AP Human Geography 5.11: Challenges of Contemporary Agriculture

Biotechnology is the use of living things, or their genes, to make or improve products. In farming it mostly means changing crops and animals at the level of their genes. A genetically modified organism (GMO) is a plant or animal whose DNA has been changed in a lab, such as a crop given a gene to resist an insect or to survive a weedkiller. Aquaculture is the farming of fish, shellfish or water plants in ponds, tanks or pens.

These innovations, among others, can produce more food from the same land or water, and each is debated:

• Sustainability: can the method keep producing for generations without using up what farming depends on? The three debates below are parts of it.
• Soil and water usage: crops grown in dry places and fish ponds filled from wells can drain water supplies, and planting one crop on the same fields year after year can wear out and erode the soil.
• Reductions in biodiversity, the variety of living things in a place: when farmers across a region switch to one engineered variety, older local varieties disappear, and escaped farmed fish can breed with wild fish and weaken them.
• Extensive fertilizer and pesticide use: crops bred for high yields can need heavy fertilizer, and weeds and insects that adapt can push spraying back up.

Supporters answer that some engineered crops need less spraying or survive drought, and that fish farms take pressure off wild fish.

Some changes in farming start with the people who buy food. Movements tied to individual food choice include these, among others:

• Urban farming: growing food or raising animals inside a city, on rooftops, empty lots or community gardens.
• Community-supported agriculture (CSA): households pay a farm before the season starts and receive a share of its harvest through the season, so they share the risk of a poor year.
• Organic farming: farming without synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides or engineered seeds, under standards a certifier checks.
• Value-added specialty crops: specialty crops, such as fruit, nuts or heirloom vegetables, that earn a higher price because of what the farm does to them: processing, packaging, certification or branding, such as grapes made into wine on the farm.
• Fair trade: a certification that promises farmers and workers, often in poorer countries, a minimum price and fair working conditions, paid for by buyers who pay more.
• Local-food movements: buying food grown close to where it is eaten, from nearby farms, farmers markets, and stores and restaurants that buy from them.
• Dietary shifts: changes over time in what a population eats, such as more meat as incomes rise, or less meat by choice.

Each choice moves money and land. A CSA lets a small farm near a city earn more from each hectare than bulk grain would, certification lets a farm charge a premium, and a shift away from beef frees pasture for other uses.

Growing enough food is only part of feeding people. The challenges of feeding a global population include these:

• Lack of food access. Food insecurity is when a household cannot count on enough safe, nutritious food, most often because it cannot afford it. A food desert is an area where people have poor access to affordable, healthy food, usually a neighborhood far from a full-service grocery store where many residents have no car or good transit. Convenience stores and fast food may be close by while fresh produce is not. The two ideas overlap but measure different things: food insecurity describes a household, a food desert describes a place.
• Problems with distribution systems. A distribution system is the chain of storage, transport and selling that moves food from farms to the people who eat it. Bad roads, too little storage or refrigeration, conflict or high fuel costs can keep food from reaching people, and stored food can rot before it moves.
• Adverse weather. Drought, floods, frost and storms can ruin a season's harvest.
• Land use lost to suburbanization. Suburbanization is the growth of homes, roads and stores on the edges of cities. Much of it is built on farmland, often flat, fertile land close to the city, so there is less land to farm just as there are more people to feed.

The map at the top of the page shows that last challenge in a hypothetical county.

These economic forces shape what farms grow and how they grow it:

• The location of food-processing facilities and markets. A food-processing facility turns raw farm products into food for sale: a cannery, a mill, a meatpacking plant. Farms that sell to one cluster within easy trucking distance of it, and foods that spoil quickly, such as milk and fresh vegetables, are grown close to the cities that buy them. When a plant closes or moves, nearby farmers may have to haul farther or change what they grow.
• Economies of scale. Economies of scale are the savings a business gets as it grows: the cost of buildings, machines and managers is spread over more output, so each unit costs less to make. Large plants and large farms can sell more cheaply, so processors often buy from fewer, bigger farms, and small farms sell out or find a niche.
• Distribution systems. Refrigerated trucks, warehouses and supermarket chains decide which foods reach which markets. A farm that cannot get its harvest into that chain cannot sell it, however good it is.
• Government policies. A subsidy is a government payment to producers, which makes a product more profitable to produce. A tariff is a tax on imports, which raises the price of foreign food and helps home farmers sell theirs. Price supports, food-safety rules and zoning that keeps land in farming change what farms do too.