With the vast majority of the world's farms now relying on synthetic chemicals to grow crops and petroleum-derived fuels to drive the engines of production, modern agriculture has become overwhelmingly toxic to the atmosphere and is hastening global warming. Pictured: a crop duster in Tennessee. (Media credit/Roger Smith via Flickr)
What amazes many environmental advocates to this day is how the widespread adoption of synthetic chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers for use in agriculture was dubbed the “Green Revolution,” when in fact this post-World War II paradigm shift in the way we produce food has wreaked untold havoc on the environment, food quality and human health.
Agricultural output has certainly increased as a result of these changes, but with the vast majority of the world’s farms now relying on petroleum-derived synthetic chemicals to grow crops and petroleum-derived fuels to drive the engines of production—modern agriculture has become overwhelmingly toxic to the atmosphere and is hastening global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that agricultural land use contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions; here in the U.S. almost 20 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions come from agricultural sources.
Intensive use of chemicals isn’t good for our nutrition intake, either. Overworked, depleted agricultural soils generate fruits and vegetables with fewer nutrients and minerals than those produced by farmers decades ago. And much of the food we eat is laced with chemicals that end up in our bloodstreams.
Beyond its effect on the food we put in our bodies, modern agriculture generates large amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous and other fertilizers running off into our streams, rivers and oceans, compromising not only the quality of our drinking water and the health of riparian ecosystems, but also causing those huge oxygen-depleted ocean dead zones we hear about in coastal areas such as the Gulf of Mexico.
Yet another issue with modern farming is the amount of animal waste generated and concentrated in small areas, which creates unsanitary and potentially dangerous conditions for the animals and humans alike. And the widespread use of antibiotics on farm animals to keep disease in check results in the development of stronger strains of bacteria that resist the antibiotics used by humans to ward off infection and sickness.
Also, many worry about the potential impacts of the widespread use of genetic engineering, whereby genes in plants, animals and microorganisms are manipulated to select for specific traits. These genetically modified organisms, reports Greenpeace, “can spread through nature and interbreed with natural organisms,” thus contaminating the natural environment in unforeseeable and uncontrollable ways.
The good news is that rapidly increasing consumer demand for healthier food is forcing agribusiness to see the wisdom of moving away from business-as-usual. Organic farming, which eschews chemical fertilizers and pesticides in favor of more natural choices, holds considerable promise for greening up our agricultural systems. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, organic cropland acreage averaged 15 percent increases between 2002 and 2008, although certified organic cropland and pasture accounted for only about 0.6 percent of U.S. total farmland in 2008. So we still have along way to go.
CONTACTS: IPCC, www.ipcc.ch; USDA, www.ers.usda.gov/Data/Organic.
About E - The Environmental Magazine
This article demonstrates how religion has changed in the US. Once, the average citizen worshiped a god that no one could prove existed, but the power came in how it changed lives in a positive manner.
Now, the god is religion, and the power is changing lives in a negative manner. While all the “facts” stated in the above article imply positive movement, in all reality it is negative.
The use of correlation is how things are shown to prove Industrial agriculture is damaging the environment, however, as any truly educated person knows, correlation never had, does not now, nor will it ever prove cause and effect.
The author uses this correlation to prosecute the guilty, but, just like racial profiling, he or she is persecuting the innocent. Not once has a properly conducted cause and effect experiment proven the claims stated.
Once we held tight to the concept, innocent until proven guilty. The religion of environmentalism rejects that concept soundly, and people, aka farmers, are guilty until proven innocent.
I hope you enjoy the hell you so justly deserve.
Agriculture is simply the human tending of plants and animals used for their food.
The first recorded instance of mans destruction of the environment in the production of food was when he cut a green sprout, sharpened the end, and used it to create a hole in the ground where he then placed a seed.
Perhaps the environment and world in general would be a better place without us, but as long as there are billions of mouths to feed we will doubtless continue to adopt methods assured of getting the job done because human hunger will always trump the environment in the minds of most people.
At any rate, the very presence of man is a negative for the earth. Agriculture is simply a whipping boy.
Texas Red is right. You can’t simply correlate two things to form an opinion. You fail to mention the many ways that modern agriculture benefits the environment.
