GEOG 3000 Resource Management Sustainable farming systems

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GEOG 3000 Resource ManagementSustainable
farming systems

• M.D. Lee CSU Hayward Winter 2004

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Agricultural Land

• Agroecosystems are defined as areas in which at
  least 30 of the land is used for crops or highly
  managed pasture (WRI 2001).
• Some 28-37 of the worlds land surface currently
  seems to meet this criteria based on satellite
  data.
• Thus about 8-10 of the worlds total land
  surface is in use for crop or livestock raising,
  leaving 2-4 left for expansion if the global
  estimate of 12 potentially farmable land is
  accurate.
• Global farmland area increased 8 from 1966-96
  although this masks conversions to and from
  farming.
• Industrialized regions lost over 100 million
  acres of farmland to urban sprawl in this same
  period.

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Urban Sprawl growing houses instead of crops
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Crop genetic resources

• It is estimated that only 15 plant and animal
  species currently provide 90 of the worlds
  food, even though there are 30,000 plants
  (perhaps 75,000) with edible parts.
• Currently, enough food is produced on the planet
  to provide a per capita diet of around 2,750 kcal
  per day (WRI).
• Four staples (wheat, corn, rice and potatoes)
  provide the majority of crop production and
  calories, but we are using a decreasing number of
  increasingly genetically homogenous varietals
  each year (especially with rice).
• Giant agricultural multinationals are
  increasingly turning to genetically engineered
  species (GMOs) to boost yields and decrease
  production costs (especially soybeans corn).

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How will we feed ourselves each day?
Meat eaters?
Vegetarians?
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Eating up the food chain

• Between 1995-2020, the demand for cereals like
  rice, corn and wheat will increase 40, 85 of
  this in developing countries.
• Much of this is in response to the expected 58
  increase in global meat demand, again 85 of this
  will be in developing nations.
• Ironically, food demand increases will be even
  higher if we succeed in global economic
  development since greater affluence leads to
  greater demand for food, especially meat.
• Meat production requires greater production of
  grains for feed, a loss of overall calories due
  to the trophic energy losses up the food chain.

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How do we get our food?

• In industrialized nations like the US, we rely on
  monoculture farming (now called conventional
  farming) that uses intensive energy, water,
  pesticide and fertilizer input on
  agribusiness/factory farm systems.
• Excess production is exported and feeds about 1/3
  of the rest of the world.
• We also import our food from developing nations
  where the best land is used for similarly
  intensive plantation agriculture for export
  (although cheap labor is often substituted for
  machinery), often through multinationals like
  Dole.
• Because of surpluses in the US and Europe, excess
  production is dumped at low cost on foreign
  markets, destroyed, purchased by govts. and given
  away or subsidized, or else farmers are paid not
  to plant a crop.

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Farming in less developed nations

• More than 2.7 billion people worldwide get their
  food from small family farms using animal
  traction, hand labor and green manure (animal
  waste or nitrogen fixing legumes plowed in). Some
  1.4 billion rely on subsistence level farming.
• In much of S. America, Africa and SE Asia, slash
  and burn is still practiced by small farmers,
  where possible on a shifting agriculture basis.
• With the best land used for export crops, farmers
  move on to steeper slopes better suited to
  forests and soil erosion is becoming a major
  problem.
• When soils degrade, increasingly there is nowhere
  to shift to and farmers give up the land, move to
  virgin forests elsewhere or migrate to cities.

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Hillslope Farming
With flat land running short, farmers are forced
up onto hillslopes. If they invest the time and
resources in terracing and other erosion
controls, farming can be sustainable.
If farmers do not anchor the soil with adequate
vegetation cover or physical structures like
terraces, then erosion can quickly result and
farms must be abandoned..
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The Future of Farming

• The world needs continued improvements in farming
  productivity, particularly because good farmland
  is being converted to urban land uses (see WRI
  2001 p56).
• Improved farming efficiency is still possible
  from multiple cropping, intercropping, irrigation
  and land reform (see Machakos example from Kenya
  in WRI 2001).
• Sustained higher yields could come from better
  soil fertility management wider access to
  chemical fertilizers (short-term) and the use of
  green manure, composting and erosion control
  (longer term).
• More secure food supplies can be assured by more
  efficient post-harvest storage and better
  distribution.
• Many believe a return to more traditional farming
  and away from conventional agribusiness is
  required (for a developing country example, see
  Cuba study in WRI 2001).

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Applying Sustainable Techniques in the Developing
World

• Cuba has been doubling and tripling its food
  production through intensive organic techniques
  on small farms.

• Kenyans have reversed years of decline in food
  production through integrated soil and water
  management on family farms

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Sustainable Agriculture

• Broadly defined, sustainable agriculture is where
  farmers introduce systems to profitably maintain
  an appropriate production of high-quality food
  while conserving resources in an environmentally
  and socially beneficial way.
• Farming subsidies and short-sighted
  profit-seeking often lead to damaging monoculture
  and unsustainable practices and can cause wasted
  surpluses.
• Heavy indebtedness can lead farmers to farm
  unsustainably, causing erosion, environmental
  damage.
• A vicious cycle results in which farmers stake
  more and more on achieving high, predictable
  yields year after year to pay for increasingly
  high input costs (true at all levels).

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Global Agricultural Priorities

• A combination of six basic goals need to be
  implemented to sustain agricultural production
  and meet growing global food needs worldwide.
• Protect existing productive soils from erosion
  and urbanization (difficult when cheap imports
  make local farmland worth less).
• Increase plant productivity per unit of land
  planted.
• Reduce harvest losses from pest damage
  (especially through integrated pest management
  that minimizes pesticides).
• Expand the total land area being farmed.
• Develop new crops that exploit underutilized land
  resources (e.g. salt tolerant crops) hybrid or
  GMO though?
• Improve global food storage and (re)distribution.
• How best to do this without ecological damage is
  a subject of intense debate in industrialized and
  developing nations.

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Science and sustainability

• Society is weighing up the role that scientists
  can play in boosting farming productivity both as
  an alternative to and a compliment to other
  methods.
• Biotechnology and genetic engineering are often
  touted as the solution to world food needs.
• Genetically modified foods (GMOs) are already
  very common on US farms and in supermarkets.
• However, in Europe, they are called Frankenfoods
  and are vigorously being protested as unhealthy
  and ecologically damaging and thus unsustainable.
• We have and will see more pest resistant and
  other productivity enhancing genes added to
  crops, more use of growth hormones in
  livestock/dairy, and more widespread cloning of
  the top milk and meat animals in the medium term.
• Many believe the GMO varieties, if cheap enough,
  could provide the biggest benefits in the
  developing nations.

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The FrankenFood Debate

• Canadians, Europeans and other nations
  environmentalists publicize their opposition to
  the release and use of GMOs.

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Some Obstacles to Sustainability

• Cropland and production expansion is hampered in
  many regions of the world by soil erosion, lack
  of water, air pollution and urbanization of prime
  farmland.
• For example, in China, more than 1 million acres
  of farmland has been paved in the last 30 years.
• Some believe bioengineering could result in
  unforeseen biological catastrophes from
  uncontrolled mutations of GMOs as well as
  possible human health effects.
• Increased demand for meat in developing countries
  in relation to cultural changes and economic
  prosperity could reduce total calories produced
  from farming by a large , exacerbating
  inequalities.
• Modern farming productivity is intensely
  dependent on cheap, abundant fossil fuels for
  energy and for chemical inputs.