Intensive farming
Modern methods frequently involve increased use of non-biotic inputs, such as fertilizers, plant growth regulators, pesticides, and antibiotics for livestock.
[2] Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity, especially on smallholdings, is an important way to decrease the amount of land needed for farming and slow and reverse environmental degradation caused by processes such as deforestation.
This in turn contributed to unprecedented population growth, freeing up a significant percentage of the workforce, and thereby helped enable the Industrial Revolution.
By the early 19th century, agricultural techniques, implements, seed stocks, and cultivars had so improved that yield per land unit was many times that seen in the Middle Ages.
Horse-drawn machinery such as the McCormick reaper revolutionized harvesting, while inventions such as the cotton gin reduced the cost of processing.
[12] The identification of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) as critical factors in plant growth led to the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers, further increasing crop yields.
It is commonly used to reverse pasture degradation, a process characterized by loss of forage and decreased animal carrying capacity which results from overgrazing, poor nutrient management, and lack of soil conservation.
[21] This degradation leads to poor pasture soils with decreased fertility and water availability and increased rates of erosion, compaction, and acidification.
[28] Correctly performed, such production systems are able to create synergies potentially providing benefits to pastures through optimal plant usage, improved feed and fattening rates, increased soil fertility and quality, intensified nutrient cycling, integrated pest control, and improved biodiversity.
[21][28] The introduction of certain legume crops to pastures can increase carbon accumulation and nitrogen fixation in soils, while their digestibility helps animal fattening and reduces methane emissions from enteric fermentation.
Food and water is delivered to the animals, and therapeutic use of antimicrobial agents, vitamin supplements, and growth hormones are often employed.
Undesirable behaviors often related to the stress of confinement led to a search for docile breeds (e.g., with natural dominant behaviors bred out), physical restraints to stop interaction, such as individual cages for chickens, or physical modification such as the debeaking of chickens to reduce the harm of fighting.
[40][41] The CAFO designation resulted from the 1972 U.S. Federal Clean Water Act, which was enacted to protect and restore lakes and rivers to a "fishable, swimmable" quality.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency identified certain animal feeding operations, along with many other types of industry, as "point source" groundwater polluters.
Since cereals that absorbed extra nitrogen would typically lodge (fall over) before harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes.
[46] With the availability of molecular genetics in Arabidopsis and rice the mutant genes responsible (reduced height (rht), gibberellin insensitive (gai1) and slender rice (slr1)) have been cloned and identified as cellular signalling components of gibberellic acid, a phytohormone involved in regulating stem growth via its effect on cell division.
Photosynthate investment in the stem is reduced dramatically in shorter plants and nutrients become redirected to grain production, amplifying in particular the yield effect of chemical fertilizers.
However, the advantage is lost for the progeny of the F1 hybrids, meaning seeds for annual crops need to be purchased every season, thus increasing costs and profits for farmers.
In agriculture, systematic weed management is usually required, often performed by machines such as cultivators or liquid herbicide sprayers.
Solutions include: In agriculture, a terrace is a leveled section of a hilly cultivated area, designed as a method of soil conservation to slow or prevent the rapid surface runoff of irrigation water.
Paddy fields are a typical feature of rice-growing countries of east and southeast Asia, including Malaysia, China, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.
[50][51] Developed in 1983 by the French Jesuit Father Henri de Laulanié in Madagascar,[52] by 2013 the number of smallholder farmers using the system had grown to between 4 and 5 million.
Intensive aquaculture takes place on land using tanks, ponds, or other controlled systems, or in the ocean, using cages.
This intensive system yields equivalent farmer profits (partly from increased livestock forage) while building new topsoil and sequestering up to 33 tons of CO2/ha/year.
Agroforestry combines agriculture and orchard/forestry technologies to create more integrated, diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable land-use systems.
There are also challenges to farmers who rely on farming equipment optimized for monoculture, often resulting in increased labor inputs.
Industrial agricultural practices are one of the main drivers of global warming, accounting for 14–28% of net greenhouse gas emissions.
Nitrogen compounds from the Midwest, for example, travel down the Mississippi to degrade coastal fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, causing so-called oceanic dead zones.
[61] Many wild plant and animal species have become extinct on a regional or national scale, and the functioning of agro-ecosystems has been profoundly altered.
[65][66] A study for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment concluded that regarding industrial agriculture, there is a "negative relationship between the trend toward increasing farm size and the social conditions in rural communities" on a "statistical level".
