Unit 3 Food: Note 2 Food Security and Agriculture Evolution

Food Insecurity: when there is no guaranteed access to food for the next meal

Chronic Hunger: when there no access to adequate food on a daily basis

Thomas Malthus: believed that the power of the population is stronger than the power in the earth to sustain humans

  • population grows exponentially

Green Revolution: systematic application of technological advances in agriculture

  • which has improved yield and crop production in less arable land, jump started Monoculture

Monoculture: single crop farming (better yield)

  • reduction in agrobiodiversity, more susceptible to pests and disease, requires intense use of water, energy and technology, more favorable yield

Historical Food Sustainability:

  1. Pre 1800

    • Low Yield/Low Impact: 3 acres/1 person per year

  2. 1800

    • Moderate Yield/Moderate Impact: 2 acres/1 person per year

  3. 1900

    • High Yield/High Impact: 1 acre/1 person per year

  4. 2000

    • High Yield/High Impact: 1/3 acre/1 person per year

Summary: as of now, food production has kept up with humanity’s population growth

  • worldwide, grain production is enough for every human to meet a consistent 2700 calories/day intake (adults are recommended 2500 cal/day)

Where Does the Food Go?

  1. Unevenly distributed among peoples and regions

  2. Uneven access to arable land or farm resources

  3. Large amount of food goes to animal production

  4. Food Waste

  5. Land Degradation

Technological Advances in Food Production:

  1. Machine Power

  2. Cultivating New Land

  3. Increased Chemical Use

  4. Increased Irrigation

  5. New Varieties of Crops

Machine Power:

  1. Major Farming Operations Use: modern tractors, tills, and drones

  2. Advantages: allows more work to be done efficiently by fewer individual precise planting and mapping

  3. Disadvantages: uses fossil fuels, produces pollution, expensive (low accessibility, hard to maintain), allows for tilling and other practices that may cause harm

Cultivating New Land:

  1. Enabled by New Technology: new machinery, irrigation, terracing

  2. Some Land is not Suite for Agriculture: when land that is not meant for agriculture is forced to yield produce through new agricultural technology, it has drastic effects on the environment of the region

  3. Outcomes: deforestation, wetland drainage, species loss, environmental service disruption

Increased Chemical Use:

  1. Fertilizers and Pesticides and Herbicides

  2. Fertilizers: add nutrients into the soil that plants need to grow

    1. allows for increases intensity of farming

    2. Often nitrogen and phosphorus are added to soils, this means that less space is needed between plants and that farms do not have to use fallow years

    3. Decreased crop rotation, more stress on soil and less agrobiodiversity

    4. Nutrients are taken out of the soil faster than natural processes can replace them (creates a never ending cycle of fertilizer usage)

  3. Disadvantages: run off from fertilizers get into surface waters like streams, rivers and creaks

    1. These surface waters have an over abundance of dissolved nitrogen and phosphorous which causes algal blooms, groundwater contamination, and deadzones in deposition regions like deltas (ie. the Mississippi Delta)

    2. Deadzones: massive algae that grows due to the abundance of nitrogen and phosphorus. Eventually the algae die and floods the bottom of the delta bed, releasing CO2 and depleting the amount of O2 for other marine life to live

  4. Pesticides/Herbicides: kills plant eaters and harmful weeds

    1. Advantages: increases crop yield

    2. Disadvantages: direct health affects for famers, residue effects for consumers, kills desirable species (pollinators, predators of the pests, soil builders), resistant strains develop

Irrigation:

  1. Allow water to be accessible in places where it wasn’t before

  2. Marginal Land Use: the amount of land usable in an area with limited arable land

    1. Irrigation increases marginal land use

    2. However, once irrigation is introduced, the land is wholly dependent on the irrigation to be sustained

  3. Negative Effects:

    1. Puts pressure on already limited fresh water supply like lakes, rives/streams, and groundwater

      • the lower the irrigation efficiency, the greater the pressure

      • however the greater the irrigation efficiency, the greater the economic cost

  4. Systems of Irrigation: efficiency is how direct water can be provided to the crops

    1. Gravity Flow = 60% efficiency, rows of water are sat beside rows of crop, the cheapest

    2. Center Pivot = 80-90% efficiency, a water pump and distributor are centered in a circular plot of land, median cost

    3. Drip Irrigation = 90-95% efficiency, direct drip onto crops, highest cost

  5. High Plain Aquifer

    1. Used in the great plains for framing, well/groundwater is the source while center pivot is the system

    2. Impact:

      a) there is a decline in the amount of water (water is pumped out faster than it can be re-absorbed) available

      b) we must remember that ground water flows, not simply stagnant

  6. Affects of Pumps

    1. spaces without water becomes weak, the ground collapses to fill in that gap, and water from the surface can no longer be absorbed

  7. Climate Change

    1. Causes less precipitation and hotter weather = longer dependency on irrigation

    2. More dependence = decrease in water and increase of pressure on the land = possible system collapse

New Crop Varieties

Historical Breeding: hand picking and selective breeding (cross breeding) done over many generations to create new varieties

  • what we did for thousands of years

Modern Breeding: genetic engineering, occurring in the last 30 years

GMO: Genetically Modified Organisms

  • faster way to develop than selective breeding

  • insert genetic material from other species that would be impossible by breeding

    • pest and disease resistance

    • sweeter, larger produce

GMO Outcomes: develop/grow faster, resist some environmental stress, pest resistant, and can be chemically resistance

  1. More yield, less irrigation needed, “round up ready crops”

GMO Impact: some but not great in the USA (4% of yield impact attributed to GMO)

  1. Globally, countries that produce wheat, rice or in famine prone land have seen great impacts

  2. The USA uses a lot of GMO with little impact, outside of the USA GMOs aren’t as accessible but they have more success

  3. Health Concern: little evidence to show that GMOs are harmful to humans, the greater concern comes from the secondary impact

  4. Round Up Ready Crops: Glyphosate is used as a herbicide that normally hurts soy, but with GMO soybeans are resistance to Glyphosate

Environment Concerns: effects the gene pool of “wild” populations

Capital Concerns: GMOs are patented and owned by multinational corps

  • seed saving is a normal and common practice, however since the GMO seeds are patented, it is illegal to seed save

  • farmers must always buy a new contract to but the seeds (monopoly)

  • Has lead to increased cost of farming and decrease in small family farms

  • high cost of seed input = smaller profit margin