Sustainable Agriculture: The Environmental And Environmental Impact Of Agriculture

Introduction Agriculture has changed tremendously, especially this 21st century after the end of World War II. As a result of population growth and world agricultural increase in food demand, productivity soared with the aid of new technologies, mechanization, increased synthetic chemical use, specialization and government policies that favored maximizing agricultural production. Although these changes have had positive effects and reduced many risks in farming, there have also been negative impacts. Prominent among these are like topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination as a result of land over use, decline of family farms, continued neglect of the living and working conditions for farm laborers, low wages for the laborers, increasing

It then introduces concept of sustainable agriculture as an alternative agricultural practice and a solution to most of the environmental and social problem. Lastly, it looks into some of the voluntary sustainability standards, life cycle assessment and comparative case studies to ascertain the advantages (or lack) of some sustainable to none sustainable agro-practices. The Loss of Ecosystem Services The drastic increase in the global food production have many direct negative impacts on the environment and agricultural ecosystem but other impact of agricultural activities worth noting is the rate of reduction on the ability of nonagricultural ecosystems to provide vital services to humanity. These vital services are known as ecosystem services which includes provision of clean air, fresh water, food nutrients (vitamins and minerals) derived from plants and animals, fiber, timber, Genetic resources etc. Taking provision of clean water as example; Thrall, Bever & Burdon (2010) in their work suggest that existing nonagricultural ecosystems provide, at no cost, pure, drinkable

2003) and this in effect reduces the biodiversity of the ecological environment. As stated by Laurance et al. (2007), Habitat fragmentation is among the most important of all threats to global biodiversity. Land Degradation Land degradation occurs when land changes due to human use and results in a reduction in the overall quality of the environment. It is considered as one of the major problems associated with industrialized agriculture. Land degradation as a result of industrialized agriculture can occur in multiple ways, including changing soil quality and physical changes to the land. Soil Quality Reduction: Reduction in soil quality occurs because the amount of nutrients available to plants decreases over time. Normally, when a plant dies in a forest, it decomposes and returns nutrients to the ground for future plants to use but in industrialized agriculture, crops are harvested, and remaining plant parts are also removed from the