Agricultural biodiversity is the food chains, develop and safeguard that will contribute to feeding the world. Agricultural revolution begins at the wild plant species in various parts of the world. It provides us with a safe source of food. This develops the development of human life, society and culture. Some elements of agricultural biodiversity have made and continue to make appreciable contributions to human diets is scarce and correlating agricultural biodiversity with human nutrition is generally difficult for a number of reasons including human diversity. This explores the linkages between agriculture, food production, nutrition, and the resource base of wild and agricultural biodiversity in the context of increasing global change. …show more content…
It has three main hierarchy which are ecological diversity, organismal diversity and genetic diversity. Agricultural biodiversity also an extension of biodiversity. All species such as crop varieties, animal breeds and other are included. Agricultural biodiversity also included diets, food intake and nutritional to people. Furthermore, habitats and species outside of farming system also involve in agricultural biodiversity. This will benefit agriculture and enhance ecosystem functions. That is also directly managed to supply the goods and services used by a human. On the other hands, it also can affect crops and food production negatively. Agricultural biodiversity is an interaction humans and ecosystem and the species that have. Sometimes this can lead the modification and transformation. Furthermore, the farmer will determine the social, cultural, ethical and spiritual variables at the local community level. Selection and evolution will lead to producing new cultivars or local crops and the methods of grown and managed also will change and evolve. Moreover, the parts of agricultural biodiversity that will directly affect nutrition and health. They will direct managed to give people good and …show more content…
On the other hand, farmers have developed a bewildering diversity of local varieties of these staples and of minor crops resulting from ‘interactions with wild species, adaptations to changing farming conditions, and responses to the economic and cultural factors that shape farmers priorities’. Local crops are the goods of breeding or selection conduct by farmers. This has passed a lot of generations and natural selection. The concept of recognizable morphologically say that farmers have names for them, and different landraces are known to distinguish in adaptation to soil type, time of seeding, date of maturity, height, nutritive value, use and other properties Nowadays, just have some livestock species contribute to agricultural and food production because less number of animal species that were fully domesticated.. Similarly, the number of breeds that were developed in these domesticates was very much smaller than in the case of plants. Furthermore, research also notes that ‘With the exception of the wild boar the ancestors and wild relatives of major livestock species are either extinct or highly endangered as a result of hunting, changes to their habitats, and in the case of the wild red jungle fowl, intensive cross-breeding
Polyculture is associated with, but not exclusively limited to, the movement in organic farming (Pollan 144). The main drawback is the work required to maintain the different species being grown. Each plant requires its own growing conditions, so maintenance becomes labor intensive. However, this method of farming greatly increases the biodiversity of the fields which reduces susceptibility to disease and pests, and creates genetically diverse species. Polyculture is very different from monoculture in more ways than simply growing more than one crop. Monoculture is the attempt to control a crop to maximize yield. Polyculture is the acknowledgement of nature’s control and the attempt to grow successful crops through changing the process of growing plants based on the ecological system around them. The people who grew early potatoes on the Andes grew a wide variety of different potato species so that not all of them were likely to susceptible to the same disease (Pollan 131). Pollan’s discussion of these methods leans heavily toward the idea that even though monoculture is simpler and more profitable, it is an inferior method to polyculture that is mainly still in use to feed the capitalistic machine of the global food
In an agricultural society people started to farm and there were less to no hunting which changed their diets dramatically. When people were hunting and gathering they were getting a healthy and a well-balanced diet. Before agriculture people ate many various wild plants and animals therefore, they had better nutrition. For example, the Kalahari Bushmen’s daily intake was “2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein” (Diamond 2). Also when Diamond is comparing the two societies, he talks about the balance of nutrients and diet, also he states that the “Kalahari Bushmen eat a variety of 75 or so different wild plants” and receive more calories than needed. As the people switched over to agriculture, the amount of food they had become more plentiful and predictable but unhealthy. Nowadays, more people are overweight especially in the western area of the world. This proves that people before agriculture were healthy and had a decent
The book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food, by Wayne Roberts introduces us to the concept of “food system”, which has been neglected by many people in today’s fast-changing and fast-developing global food scene. Roberts points out that rather than food system, more people tend to recognize food as a problem or an opportunity. And he believes that instead of considering food as a “problem”, we should think first and foremost about food as an “opportunity”.
Agriculture plays an enormous part in having a functioning society. The farming fields in the
Before the land of what we no class Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and other countries in the middle east grains, such as wheat and wild barley, could be seen growing in the wild without human hand to cultivate and nurture it (Authors 2007). Over time, humans began to recognize the benefit of the plants and began the first signs of human agriculture. The skill of farming took time and trial and error, but along the way, humans began to settle down to tend to their crops. Though the first crops were nothing more than seed s thrown about without rhyme or reason to the process we know today such as fields having, rows and sorting out the seeds to create a higher yield each harvest (Authors 2007). Because of the trial and error process, agriculture of plants did not take place of a short period but took many, many years to evolve to what we know today as agriculture; the new fa...
