9 questions to memorize Flashcards
- In what ways can farmers grow enough food for everyone if we switched to organic, low-input, sustainable agriculture? How would you design a research program to test this question?
Farmers can grow enough food for organic, low input, and sustainable agriculture by employing more efficient and less wasteful techniques such as drip irrigation, hydroponics, conservation tillage, and agroforestry to improve soil health. Most countries still employ wasteful and unsustainable agricultural practices, so you can use that as a control. The research program would focus on employing sustainable agricultural practices mentioned above, then comparing them to the existing farms in terms of yield, environmental impact, and cost.
- While there have been vast improvements in agricultural practices that led to increased food production, what has been a fairly consistent poor farming practice throughout history? How did these practices specifically affect agricultural development?
Throughout history, farmers have often prioritized short-term gains over long-term sustainability, leading to the overuse of land and the depletion of essential nutrients in the soil. If the soil became infertile, farmers would move to another area where the soil was still fertile, leaving behind a trail of destruction. The main practice that caused a lot of soil erosion is conventional tillage. In conventional tillage, the soil is stirred and the subsurface layers are disturbed, which could reach down to even the B soil horizon. The loose soil is ideal for planting seeds and adding anything extra such as fertilizer. The method is so destructive that after a year or two, due to no preserved soil structure the wind would blow away the soil and water would wash away anything inside the soil, causing eutrophication via extreme runoff. This means both the fertile farmland and local underwater ecosystem got destroyed, forcing farmers to move to somewhere else.
- What are some of the impacts of climate change on agriculture?
Climate change causes rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and increased extreme weather events. Crops are very particular about how they are grown, so these major changes to the environment heavily impact yield, water scarcity, and increased disease outbreaks.
- How is genetic engineering (creating genetically modified organisms) different from artificial selection (traditional breeding methods)? What are the pros and cons of each. Are any of your foods genetically engineered?
Genetic engineering is a direct and controlled process. Rather than producing gradual change over many generations through selective breeding, which is how artificial selection produces desirable traits, creating a GMO is simply inserting a gene into a crop or livestock animal’s genome.
Artificial Selection makes people feel better about what they’re eating because it’s considered “organic” food, even though it’s not very different from GMOs. Artificial Selection also takes a long time while being imprecise, not to mention the lack of genetic diversity. GMOs, on the other hand, are much faster than artificial selection and don’t have the same ramifications considering genetic diversity. There are some problems with GMOs though. For example, they can breach containment and spread the modified gene into the wild population
- What are the three most significant concepts you learned doing this food project about farming techniques? Explain in detail.
Farming is extremely resource intensive, and though there are techniques to improve farming efficiency, they too come with drawbacks.
As countries industrialize and reach Stages 4-5, agriculture becomes a smaller and smaller part of their economy. The country then starts to depend more on imports or try to apply technology to increase yield with less resources.
Even without eating meats and other animal products with lots of proteins, you can still get all of the protein you need from plants alone. During our research we had to make sure the food we were making had all the necessary amino acids and it was surprisingly easy to do.
- How can plant based foods provide the same amino acid content and variety that meat and diary provide and what is the ecological advantage of eating low on the food chain?
Plants, especially beans, can produce some amino acids on their own, but legumes take this to a whole new level, as they have nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots, allowing them to have lots of amino acids, including the 8 essential amino acids that are necessary for human function. This doesn’t mean that you sacrifice variety, however, as there are over 40,000 bean species, with even more available foods if you consider other kinds of plants. Because of the nature of plants as producers, they are low on the food chain, and thus, are not taxed on their energy because they are on the first trophic level, whereas animals are taxed as they go higher and higher up, reducing the efficiency of your eating.
- Under what circumstances would conservation tillage be used and why?
Conservation tillage would be used in areas with relatively fertile soil. Historically, fertile soil was over-tilled, causing the soil to be prone to erosion, making further tilling an extremely dangerous idea for the land as the topsoil would erode away. The most prominent example is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when, due to over-tilling the fertile lands, the topsoil of millions of acres of land was swept away into the sea, as they had nothing to anchor to.
- When thinking about your “ How low can you get on the food chain” why is the bio-availability of plant based foods very important to address with respect to getting the nine essential amino acids. Have an example to share.
Addressing the bioavailability of plant-based foods is crucial for ensuring adequate intake of all nine essential amino acids, as many plant proteins are incomplete and may lack certain amino acids, or have lower digestibility than animal proteins. For example, combining beans (low in methionine) with rice (low in lysine) creates a complete protein source, as the two complement each other’s amino acid profiles.
- What type of irrigation may have been involved in the main foods you are providing and given the region why/why not was this an appropriate/sustainable use to the water needed to irrigate those crops?
South Korea’s main crop is rice, a thirsty crop that requires a water-intensive irrigation method, flood irrigation. Growing rice requires its paddies to be completely flooded. Given the massive surface area of these paddies, evaporation is constant and massive, which means massive water consumption. Given that South Korea has historically struggled with water resources (2023 South Jeolla Province drought), this does not appear to be a good use of their water.
Why did the farmer bring a ladder to the field?
Because he heard sustainable agriculture was all about raising the crops right!
