the world population is projected to reach 9.6 billion people by 2050. This implies that food production must increase by 70 per cent to meet the demands of such a huge population. Therefore, it is becoming more apparent that serious reforms are required in the agricultural sector to ensure that our food system is ready to meet the challenges of a burgeoning world population. Specifically, we need to shift our agriculture from the conservative industrial food system, that has characterized food production for ages, to sustainable farming.
What is Sustainable Agriculture
Sustainable agriculture is designed with the intention of preserving the environment, expanding the earth’s natural resources, all while creating a quality of life for animals and humans. Sustainable agriculture allows for the desires of society’s food and textile needs to be met without the fear of inhibiting the earth’s natural resources for future generations.
In addition to preserving the earth’s natural resources, sustainable agriculture benefits the environment through helping maintain soil quality, reducing erosion, and preserving water. In order to maintain a sustainable lifestyle, agriculturalists focus on certain criteria in order to compete with current sustainability practices. This criterion consists of creating a healthy environment, while ensuring economic profitability in addition to maintaining social and economic equity.
In this article, we’ll look at reasons why sustainable agriculture is vital for the food security of the future.
1. Nourishes and restores the soil
Generally, conventional agriculture is characterized by heavy tillage and heavy use of fertilizer to increase farm output. While fertilizers can help to spur plant growth, they often lead to polluted runoff water that ruins the natural environment. Additionally, the heavy use of fertilizers is not only harmful to soil ecology but can also be noxious to humans. Moreover, conventional farming fails to nourish the soil with the essential nutrients required to grow highly nutritious plants. The lack of emphasis on soil nourishment in conventional agriculture often results in crops that are highly susceptible to drought, diseases, and pests.
As opposed to conventional industrial farming, sustainable agriculture places a lot of emphasis on soil nourishment. This ultimately results in healthier plants and animals. Using natural fertilizers and crop rotation, while minimizing the number of animals on a farm, sustainable agriculture ensures that soils are free from toxic compounds that may harm humans, animals, and pollinators. With healthy soils, plants can withstand attacks from pests and diseases because they have the required minerals to give them resilience.
2. Saves energy
One distinguishing feature of industrial farming is its heavy reliance on energy-intensive machinery, especially fossil fuels. In fact, industrial agriculture is one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world today. In contrast, sustainable agriculture endeavors to minimize energy use at all levels of production. It not only embraces less energy intensive tools of agricultural production but also adopts smart farming systems. By eliminating the use of fossil fuels and reducing energy use, sustainable farming helps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thereby playing a significant role in combating climate change.
3. Conserves and protects water
Conventional industrial farming uses a lot of water to irrigate the vast tracts of land under cultivation without emphasizing on conservation. As opposed to these conventional methods, sustainable agricultural systems use several techniques to conserve water, such as drip irrigation and mulching. In addition, it focuses on planting perennial crops with deep roots that don’t require a lot of water.
Moreover, sustainable farming embraces methods that protect water bodies from pollution. Specifically, this farming system uses practices such as contour farming and filter strips near rivers to limit contamination of the water mass.
4. Values diversity
The defining feature of industrial agriculture is monoculture, a system of farming that involves planting vast tracts of land with a single plant breed. The over-reliance on only one plant breed increases the vulnerability of plants to diseases, which may quickly spread from one plant to another and wipe out the entire crop. Because monocrops are highly vulnerable to pests and diseases, the large industrial farms heavily depend on herbicides and pesticides to keep their plants healthy. Regrettably, these chemicals can be hazardous to pollinators, wildlife, and people.
Unlike industrial agriculture, sustainable farming focuses on diverse farming systems which use a variety of crops. The diversity of plants in this farming system ensures that they are more resilient to withstand any pests, diseases, and drought. Moreover, a sustainable farm is cooperative because it incorporates plant and animal production together while also providing a healthy environment for wildlife, pollinators, and people.
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