GE crops allow us to less inputs to bring a crop to harvest. Insect resistant varieties reduce our dependence on pesticides, and when we plant these varieties we are required to plant non-resistant varieties in order to maintain the insect population and keep the bugs from becoming resistant themselves. Two big things coming very soon that you would think environmentalists would be happy about are drought tolerance and nitrogen use efficiency. Drought tolerant crops will not only perform better in drought conditions, but even in good conditions will require less water which means less irrigation is needed. Nitrogen use efficiency will reduce our need for those synthetic products you mentioned.
GPS technology reduces our inputs costs in many ways. Precisely guiding equipment through the field reduces fuel costs and operator fatigue. Using guidance gives you the opportunity to employ swath control. Swath control will automatically shut off sections of application equipment as it enters part of a field that have already been worked. If you’ve done much field work you know that almost no field is perfectly square, you overlap slightly every time you turn around, and even a squared field will have point rows on one side unless the field width just happens to be a multiple of the equipment width. In one season swath control allows you to apply less seed, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, and if needed fungicide. And then there’s variable rate technology or VRT. VRT in combination with GPS and soil testing doesn’t necessarily reduce your inputs, but allows you to put them where they are needed most. Before VRT you had to apply the same amount of fertilzer over an entire field with the application rate being set by what part of the field needs it the most. Now with GPS, VRT, and soil maps and testing application equipment will vary the amount of product put on in each area of the field, putting nutrients where they are needed most, increasing productivity and reducing losses and over application.
Don’t forget we are also seeing more no-till and minimum till practices as well as cover cropping which increases soil health and organic matter which can store more nutrients, thus reducing the need yet again for more of those inputs.
Appreciate the discussion. Texas Red scares me. I agree with the perspective of the poster. It is not natural.
@Thefarmerslife (love your tweets)
The response to your first paragraph, where you talk about all the benefits to GE crops, is that you are using a clone seed. Exactly like your neighbor is using. And all the other corn farmers in the Midwest (or, wherever..). It attracts pests that eat that one variety. This makes the basis for what you have to spray. The right response is not to make the sprays better, but to grow your own seeds from the best plants. They survived so they have a tolerance. That’s the environmental basis for seed saving, and also against herbicides. At the best of sustainable farms, we use heritage seeds or save our own. At those organic farms that are sales-oriented, there are catalogs for that. If plants replicate themselves, you don’t have to spend the money. Or spend the money to care for them. I think we can all agree on that.
Leads to the response to the second paragraph. About GPS. You are planting a monoculture. This is the [other] number one thing to watch out for. Monoculture creates the problems that technology tries to fix. On my farm, we have asparagus, beans, beets, brocolli, cauliflower, collards, greens, kale, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, squash, onions, garlic, more varieties, more tomatoes, more lettuce, etc. In a day where most food grown by farmers is not edible, I think the right way to think about your farm is: “What would I want to eat,” and then if it grows I will have extra for my markets. DIVERSIFY.
Solves all that. Technology saves time, sure. Tractors do. But in a time where there are NO jobs for men out there? Wouldn’t you rather have a few interns or volunteers and do vegetable rows? If you have a farm that helps decrease the national waistline, you won’t need GPS to tell you what to do. Save the GPS/VRT machine and get their pitchforks and wheelbarrows to put more compost on the squash mounds that are sometimes shady. I say (firstly that more people need to be into farming, and secondly) that we need to learn from nature. It’s the only way that plants have grown provenly in long periods on this planet. The rainforest grows a bountiful diversity of plants from composted topsoil. And that has been around for millions of years.
-Eddie Miller
BU ’10 — Economics and Sustainability.
http://eddiemill.wordpress.com/
http://twitter.com/eddiemill/
PS For a farmer, planting any plant takes Nitrogen out of the soil. Get the maximum composting action you can. .If you’re just giving the plants “enough,” then that leaves the soil with nothing at the end of the year. Got me? It’s a dead substrate.. desertification.. not natural..
I’m amazed we farmers are allowed to roam the streets. We drug our animal, cause obesity in people, poison the earth and play frankenstein with the food supply. We must be stopped.