Sustainable Agriculture

Our growing population demands humanity to develop ways to increase our agriculture to meet every one's needs while minimizing impact on the environment in order to do this farms must have uniform crop types and structures and will they will rely on specific planting and harvesting dates. This will result  in a decrease of crop diversity because we are only growing highly productive crops (industrial agriculture). We will now have, a small variety of crops planted, because the less productive breeds will become extinct.

According to the united nations convention on biological diversity,  in the history of human agriculture there have been about 7000 different species of plants that have been used as food crops now because of industrial agriculture there are only about fifteen plants and eight animal species relied for about 90% of all human food

The benefits of relying on a few highly productive livestock breeds and crop varieties is that it is less costly and it provides the needs for our growing population
However every time you reduce the genetic diversity you increase the risk of the few crop varieties to survive in future conditions, such as climate change or other environmental changes.
- genetic diversity is important to withstand natural selection
- basically unsustainable human activity is the greatest threat to biodiversity
- also factory farms that have a mass production of the few selected livestock and crops force independent farms our of business and this also reduces genetic biodeversity because the other crops and livestock are no longer being tended to

- one of the problems of relying on a few highly productive livestock breeds is that because of industrial agriculture,  these livestock can no longer adapt to the natural environment and must always be carefully regulated. They are no longer able to survive outsite of the factory farm. So in the future this can become more costly
-as for the crops, when you lose genetic diversity, the few crops become more susceptible to devestation by pests. when the crops star looking the same it is easy for pests to wipe out the entire harvest compared to if all the crops were different

- overall, industrial agriculture only considers the present and not the future. by continuing industrial agriculture we are minimizing our food, livestock, and crop security in the future. Also, factory farms and industrial agriculture creates a lot of pollution which will inevitably have a major negative impact in the future.

- what we need to look towards is a sustainable agriculture which is a way of raising food that is healthy for consumers and animals and does not harm the environment. Everything is done in a humane and just way.

- all i eat for dinner and lunch is rice and chicken which is one of the main mass produced livestock and crops.
- i believe that the agricultural industry can keep up with the rapid growth of the global human population however the environment and humanity will pay a damaging price

reference: http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/biodiversity/
http://www.sustainabletable.org/intro/whatis/

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