Feeding The Future: Organic Agriculture

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Having lived in rural America all of my nearly twenty-two years in life I take pleasure in sitting down to dinner and knowing exactly where the food I am about to partake in came from and am hopeful that we continue to produce enough to feed ourselves. The steak was from an Angus steer fed out on our farm, the potatoes and corn a family friend grew in his garden, and the apples in dessert are from a local orchard. Granted, not everything I put in my mouth comes from a source that I have direct contact with, but I least have knowledge of the food industry. However, your average American is clueless about where their food comes from. They travel to their local supermarket and furnish themselves with the plastic wrapped meat in the freezer section or to the local fast food drive thru for a burger. My agricultural background makes me proud to understand where my food comes from and that I possess the ability to sustain myself and not wholly depend on a trip to the grocery store if possible. With this knowledge I chose the topic of whether the world can tackle it’s exponentially expanding population and be able to feed itself in the foreseeable future.
Considering that the first humans who interacted with agriculture were hunter-gathers, I believe the industry has come a long way in domestication of plants and animals and with technology that has made farming easier. Advancing from hunting and gathering, crops would only be planted near a water source for irrigation. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that farming itself really changed, when mechanization, where once beasts of burden were used, could increase production. New implements meant less time could be spent on the fields and they could focus on introducing tac...

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...ulture Organization (2009). Global agriculture towards 2050. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_papers/HLEF2050_Global_Agriculture.pdf
Jones, J. D. (2011). Why genetically modified crops? Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0345

McLure, J. (2012, August 31). Genetically modified food. CQ Researcher, 22, 717-740. Retrieved from http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/

United States Department of Agrculture (n.d.). 2007 Census of Agriculture. Retrieved from http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Online_Highlights/Fact_Sheets/Farm_Numbers/farm_numbers.pdf
World Hunger Education Service (2013). 2013 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics by World Hunger Education Service. Retrieved from http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm

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