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 , 16 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.