Modern Agriculture
Thursday, January 18, 2018
agriculture
A plurality of Bangladeshis earn their living from agriculture. Although rice and jute are the primary crops, wheat is assuming greater importance. Tea is grown in the northeast. Because ofBangladesh's fertile soil and normally ample water supply, rice can be grown and harvested three times a year in many areas.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Benefits of Modern Agriculture
While the phrase, industrial farming is frequently intended to deride modern farm organization, it
is impossible to ignore the fact that agriculture, like other sectors, has become much more
productive as machines and computers have eliminated the most laborious parts of the job.15
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And farming communities have educated their children to choose, in many
cases, other careers and the number of people who want to work on farms in the old, labor intensive
way is very small. The result is that hand-labor-intensive crops, or high labor cropping systems appear to be on a collision course
with demographic trends, since the pool of unskilled, low cost farm labor upon which those crops
and systems have depended appears likely to continue to decline and increasingly to make
non-mechanization an increasingly non-viable option.
Benefits of Modern Agriculture |
At the same time, modern agriculture has become much more productive Pr-industrial yields were low and stagnant before introduction of better machines, synthetic
fertilizers, improved plant and animal breeding, pesticides and, most recently, biotechnology and
the huge changes these new techniques brought. At the same time, it is true that environmental
issues that led to the Dust Bowl calamity of the 1930 also led to the establishment of the Soil
Conservation Service and other important steps that continue to improve farming practices
through public and private programs until they have all but eliminated wind and water erosion
hazards.
For example, the pioneers of no-till agriculture actually began in the early 1960 in efforts to
save fuel and stop erosion. And, the environmental movement of the late 1960 lead to the
creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1969—and to major changes in pesticides
and pesticide regulation since that time.
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Improvement in Modern Agriculture
We have most improvements in use some place, but not applied widely enough. Some improvements of course are not applicable to all situations, and we need to be sure to document the situations in which any improvement will actually improve, where the improvement would not be cost effective, where it might be harmful.
Why? too much effort is spent trying to make decisions based on well intention ed advice that would not be useful in the particular situation. But why? People looking for advice are not aware of what in their situation would be significant to disclose when asking. In effect we need something akin to artificial intelligence systems that will guide the farmer to identify the relevant circumstances, and then may be able to present relevant articles, omit the irrelevant or just plain wrong for that situation.Improvement of agricultural methods and productivity to reduce the need to cut down additional forest land. Tropical forests cannot be maintained unless agricultural productivity is greatly improved. However, to feed the projected population of the mid-21century even at present levels, not to mention a level approaching that of developed countries, agricultural efficiencies would have to be far greater than is currently the case in most countries. We need increases in agricultural productivity of between 1.8% and 3% per year for many years..
What is Modern Agriculture?
For simple terms, agronomy as a science really began in the middle of the 1800, so that we could properly describe modern, science based agriculture as modern agriculture and agriculture that predates the use of science in agriculture as pre-modern. Now not all of agriculture has ever become science based, so this is not based on a date in time when all of agriculture changed.
The worst consequences of pre-modern agriculture would include tillage up and down steep slopes that produced severe erosion, the practice of discarding manure instead of spreading it back on the fields to retain fertility, Repeatedly growing the same crops on any given field until that field would fail to produce that crop, then abandoning that field as fallow for a decade or so, and going right back to growing the same crop. Pre-modern agriculture did not understand why certain crops did very poorly on certain fields, but they did observe it, and they tried something different. Crops that would never succeed on an acidic soil, or an alkaline soil could have been predicted with a high degree of confidence today, but pre-modern agriculture did have the sense to use certain rule of thumb approaches... you can grow certain crops on land that grows an oak tree, other crops on lands that grow pine trees. Knowledge of the needs of given crops for soil drainage was developing pre-science. Farmers learned that grain would die if the ground stayed too wet for too long. This rule of thumb reasoning of course is the starting base of the science of agriculture. We should understand that a lot of observation took place well before serious scientific study of agriculture began.
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