Info About Agriculture
Intensive Agriculture
Intensive agriculture refers to farming which relies heavily on the use of technologies like pesticides and other chemical fertilizes. Intensive farming also requires a high input of labour and is the opposite to forms of farming such as organic farming and extensive farming which both only require fairly small amounts of labour and fertilizer use.
In today's farming culture intensive farming uses mechanical ploughing, a variety of forms of chemicals to fertilize the land and other forms of machinery which allows them to increase production massively. However by doing this they type of farming there we have seen a high amount of pollution to the environment as a result, water has been contaminated, forest have been torn down to make room for farming are just some forms of this pollution.
Intensive farming can also refer to the intensive farming of animals; this is where a large number of animals are kept in tight and cramped conditions. In normal conditions animals require a fairly large supply of food and water to keep them healthy, in the cramp conditions of intensive farming the require even more food and water to keep them going. These types of farming tend to be heavily criticised due to the conditions the animals are kept in.
The advantages to intensive farming are fairly obvious; it allows you to produce a larger amount than you would normally, due to the cattle being kept in such a small space they have less room to move about therefore use less energy, needing less food, which allows farmers to cut back on their costs. The food the cattle are feed also gets stored up due to the small amount of room to move in resulting in extra stored up meat.
Intensive farming does however have a large number of disadvantages due to its extensive use of fertilizers as they can change the biology of local rivers and lakes if their water becomes polluted by the fertilizes. One of the fertilizers that intensive farming uses is pesticides; this can kill a number of insects which can be useful to them, for example ladybirds as they can eat away at some weeds. Pesticides are also harmful to the people using them, which results in some cases in them having health problems due to their work with them, they also tend to pollute the area around them as they pollute the local water due to their excess run-off, not only that but they also pollute the air. Pesticides are also harmful if any are left on the crops which then get consumed. The fertilizers can also kill the ground due to their chemicals which then prevents anything from being able to be grown there. Intensive farm require a large workforce in order to be successful as they need to operate the machinery and also apply the fertilizers.
In modern society intensive farming now means production of animals and crops, this means producing the highest output but at the lowest cost possible. As this is done on such a wide scale company's are able to do this by using economies in scale which allows them to buy in bulk the machinery they use do to this on a mass scale. This is now the procedure for the majority of crops, meat, eggs and dairy products that we pay from our local supermarkets.
Agriculture & Farming
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The production of food and goods through farming and forestry.
Resources
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