How Sustainable Agriculture is Different from Conventional Agriculture?

Farming has dominated world landscapes for thousands of years. Agriculture practices have been refined day by day to accommodate the increasing human population. But during the recent decade, we have witnessed the problems associated with modern agriculture practices. Less and less land is available for food production and the existing crops are exhausting easy. Rapid population growth pressured science to come up with certain methods that increase food production such as gene manipulation techniques. In addition to this, agriculture production has increased extremely worldwide. Degradation of soil and pollution is integrated with this growth.

Many existing agriculture practices are used only for maximizing the potential of plants. Synthetic chemicals are being used without thinking about its harmful effects on the soil. All this makes it necessary to have a global transition to sustainable agriculture. With the current rising population, it is important to address a few questions: what is the most cost-effective and eco-friendly method to feed the world population. Fortunately, humans are capable enough to find out these answers. We have been perfecting agriculture practices for more than a decade and working on finding those techniques that can maximize the crop yield along with enhancing the soil composition and promoting bio-diversity. But before moving on to sustainable farm methods let’s first take a look at the history of agriculture.

History

During the Stone Age, animal meat is the only source of food for humans. But as humans started cultivating food products, human civilization changed tremendously. After finding the potential of plants, humans started exploring the world and started building infrastructure where they find fertile soil.

After starting framing, we began to try such methods that improve plant production and soil fertility. All this encouraged us to use agriculture methods such as crop rotation and intercropping. Modern science started introducing techniques such as irrigation, intercropping to increase efficiency.

The ever-increasing pressure of the population is subjecting farmers to the greed of the industry because their crops depend on synthetic chemicals and energy. Farmers who were once committed to traditional farming find themselves locked in a cycle of loans, debts, and subsidies after this.

Conventional agriculture

Conventional farming or conventional agriculture is a broad term and a crop that is produced using synthetic chemicals comes under conventional farming. Conventional farming was designed to increase crop production; it achieved this but at the major cost to the environment.

Using synthetic chemicals, genetically modified organisms, and other industrial products the crop yield is maximized in conventional agriculture. In maintaining this system, we have already comprised the bio-diversity, soil-fertility and the ecosystem. In addition to this, conventional farming typically involves cropping of a single crop. This uniformity reduces the labor cost and makes the harvesting easy but it also destroys the bio-diversity. Chemicals and pesticides also make the maintenance of conventional agriculture easy. But these pesticides lead to several unintended consequences. Since the only motive of conventional agriculture is to maximize yields, the biodiversity and the health of the environment usually not preserved.

Sustainable agriculture

Sustainable agriculture as the name suggests helps in sustaining the health of the environment. It uses eco-friendly methods that help in protecting the biodiversity and the eco-system rather than using those inputs with adverse effects. Many types of sustainable agriculture rely on natural methods that ensure plant health. Instead of using synthetic chemicals, farmers plant a variety of plants together and keep the pathogens and the pests away from the crop. While conventional farming promotes uniformity, sustainable farming uses biodiversity to protect the crop from pests and insects. Eco- friendly methods increase soil fertility and maintain the environment's health. This is not only economical for the farmers but also helps them in increasing the crop yield.

In comparison to conventional farming sustainable farming helps in improving biodiversity, soil composition and provides social and economic growth. All this makes sustainable agriculture the most feasible way to meet the growing trends.

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