Farming Affect The Environment

Over the next 40 or so years the global population is going to swell to over 9 billion and the food production rate will have to be increased 70% in order to evade a massive famine.

Farming is the production of food and other materials by raising plants and animals. Many people buy their food in supermarkets close to their homes, but the food is imported from many different countries, and many products are farmed in a number of different ways. The way food is farmed affects the environment. It also affects people’s health and the treatment of animals. Some farming methods are more harmful than others.

Over 11,000 years ago, people got all their food by gathering wild plants, hunting and also from fishing. They travelled around constantly

Machinery did most of the work for people, so people could make food for many more people and sell it to their community. Scientists then developed chemicals to produce more food, and developed new plants and different breeds of animals.Many more farmers now use more chemicals such as fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides to grow more crops. Fertilisers make the soil more fertile. Pesticides kill insects that harm crops and herbicides kill weeds among the crops. Today in wealthy countries such as Britain and the USA people live in cities rely on fewer farmers in the countryside to grow their food. But many people are worried about how their food is produced, chemicals are sprayed onto the crops and they can stay on the food. They can also run into rivers and the water underground. New kinds of plants and new breeds of animals may upset the natural environment. Valuable soil is also being lost or damaged.There is a lot of reduction in land and one of the causes for this is farming Farming methods, including overgrazing, incorrect farming methods and the overstocking of land, remove essential nutrients from the soil. This results in the denudation of the land. As no vegetation is available to retain the soil, it is washed away. Soil erosion further lessens the amount of land available for natural plants and animals. As the number of people grows daily, more food is needed and more land is

This is called Eutrophication. Eutrophication is the overgrowth of algae in water ecosystems where nutrients are usually limiting. Many fresh water systems are 'oligotrophic', meaning that the growth of primary producers algae is limited not by dissolved gas or light, but by nutrients such as nitrates and minerals. The organisms in these environments have evolved to be optimally suited to these conditions, and everything works fairly well. But when someone builds something next to a lake golf course and the fertilizer being used on the grass runs off into the lake, the algae grows too fast for the rest of the ecosystem to keep up, and overgrows the lake, killing everything in it. That's one example there are many other the solutions generally involve not washing lots of nutrients into lakes and streams or the ocean, which, although generally full of nutrients, can also be locally overwhelmed with runoff especially in coral reef