The history of agriculture can be seen as a long process of intensification, as society sought to meet its ever growing needs for food, feed and fibre by raising crop productivity. Over millennia, farmers selected for cultivation plants that were higher yielding and more resistant to drought and disease, built terraces to conserve soil and canals to distribute water to their fields, replaced simple hoes with oxen-drawn ploughs, and used animal manure as fertilizer and sulphur against pests.
It is now recognized that those enormous gains in agricultural production and productivity were often accompanied by negative effects on agriculture’s natural resource base, so serious that they jeopardize its productive potential in the future. “Negative externalities” of intensification include land degradation, salinization of irrigated areas, over-extraction of groundwater, the buildup of pest resistance and the erosion of biodiversity. Agriculture has also damaged the wider environment through, for example, deforestation, the emission of greenhouse gases and nitrate pollution of water bodies.
After reading this article, read this one
Future needs vs Resource degradation
After reading this article, read this one
Future needs vs Resource degradation
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