Humans Screw Up Food Production: An Essay about farmers that Cause Soil Erosion Soil erosion is one of the most serious threats in our world. Humans cause 40% of soil erosion. Soil erosion is topsoil, which is organic soil made up with rich nutrients. Erosion can be caused by careless farming techniques that lead to water erosion. When it is raining and you are walking to class you can see soil erosion where they have been working besides the English building. Soil erosion and water erosion is practically the same thing. No one will ever notice soil erosion because nobody ever realizes erosion is everywhere we go. So what exactly causes soil erosion? Humans cause soil erosion, farmers, anybody really, cause soil erosion. Farmers do not listen …show more content…
Cropping systems decrease runoff and soil loss from continuous cotton to soybean to sorghum to wheat in all tillage systems under climate change, indicating a preference of winter wheat for controlling runoff and soil loss. Tillage systems are generally grouped into three types: intensive tillage, reduced tillage, and conservation tillage. “ According to the Conservation technology Information Center, IT includes more than four tillage passes and leaves less then 15% residue cover on the top soil surface after planting.” Farmers will use the tillage system and do it there own way or they will leave there crops leave out to long. If they leave their crops out too long bad rainstorms destroy about 60% of the crops. That is why farmers need to upgrade their technologies or go to their soil survey groups. They cannot predict on their own when to tillage …show more content…
See how much food we can loose from this. Our world is relying on our farmers to produce food and we just keep screwing it up. Back in the early 1900s they treated soil with respect. “ We believe that the soil, as well as the world, should be treated as a living organism. Just as we are not simply a compilation of various cells, but a whole that is entirely different than its parts, soil is not just dirt, but a living breathing entity full of organic matter, bacteria, minerals, water and air whose whole is so much greater than the sum of parts.”( Whitecraft, Michele A., and Jr. Bruce E. Huggins. “Casting a Wider Net: Understanding The “Root” Causes of Human-Induced Soil Erosion. “Agriculture 3.4 (2013): 613-628.
The nature of the Southern Plains soils and the periodic influence of drought could not be changed, but the technological abuse of the land could have been stopped. This is not to say that mechanized agriculture irreparably damaged the land-it did not. New and improved implements such as tractors, one-way disk plows, grain drills, and combines reduced plowing, planting, and harvesting costs and increased agricultural productivity. Increased productivity caused prices to fall, and farmers compensated by breaking more sod for wheat. At the same time, farmers gave little thought to using their new technology in ways to conserve the
middle of paper ... ... Katsvairo, Tawainga W., David L. Wright, Jim J. Marois, and Pawel P. Wiatrak. "Making the Transition from Conventional to Organic Farming Using Conservation Tillage in Florida. " University of Florida IFAS Extension.
The producer had continuous wheat on all the fields, which affected the decisions we made regarding what was planted when. In field one we decided to plant wheat continuous one more time, so we can get this field on a wheat, fallow, sorghum rotation. This will also give us the opportunity to deal with the field bindweed and kochia problem during the times of fallow. We also wanted the producer to have an income this year from something other than his corn. These 80 acres will then be fallow for a year and will be grain sorghum the following year.
“Farming techniques such as strip cropping, terracing, crop rotation, contour plowing, and cover crops were advocated.” ("About the Dust Bowl")These new techniques were advocated in order to try and prevent more dust from getting picked up by wind and starting the dust storm again. “But for years, farmers had plowed the soil too fine, and they contributed to the creation of the Dust Bowl.”(Ganzel) This was a big mistake farmers had made. This was one of the huge factors in contributing to the Dust Bowl. This has definitely changed now. “Now, many farmers are learning how to raise crops without tilling their fields at all. (Ganzel) Farmers now not tilling their fields at all is a new farming
Many farmers always wonder about newer, more efficient ways to farm. Farming becomes more and more precise every day; farmers struggle to keep up with moisture loss caused by dry-spells, soil and nutrient run-off caused by erosion, and trying to raise better yields. Although it may seem as if there is no answer, many farmers are turning to no-till as the solution. Some farmers stand against no-till, saying it keeps the ground too cold for too long in the spring, or that it will not allow them to get their crops up, but much research proves these beliefs wrong. No-till is an advantage over conventional-till for three main reasons: conserves moisture in the soil, reduces erosion by wind and rain, and increases the quality of the topsoil.
Costal erosion, especially on barrier islands, is a major concern throughout the world. The issue represents a serious concern for many vulnerable coastlines throughout the coastal regions of the world. This issue must be studied for root causes so it can, if at all possible, be brought under some semblance of control before it is too late. The cost of ignoring this issue would be catastrophic to both communities on the beach and the marine life that depend on the coastal areas for their very survival.