If I were the Prime Minister of Canada the environmental issue that I would focus on for the next five years is the biodiversity loss in Canada. Canada is the world’s second largest country in size, with 9.98 square kilometers and a population of 35 million people. A country that is so huge must also be rich in species? An estimated 14,000 species live in Canada, and only half have been identified. Canada is such a large country and so sparsely settled for the most part that it is very difficult to know and name every single species living in the country. This just gives you a glimpse of how naturally diverse the country really is.
The introduction is human/livestock orientated, but the remainder of the paper is presented in livestock terminology. Some discussion about the relevance of the results to human populations would be useful.
In order for us to maintain our lives, we need to consume food to supply nutrient-needs for our bodies. As the global population increased, the demand for food also increased. Increased population led to mass production of foods. However, even with this mass production, in under-developed countries, people are still undernourished. On other hand, in developed and developing countries, people are overfed and suffering from obesity. In addition, the current methods of industrial farming destroy the environment. These problems raised a question to our global food system. Will it be able to sustain our increasing global population and the earth? With this question in my mind, I decided to investigate the sustainability of our current global food system.
Agriculture is the science and practice of producing crops and livestock. The primary aim of agriculture is to use the land to produce more abundantly to feed and clothe the world at the same time protecting it from deterioration or misuse. Humans had to improve agriculture as they became more dependent on food, creating a solitary evolutionary connection between plants and animals (Campbell and Reece, 2001). In this day and age, so many people have forgotten the authentic premises of survival. It is easy for some to believe that the grocery stores produce food and clothing is produced by shopping centers. These inaccurate presumptions are being made due to the lack of knowledge of how agriculture truly works. There are also significant differences in the levels of understanding between rural and urban communities.
The source shows the reliability of biodiversity and soil quality that organic farming agriculture exploits, specifically when it has a tight grip of the economy and community that has directly affected livestock, farmers, people, and the global environment as a whole. Organic farms are sometimes difficult to maintain as the land can quite possibly lose its potential of being free from pesticides. As articulated in the source, the piece of land must also need precise qualifications which takes time and patience. This is one amongst many disadvantages a progressive movement such as organic farming must work on. The purpose is meant to enhance a genetically modified agriculture into an innately modified agriculture for a nutritious
“Currently 80% of the world’s agricultural land is used directly or indirectly for animal production. In the US over half the total land mass is used for the production of meat and dairy products” (Clarke).
As agriculture has become more intensive, farmers have become capable of producing higher yields using less labour and less land. Growth of the agriculture has not, however, been an unmixed blessing. It, like every other thing, has its pros and cons. Topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, continued neglect of the living and working conditions for farm labourers, increasing costs of production, and the disintegration of economic and social conditions in rural communities. These are the cons of the new improved agriculture.
One of the reasons for loss in biodiversity is alteration of habitats. A habitat is the natural environment in which a species of living organism lives. If the habitat of a species is changed, it will cause the species to die or migrate to other places where it can find its natural habitat. There are many ways in which the habitat of plants and animals can be altered. One of them is land use changes. Since the beginning of human life, human beings have been changing land use for farming. Large areas of forests have been cleared by humans to increase the area of farming to satisfy their growing needs. Many biodiversity-rich landscape characteristics have been lost due to intensive farming (Young, Richards, Fischer, Halada, Kull, Kuzniar, Tartes, Uzunov & Watt, 2007). For example, traditional farming was replaced by private farms in Europe after the First World War causing an immense change in land use patterns. Another major proble...
Establishing an adequate supply of food is historically one of the fundamental challenges facing mankind. The modern food infrastructure employed by contemporary society is rooted in the creation and innovation of food production. Its effective utilization decreases the level of societal labor contribution required and discourages food shortage trepidation amongst individuals. It is hard to fathom given the current status of our society massive agricultural-industrial complex that the hunter-gatherer organization of society dominated for more than 99 percent of our existence (Fagan 2007: 126). The hunter-gatherer population was characterized by their primary subsistence method, which involved the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild. The primary methods employed were foraging and hunting, which were conducted without any significant recourse to the domestication of either food source (Fagan 2007: 129). Food production is presumed to have emerged approximately 12,000 years ago as a system of “deliberate cultivation of cereal grasses, edible root plants, and animal domestication” (Fagan 2007: 126). The pronounced change from hunting and gathering to agriculture and domestication can be simplistically designated the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution (Pringle 1998). The catalytic developments of the Neolithic Revolution mark a major turning point in the history of humankind. The resulting animal and plant domestication established the foundation on which modern civilization was built.
How is the important of food production? That agriculture is one of the most essential means of producing food is realized easily when we think of the types of things that we eat. The rice or wheat that we eat comes from the land. Even potatoes and other roots or vegetables and even leaves such as tea, as well as the fruits that men eat are the products of the soil that covers the earth. In fact, everything that we eat, except meat, fish and other kinds of flesh comes from the land, and what grows on the land is part of agriculture. Even the sugar, oil, coffee and other beverages that we use are products of plants that grow on land. In the same way, many of the medicines that we use is made of plants that grow in various parts of the