 |  Environmental Science: A Global Concern, 7/e William P. Cunningham,
University of Minnesota
Mary Ann Cunningham,
Vassar College
Barbara Woodworth Saigo,
St. Cloud State University
Food and Agriculture
Chapter OverviewThis is the first of two chapters devoted to food. The world’s farmers are caught in a dilemma: how to preserve the land’s productivity and avoid damaging health and water supplies yet still produce the food needed by a rapidly growing population.
Parts of modern intensive agriculture do not seem sustainable. Soil, that complex mix of the living and the nonliving, is indispensable for large-scale food production. Despite the fact that soil is a renewable resource, we are losing it to rivers and the sea at a prodigious rate. This relentless, accelerating loss jeopardizes the future ability of the earth to feed us. Farming practices must change.
This chapter is full of both depressing facts and hopeful signs. We understand the problem. We know how to solve it. The answer is sustainable, or eco-efficient, agriculture, and farmers the world over are getting interested in these new ways as well as some very old ways of farming.
Most of us are not farmers. But food, from its availability to the water polluted in its creation, directly touches us all.
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2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education