# data[].attributes.body
EXAM STYLE QUESTION - Explain the rising popularity of one named crop and discuss the impact it is having on the physical environment  [10]

IMPORTANT - USING A NAMED AGRICULTURAL PRODUCT YOU HAVE STUDIED, COMPLETE THE ABOVE QUESTION

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Industrial agriculture is currently the dominant food production system in the United States. It's characterized by large-scale monoculture, heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and meat production in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). The industrial approach to farming is also defined by its heavy emphasis on a few crops that overwhelmingly end up as animal feed, biofuels, and processed junk food ingredients.

From its mid-20th century beginnings, industrial agriculture has been sold to the public as a technological miracle. Its efficiency, we were told, would allow food production to keep pace with a rapidly growing global population, while its economies of scale would ensure that farming remained a profitable business.

But too often, something crucial was left out of this story: the price tag.

In fact, our industrialized food and agriculture system comes with steep costs, many of which are picked up by taxpayers, rural communities, farmers themselves, other business sectors, and future generations. When we include these "externalities" in our reckoning, we can see that this system is not a cost-effective, healthful, or sustainable way to produce the food we need.

And the good news is that it's not the only way. Scientists and farmers are developing smart, modern agricultural systems that could reduce or eliminate many of the costs of industrial agriculture-and still allow farmers to run a profitable business. It's time for farm policy to move into the 21st century and prioritize these innovative methods.

Costs to human health and safety

Industrial farming is bad for the health of workers, eaters, and downstream neighbors. Here are some of its costly health impacts:

Pesticide toxicity. Herbicides and insecticides commonly used in agriculture have been associated with both acute poisoning and long-term chronic illness.

Water pollution from fertilizer runoff contaminates downstream drinking water supplies, requiring costly cleanup measures with an annual price tag of nearly $2 billion.

Junk food. Industrial agriculture, especially in the central United States, mostly produces commodity crops like corn and soybeans. These crops are used to make the processed foods that dominate the US diet, with serious-and enormously costly-health impacts.

Antibiotic resistance. The overuse of antibiotics in CAFOs has accelerated the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which has taken a toll both in lives and health care dollars.

Damage to farmland and the rural environment

The soils of the American Corn Belt were once celebrated for their fertility. But industrial farming treats that fertility as a resource to be tapped, not maintained. This leads to several kinds of costs, including:

Depletion. Monoculture exhausts soil fertility, requiring costly applications of chemical fertilizers.

Irrigation. Soils used to grow annual row crops and then left bare for much of the year have poor drought resistance, increasing irrigation costs.

Erosion. Monoculture degrades soil structure and leaves it more vulnerable to erosion, resulting in costs for soil replacement, cleanup, and lost farmland value.

Lost biodiversity. Industrial farms don't support the rich range of life that more diverse farms do. As a result, the land suffers from a shortage of the ecosystem services, such as pollination, that a more diverse landscape offers.

Social and economic impacts

The pressure to "get big or get out" is fundamental to industrial agriculture-and takes a toll on communities.

Loss of mid-sized farms. Once the backbone of US agriculture, medium-sized farms are a dwindling breed, which means that fewer and fewer Americans make their living as farmers-a trend that has been bad for the economies of rural communities and farm states.

Harm to neighboring and downstream economies. Industrial agriculture can pack an economic wallop hundreds of miles from its origin-just ask local governments and utility managers who must install expensive equipment to remove fertilizer by-products from public drinking water supplies. Or ask people who make their living from fisheries or tourism on the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, where "dead zones" and toxic algae blooms caused by farm runoff do damage with an annual price tag in the billions. CAFOs, too, create pollution problems that reduce livability and depress property values in surrounding communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Industrial agriculture is currently the dominant food production system in the United States. It's characterized by large-scale monoculture, heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and meat production in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). The industrial approach to farming is also defined by its heavy emphasis on a few crops that overwhelmingly end up as animal feed, biofuels, and processed junk food ingredients.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a healthy farm system, agriculture works in harmony with the natural environment. This begins with healthy soil that stores water and nutrients and provides a stable base to support plant roots. In a sustainable system, soil is kept in balance. Crops are rotated through the fields to replace nutrients in the soil. Where there is livestock, animals graze the land, then waste from those animals is used to fertilize the soil. The idea is that as farmers take from the land they also give back.

Industrial farms disregard that need for balance. Land is used continuously and not given proper rest. Crops are not rotated in a way that replenishes the soil. Manure and chemical fertilizers are used to "feed" the soil, but through over-application these additives become a problem.

