This book goes into many different areas for sustainability.
I decided to focus on a specific topic that caught my eye. It’s the growing
concern of being able to feed 8 billion people well on our continuously
depleting resources. This involves raising land and water productivity, and producing protein more efficiently.
“Gains in
land productivity have come primarily from three sources; the growing use of
fertilizer, the spread of irrigation, and the development of higher yielding varieties.”
Fertilizer started being used in the effort to remove the nutrient constraints
on crops, but its use has started to go down in some countries. One of those
countries is the United States, this makes me wonder what we have in place of
the fertilizer and how well it works. Another source of gain is in irrigation.
Irrigation is used to remove soil moisture limits on crop yields, and this is
beneficial for places that don’t get enough rainfall and dry areas. The amount
of irrigated areas, according to the book hasn’t really increased since 2000.
However, he states that “Future gains in irrigation will likely come more from
raising irrigation efficiency than from expanding water supplies.” I like this
take on it as this chapter focuses on reducing demand, and building more systems
requires the use of resources. Further it is important that the irrigation
systems the world already has in place are working to their maximum potential
before expanding more. The last gain
comes from higher yielding varieties. I didn’t like this part very much because
it can involve the use of genetically modified crops and I am not a fan of
that. Although it’s able to produce a higher yield on crops, the health
benefits of such things are probably not so great. One suggestion in raising
land productivity was “Expand the area of land that produces more than one crop
per year.” I think that this is an awesome idea, it’s a logical and
efficient way to increase multiple crops instead of just one. Many crops can
only grow in certain places, and if you increase land on one crop then other
crops that may be able to be grown there can’t. When it comes to raising water
efficiency, it talks mainly about efficiency of irrigation systems and gives
alternatives to furrow irrigation.
Lastly, this chapter talks about producing protein more
efficiently, which I believe is most important because it has to do with the
food itself. Initially when you think of protein you think of beef, however “both
health concerns and price differences are shifting consumer demand from pork
and beef to poultry and fish, sources that convert grain into protein most
efficiently.” I like how this focuses on what animals eat and convert into
energy most efficiently rather than focusing on just more efficient farming
systems. Cattle 7 kilos of grain for output of 1 kilo gain, pork uses 3, and
poultry uses 2 while some fish use less than 2. Since the poultry and fish
clearly need less grain, this can decrease the need for wheat crops, and the
extra land can be available for the growth of another crop. “As the market
shifts production to the more grain efficient products, it raises the
productivity of both land and water.”
Clearly
being able to feed 8 billion people involves a lot of different changes in the
way we farm, what we demand, and the attention to the systems we have in place
for the growth and production of animals and crops.
No comments:
Post a Comment