September 25, 2011
Sustainable Agriculture: the new face of agriculture in America
Agriculture is an important multi-billion dollar industry in the United States that plays an important economic and social role. In recent years, the concept of sustainable agriculture has emerged out of the increasing concern for long-term farm productivity and the effect of agricultural practices on the environment. Sustainable agriculture is an alternative approach to agriculture that incorporates integrated farming systems to produce environmental goods while protecting resources and enhancing future environmental quality. The key to creating sustainable agriculture is improving and maintaining soil biodiversity, but this cannot be done until the economic and social issues related to farming are addressed.
Soil biodiversity is a central component of sustainable agriculture since without it the availability of arable soil would decrease, therefore making soil management techniques crucial in sustainable farming. Soil is the home for a myriad of organisms, bacteria, fungi, and microbes, which all play key roles in soil quality and health, in turn affecting agriculture. The function of these soil biota are “central to the decomposition processes and nutrient cycling” and therefore “affect plant growth and productivity, as well as the release of pollutants in the environment.” Soil biodiversity is key in sustainable agriculture’s goal of producing adequate amounts of nutritious food while maintaining environmental quality and conserving natural resources.
Sustainable farming is extremely intertwined with three variables: environment, economy, and society. Environmental factors sustainable farmers must take into account are biodiversity, recycling of nutrients, waste, and avoidance of pollution, to name a few. Although most attention is usually places on the environmental facet of sustainable agriculture, the economic and social influences play increasingly crucial roles in its success. Economically, concerns of profitability, especially compared to other farms, and maintenance agricultural raw materials are important for farmers to take into consideration. The social dimension includes the “retention of an optimum level of farm population, the maintenance of an acceptable quality of farm life, and the equitable distribution of material benefits from economic growth.” The struggle for many sustainable farms is that environmental, economic, and social factors do not always coincide and therefore priority must be given to certain interests over others. For example, sustainable agriculture techniques such as crop rotation, conservation tillage, cover cropping, nutrient management, and multicrop farming can become costly and do not necessarily yield the biggest profit margin. Conversely, due to competition from other farms, sustainable or not, in order to stay in business farms must have a maximum output of crops.
Organic farming is a type of sustainable farming that prohibits the use of synthetic products, including fertilizers and pesticides, and stresses maintaining soil productivity and quality. In 1995, the National Organic Standards Board defined it as “an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity.” Since organic farms do not use unnatural pesticides and fertilizers, they tend to rely more on natural nutrient cycles than do conventional farms. These types of farms must be creative in the ways they replace chemical fertilizers and frequently practice crop rotation, maturing, cultivation, and mineral fertilizers. Since many of these practices are more time consuming and costly than traditional chemical fertilizers, organic farms rely on higher prices for their produce in order to ensure profitability. By increasing their prices, organic farmers do not have to choose between being environmentally sustainable and making an economic profit.
Due to the increasing global population rate and more demand on agricultural resources, sustainable agriculture is becoming more important and necessary, however it is crucial to remember the role of soil biodiversity in its success and how economic and social factors play an important role in its effectiveness and implementation.
About the authors: Ariana Verdu and Lily Phillips are working towards their bachelor degrees in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
September 19, 2011
Soil: The Underground Treasure
Soil is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, haven to not only insects, but also bacteria, fungi, nematodes, amoebas among many other organisms. However, the ecosystem and biodiversity is also understudied, which has resulted in the misuse and erosion of soil due to agriculture and a lack of government involvement to protect this resource in the US. Despite the significance soil has in supporting the majority of ecosystems that exist above it, the influence and financial benefits that agriculture has in the U.S. has led to poor farming practices at the cost of soil biodiversity.
An important aspect of conserving soil biodiversity is to understand the benefits soil biodiversity contributes. Soil biodiversity helps decompose plants such as trees and leaves that have fallen on the ground. Decomposition allows for nitrogen obtained from the decaying plants to be turned into an inorganic form to be used by plants and spreading nutrients, which allows vegetation to grow. Another service is storage and filtration, meaning that the soil biota filters water stored in the soil. The filtered water then flows into streams, providing clean water for many aquatic species to live in.
Yet, the efforts to conserve earth’s ecology have focused primarily on the loss of biodiversity above ground; degradation and loss of biodiversity in soil have gone fairly unnoticed. Land use, nitrogen enrichment and climate change have impacted soil through changes in physiochemical conditions of the nitrogen and carbon content of soil, losing functionally important organisms, and creating long term consequences in the nutrient cycling that makes it possible for plant dynamics and primary producers to exists in many ecosystems (Wall, Bardgett, et al. 2010). Within the United States alone, soil preservation has not been an area of great importance due to the vital role that agriculture plays in US history and future.
“No comprehensive soils protection strategy exists in the United States” (USDA). The US EPA is the federal agency mainly responsible for implementing laws to mitigate polluted air and water, yet no legislative law has been implemented to protect soil biodiversity. The goals for soil conservation within the U.S. as primarily have been interrelated with the greater goals for agriculture and the environment. Agriculture has a deep history within America. Both legislation and general social ideals form the basis of the U.S.’s conservation policy in agriculture.
Agriculture itself provides the food necessary to feed the population. However, this deep seeded role that agriculture plays within American history has led to more than $40 billion annually lost from soil desertification (Ginsburg). The U.S. has a difficult role in controlling erosion due to the large scale intensive agriculture dependency that has made up a profitable part of its economy for over 200 years.
As a result, agriculture has led to numerous farming practices that have led to loss in soil biodiversity: soil erosion, fertilizer and pesticide pollution, deforestation, salinization, desertification, loss of biodiversity of some of the few sources of loss in soil biodiversity.
There are ways to prevent loss of soil biodiversity while maintaining the agricultural dependency our economy relies on. Soil erosion can be reduced by seasonal plowing, crop rotation, multi-crop farming and a plethora of ways to reduce the anthropogenic impact on soil. And, a deeper understanding of the true value of soil—as a basis of almost all primary ecosystems on this planet to create a sentiment of how critical soil is. Yet, like all natural resources provided by this planet it is important to recognize that no matter what measures we take to restore any resource it will never return to its original state of biodiversity.
About the authors: Victoria Chu and Mabel Nevarrez are undergraduate students in the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.