Chapter 18. Chapter 18: Agriculture

What modern industrial agriculture methods are used to produce food...?

Why You Should Care

It is difficult nowadays to appreciate the importance of agriculture to human society because few of us need to be involved in the growing of our food. But the invention of agriculture is thought to have allowed humans to give up nomadic hunting and gathering, develop stable communities, and have larger populations. But the other side of the coin is that with larger populations come the problems of famine, epidemics, and war. By the 20th century, the yields provided by current agricultural practices had become insufficient to meet the demand of Earth’s population, and so more industrial and automated methods were developed.

These methods include planting monocultures—single crops all of the same variety planted over large areas so that it is more efficient to raise and harvest them. Modern chemistry has also helped; synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides were developed to provide crops with the optimal amount of nutrients while killing any other organism that might compete with them. High-yield varieties of crops were developed to take advantage of these breakthroughs. Today’s corn yields are nearly 100 times what they were a century ago because of these methods. The Green Revolution allowed the population to continue to grow. No one would want large-scale famines such as those that have occurred in countries such as China to return, but the question remains: Has the population growth allowed by modern intensive agriculture simply set humans up for an even more catastrophic crash than was originally avoided?