Farming Futures: Charting the Course for a Sustainable Agricultural Revolution

About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history that enabled people to settle, build, and create. In short, agriculture enabled the existence of civilization. Today, approximately 40 percent of our planet is farmland spread all over the world. These agricultural lands are the pieces of a global puzzle we are facing in the future: how can we feed every member of a growing population a healthy diet?

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Meeting this goal will require nothing short of a second agricultural revolution. The first agricultural revolution was characterized by expansion and exploitation, feeding people at the expense of forests with wildlife and water, and destabilizing the climate. In the process, that's not an option. The next time around, agriculture depends on a stable climate with predictable seasons and weather patterns. This means we can't keep expanding our agricultural lands because doing so will undermine the environmental conditions that make agriculture possible in the first place.
Instead, the next agriculture revolution will have to increase the output of our existing farmland for the long term while protecting biodiversity, conserving water, and reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

So what will the future frames look like? The drone being part of a fleet that monitors the crops below the frame may look haphazard, but it is a delicately engineered use of the land that interwines crops and livestock with wild habitats. Conventional farming methods cleared large swathes of land and planted them with a single crop, eradicating wildlife and emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases in the process.

This approach aims to correct that damage while moving among the crops. Teams of field robots apply fertilizer in targeted doses inside the soil. Hundreds of sensors gather data on nutrients and water levels. This information reduces unnecessary water use and tells farmers where they should apply more and less fertilizer instead of causing pollution by showing it across the whole farm. But the farms of the future won't be all sensors and robots. These technologies are designed to help us produce food in a way that works with the environment rather than against it, taking into account the nuances of local ecosystems.

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cost Agriculture practices can also serve those same goals and are much more accessible to many farmers. Many such practices are already in use today and stand to have an increasingly large impact as more farmers adopt them in Costa Rica. Farmers have interwoven farmland with tropical habitats so successfully that they have significantly contributed to doubling the country's forest cover. This provides food and habitat for wildlife, as well as natural pollination and pest control from birds and insects. These farms attract and produce food while restoring the planet. In the United States, ranchers raise cattle on grasslands composed of native species, generating a valuable protein source and protecting biodiversity.

In Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Nepal, new approaches to rice production may dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Rice is a staple food for three billion people and the main source of household income. More than 90 percent of rice is grown in flooded paddies, which use a lot of water, and only 11 percent of annual methane emissions, which account for one to two percent of total annual greenhouse gas emissions globally, can be reduced by experimenting with new strains of rice, irrigating less, and adopting less labor-intensive ways of planting seeds. Farmers in these countries have already increased their income and crop yields while cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.

In Zambia, numerous organizations are investing in locally specific methods to improve crop production, reduce forest loss, and improve livelihoods for local farmers. These efforts are projected to increase crop yield by almost a quarter over the next few decades. If combined with methods to combat deforestation in the region, they could move the country towards a resilient climate-focused agriculture sector.

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In India, where up to 40 percent of post-harvest food is lost or wasted due to poor infrastructure, farmers have already started to implement solar-powered cold storage capsules that help thousands of rural farmers preserve their produce and become a viable part of the supply chain. It will take all of these methods, from the most high-tech to the lowest cost, to revolutionize farming. High-tech interventions stand to amplify climate- and conservation-oriented approaches to farming, and large producers will need to invest in implementing these technologies. Meanwhile, we'll have to expand access to lower-cost methods for smaller-scale farmers.

This vision of future farming will also require a global shift towards more plant-based diets and huge reductions in food loss and waste, both of which will reduce pressure on the land and allow farmers to do more with what they have available. If we optimize food production both on land and at sea, we can feed humanity within the environmental limits of the earth, but there's a very small margin of error, and it will take unprecedented global cooperation and coordination of the agricultural lands we have today.

In conclusion, In today's society, the word organic has spread. Organic farms used to simply mean farmers selling their food to the locals. The farms were small and private, and there was interaction between the consumers and the farmer. The consumers were able to learn more about the farmers and how they grew their food. Since the term organic was what increased sales in the food industry, they started focusing more on the organic label to increase money in the industry. Industrial organic farms are large farms or corporations that rely on monoculture to focus on growing organic food.

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