Animal Manure

Factory farms concentrate an unnatural number of animals in one place, which creates an unmanageable amount of waste. For example, a single hog excretes up to 17.5 pounds of manure and urine each day. Put 1,000 hogs together, and that's six million pounds of waste each year. On a factory farm containing 35,000 hogs, over four million pounds of waste are produced each week, and over 200 million pounds each year. Whereas on a sustainable farm animal waste can be a tool, in factory-farm amounts it becomes a major pollutant.

The creation and disposal of such enormous quantities of waste has a devastating effect on the air, water and soil surrounding factory farms. Unlike human waste, livestock manure is not processed for sanitation. On factory farms it is commonly mixed with water and held in pits (called "lagoons"), and then spread or sprayed on cropland. But the system often suffers from an excess of manure: the lagoons can leak or spill, for instance, or the manure is over-applied to fields, which can cause it to run off into surface waters.

Pollutants

Manure carries with it other substances that are used on industrial farms. These include antibiotics and artificial growth hormones, which contaminate waterways and affect the plants and animals that live in them. Salt, a common component of manure from industrial dairies, can damage soil quality and contributes to erosion.

Nutrients and heavy metals present in animal feed are also excreted by livestock, and so end up being applied to cropland. These include zinc, copper, chromium, arsenic, cadmium and even lead. In balanced amounts, some of these elements can be good for soil and promote plant growth. But as factory farms over-apply manure to fields, a significant quantity of nutrients builds up in the soil and can actually reduce the soil's fertility. This damage is difficult to reverse, and ultimately puts fertile cropland out of use.

Air and Water Pollution

Factory farms emit harmful gases and particles such as methane and hydrogen sulfide, which can contribute to global warming and harm the health of those living or working nearby. Air pollution results from the overuse of machinery, the mismanagement of manure, and the irresponsible feeding practices that characterize industrial farming.

Chemical fertilizers and pesticides have turned agriculture into a leading source of water pollution in the United States. Runoff from factory farms kills fish, degrades aquatic habitats and threatens drinking water supplies. Additionally, factory farms use tremendous amounts of water, which cuts into our precious supplies of water that are not contaminated.

What Is Soil?

It's not just dirt! Soil is a mixture of minerals, air, water, and organic matter such as roots, decaying plant parts, fungi, earthworms, bacteria, and microorganisms. An acre of healthy topsoil can contain 900 pounds of earthworms, 2,400 pounds of fungi, 1,500 pounds of bacteria, 133 pounds of protozoa, and 890 pounds of arthropods and algae.

Feed Crops

Factory farms also harm American farmland through their consumption of massive quantities of feed crops. Consider this: The average cow eats roughly 30 pounds of food each day. The beef industry raises more than 30 million cows each year. Some of those cows feed themselves by grazing on pasture, but the vast majority are raised in feedlots, where they eat corn and soybeans. The result: American cropland is pushed hard to produce an extraordinary amount of grain.

In response to this demand, conventional crop producers have adopted intensive growing practices. These methods increase crop yields, but they also damage the soil and throw natural systems out of balance, primarily due to erosion and loss of fertility.

Crop farming is an "extractive" process, meaning that as plants grow, they take nutrients from the soil and turn it into plant matter. When the plants are harvested, the nutrients leave the soil's system. Sustainable practices replenish these nutrients, using compost, manure, or "green manures," which are plants that naturally deposit nutrients in the soil. Instead of replenishing the soil, intensive practices use chemical fertilizers to supply only what is necessary to grow the next round of crops. Chemical fertilizers are not as effective as natural sources of fertility, and are known to cause long-term depletion of organic matter, soil compaction, and degradation of overall soil quality. In 2005, American farmers used more than 22 million tons of chemical fertilizers.

Tilling is another aspect of farming that has gone out of balance in industrial practice. When land is plowed, old organic matter is turned under the soil in order to plant a new crop. However, when soil is bare it is most susceptible to erosion. There are many ways to protect against this. Farmers can leave strips of land untilled, to act as a catch for water-borne erosion. Instead of plowing up and down hills, leaving furrows that carry wet soil straight downhill, they can plow with the contours, making furrows that act as tiny retaining walls. And they can grow cover crops in the off-season, whose plants anchor the soil with their roots.

