Sustainable Agriculture
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ustainable agriculture involves farming systems that produce food, feed, fiber and energy while ensuring long-term economic returns, protecting the environment, and human health and safety. Sustainable agriculture includes conventional, organic, low external input and other alternative farming methods if they conserve resources and address economic, environmental and social concerns. |
The goal of sustainable agriculture is a permanent change in the way producers, agro-industries, consumers, and the general public thinks and practices food, feed, fiber and energy production while protecting the environment. Explicitly, a sustainable approach emphasizes the farm as a living, dynamic system that is in constant interaction with the environment and people. Reducing agrichemical use, land stewardship and recycling of wastes, diversifying farming enterprises, using soil and water conservation practices on the farm are some of the areas producers can make changes through the process of adopting sustainable agriculture.
How producers reach those goals is as different as prairie flowers dotting a Midwest landscape. A cattle rancher might divide his rangeland into sub-sections for his herd to graze in a rotational strategy to better manage natural resources like streams and soil while improving animal productivity. A field crop farmer might plant different crops each season - and include “cover crops,” non-cash crops grown for their benefit to the soil and ability to suppress weeds – to break up pest cycles, improve soil fertility and cut as directly to restaurants in a nearby city, to gain a larger share of the consumer food dollar. No single practice works in every field. No one recipe works on every farm. There are thousands of ways to farm more sustainably.
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Sus Ag News |
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Agropolis? |
Well, this is another idea introduced recently regarding urban food production and consumption. The system envisions integrating farm, grocery store and restaurant in the same building. The farming aspect employs hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming methods. Simply put, a restaurant and grocery building produces fruits, vegetables and herbs directly in the store so that customers can pick their own super fresh vegetables for home or for in--restaurant consumption. Read the complete article from Discovery News. What are the cons? To be seen as this takes effect.
Store illustration by Agropolis. Jan 2011 |
Straw Bale Bed: A way to Garden While Building Soil |
A straw or hay bale bed is a type of bed which can be used for raising vegetables (pepper, tomatoes, onion, grain amaranth etc), flowers, herbs, and cover crops (cow peas, vetch etc) directly on or in bale(s) (Figure 1) with the possible addition of growing media (plant nutrients) from compost, soil or other sources.
Generally, the growing season and planting time for bale gardens is roughly the same as that for conventional beds. But bale gardening may allow an earlier planting in the spring and offer extended production after the onset of fall and winter. Read the complete article here. |
| The Recurrent Topic: Organic vs Conventional Agriculture |
Both the proponents and opponents of organic agriculture have exchanged harsh words for the last several years and the squabble has been on-going to date. The two central points of the argument between the two groups are yield and quality of crops/livestock. A research done in California that compared 13 pairs of organic and conventional strawberry agroecosystems supported the claim of the proponents of organic agriculture. In the research findings published in the online free access journal PLoS ONE, Dr. Reganold and his colleagues concluded that strawberry fruit quality was superior in the organic than conventional managed strawberry agroecosystems. Read the full article here. |