As humans, we need food to survive. This is a basic need and want and has always been primarily done by farming the land. That farmed land requires sunlight, nutrients, and fresh water. If one of these three criteria is missing, the land is no longer able to birth vegetation. The biggest issue we face here in Canada is desertification. This term means that the land being classified with this is losing its water either to drought or to human causes. Desertification is a form of land degradation and is found to be an issue all over the globe. These dry lands are not just centered on a small percentage of people but affect up to half of the world’s population. This type of soil erosion is due to many factors. The biggest is the latitude of the area under concentration. Of course the closer you are to the equator the hotter and less precipitation is going to reach the land and this also affects natural weather cycles. The sad thing is however that where there is desertification, poverty will not be far. This makes sense for the reason we have poverty is because there are people without food and shelter. This connects to the lack of vegetation for with desertification the food and materials needed cannot grow to make a successful civilization. Looking at what causes desertification we can at least attempt to reverse the results. Desertification is caused by human error by globalizing prematurely.
By implementing new farming techniques provided with the new technological advances in machines we can see abundant harvest in even the poorest third world countries. For example, the Green Revolution has already showed admirable progress in the northern part of India ever since it took start in 1950. By 1997, northern India increased its grain production by 37 percent. This has proven that traditional farming methods are being rendered obsolete. And because by the year 2000, there will be half the land per person in developing countries as there was in 1970, we need to apply ultra-efficient methods to sustain the growing need. Not only does the Green Revolution enhances food output, it also preserves the environment.
The major causes of soil erosion in Iowa are due to ephemeral gully erosion. These erosion form branching like pattern of channels and also, cause soil movement that are affecting the soil's ability to hold water. The soil is the foundation for agriculture, which Iowa truly depends and so do corn and soybean farmers. Agriculture involved businesses provide roughly one-quarter of Iowa's $152.4 billion gross domestic product.
Take, for example, that livestock agriculture and the plant-based agriculture specifically used for feeding that livestock utilizes 30 percent of land on Earth. With crops in high demand to feed the many animals that are slaughtered or otherwise used by humans, it's been found that the soil has lost a great deal of its nutritional value and has eroded to the point that, in the United States, nearly 33 percent of topsoil is diminished.
It’s funny how things that you used to do as a kid can change the course of people’s lives. Myself, when my parents told me and my brothers and sisters that we were going to the cabin meant a week of solid fun. My family has a cabin up on Camano Island, which is about 20 minutes north of Everett, right off of the I-5 interstate. My family would go up there during the summer with my cousins and grandma, and go swimming when the tide was in, build sandcastles when the tide was out, only to have them washed away when the tide came back in, build forts with the new driftwood that came in each year, explore the wrecked ship down the beach in one direction from our cabin, and scour the dunes that were north of our cabin. The dunes were the best part going to the cabin. We would always try to get there by walking along the wood that had been washed up and once we got there, we would race up the hills and jump down into the sand pits below. Another things that we all used to love doing, were to see who had carved messages into the sides of the dunes. There were all sorts of messages, love message from husband to wife, boyfriend to girlfriend. ‘I was here’ messages, and then there were simply names. That is what we always used to do. Every year, my two cousins, dad, three siblings and I would climb up into the dunes and carve our names into the wall using sticks. This was done over and over again for about 8-10 years. Over the last couple of years we did this we noticed that we could see a house at the top of the dunes. This was something that we never noticed before and when we asked my dad, he said that he never noticed it either. We thought nothing about it at the time, carved our names in the wall and went back to the cabin. Later on we heard from other people who lived up there that there was a big concern by the people who live in that house that all of the messages that people had carved along with the natural erosion of the hills has caused the hill side to be dangerously close to being pushed back far enough to where the house might fall down.
They take pride in caring for the land, water and natural resources in several ways. One way is by using cover crops which are plants grown to protect the soil and put healthy nutrients back into it, while slowing erosion, controlling pests, and increasing organic matter. They also use crop rotation by planting different crops in the same field but during different times. This keeps the land fertile because not all of the nutrients are being used with each crop. Buffer zones are another technique farmers use to plant strips of vegetation between the fields and bodies of water to keep the soil out of the water source. No till fields are used to keep the soil in place when it rains, helping moisture stay in the
tillage is a method where some of crop residues, if not all of crop residues,
Agriculture also leads to soil erosion, both through rainfall and wind. This soil can damage the aquatic ecosystems it ends up in, an...
Our landscape is constantly changing, since the Big Bang Theory to present day. There are many different factors which can a huge impact on the shaping of the land. There are many natural disasters such as floods, typhoons, earthquakes, hurricanes, and even wildfires. They can change the face of the landscape and they can change the shape of the landscape. Then there is also the human factor. Many huge companies and businesses are always taking advantage, or as Denis Wood refers to as in “The Spell of the Land,” the raping of the land. It is a very rare sight to being driving nowadays and not see some type of building being built or a future sight of some type of business. There is nothing that can be done when looking at the natural disaster factor, but as for the human factor, there are steps that people can do to prevent the “raping” of the land. Again, like I touched upon in the introduction, not all usage of the land by companies is a negative thing.