In the drive to produce ever more grain, however, precautions like these are often not taken. Currently, the average rate of soil erosion on US cropland is seven tons per acre per year. This is a serious problem, because erosion causes fertile farmland to lose nutrients and water retention ability. Because the first thing to go is precious topsoil, the soil removed by erosion contains about three times more nutrients and 1.5 to five times more organic matter than that which remains behind. The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service writes that erosion is the single greatest threat to soil productivity in the United States.

Know your Fertilizers

Natural fertilizer

Because they are composed entirely of organic matter such as manure and compost, these contain a wide range of nutrients and replenish the soil's organic composition. USDA "Certified Organic" produce can only be grown using natural fertilizers.
Synthetic or chemical fertilizer is composed primarily of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium; these petroleum-based soil additives lack the organic matter contained in natural fertilizers.

Compost

A nutrient-rich mixture of decaying organic matter (typically leaves and other plant parts) used as fertilizer for plants.

Sustainable Alternatives

By using farming techniques such as crop rotation, conservation tillage, raising animals on pasture and natural fertilization, sustainable farmers produce food without having a negative effect on the environment. Instead of harming soil, air and water, sustainable farms actually enhance and preserve the land so that future generations can continue to use it for food production.

What You Can Do

By supporting small, sustainable farms you can help reduce the impact of industrial farming and promote the use of environmentally friendly farming methods.

Visit Eat Well Guide to find stores, farms and restaurants that supply sustainable meats and produce.

Ask your local farmer about the erosion prevention techniques and fertilizers used on his or her farm, and buy your food from farmers that use conservation tillage and natural fertilizers.

Plant your own garden, and try making your own organic fertilizer using a compost bin. Find out how to compost at HowToCompost.org.

Did You Know?

In the United States, approximately 40 percent of all chemical fertilizers used eventually break down into ammonia and are released into the atmosphere.

The EPA reports that the waste generated by animal agriculture has polluted over 35,000 miles of river in 22 states.

Researchers from the Department of Economics at the University of Essex put the annual cost of environmental damage caused by industrial farming in the United States at $34.7 billion.

For More Information

Reports and Articles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a healthy farm system, agriculture works in harmony with the natural environment. This begins with healthy soil that stores water and nutrients and provides a stable base to support plant roots. In a sustainable system, soil is kept in balance. Crops are rotated through the fields to replace nutrients in the soil.

# data[].attributes.body
Watch the video 'The official Meatrix'.

What are the environmental and socio-economic impacts shown?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
www.themeatrix.com The movie that started it all! The Meatrix (www.themeatrix.com) spoofs The Matrix films and highlights the problems with factory farming. Instead of Keanu Reeves, The Meatrix stars a young pig, Leo, who lives on a pleasant family farm... he thinks.

# data[].attributes.body
Watch the programme 'From Crop to Shop - Jimmy's Supermarket Secrets'

For ONE of the following crops make notes on the environmental impact each has:

1. Scottish Potatoes in Egypt

2. Green Beans in Kenya

3. Peppers in The Netherlands

4. Pineapples in Ghana

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
crop to shop: jimmy's supermarket secrets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
crop to shop: jimmy's supermarket secrets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
crop to shop: jimmy's supermarket secrets (2010)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Watch Crop To Shop: Jimmy's Supermarket Secrets Online | Watch Full Crop To Shop: Jimmy's Supermarket Secrets (2010) Online For Free

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Watch Crop To Shop: Jimmy's Supermarket Secrets Online | crop to shop: jimmy's supermarket secrets | Crop To Shop: Jimmy's Supermarket Secrets (2010) | Director: | Cast:

# data[].attributes.body
Based on what you have seen and read what are your current thoughts about food production and consumption? Will you think more carefully now about what you eat?

# data[].attributes.body
Using both Kognity and the Hodder textbook describe:

a) the general characteristics of agro-industry.

b) it's environmental impacts.

# data[].attributes.body
Watch the following clip.

1. Decide whether it is a good example of agro-industry/business.

2. What does it say in terms of the production and consumption of food?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This clip from SAMSARA showing food production and consumption has been getting a lot of attention! We'd love for you to watch the whole film: SAMSARA is available on DVD and Blu-ray, as well as On Demand from Amazon, ITunes and Netflix and just recently made #1 on Cinefix's top 10 list of the most beautiful movies of all time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj73aDoeFdk).

# data[].attributes.body
Know the following terms:

Agro-industrialisation

Agribusiness

In agricultural/food terms, what is meant by PRODUCTION  and CONSUMPTION. How are the two related?