Risk Assesment Essay

Submitted By cgresham
Words: 512
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Patterns of Food Production and Distribution
Lindsey Sessions, Geoffrey Anderson, Connie Amaya, Courtney Van Winkle
ENV/100
July 28th, 2014
Lori Keller
Patterns of Food Production and Distribution
120000 years ago agriculture and animal husbandry were new aspects in everyday life. It is the reason that the world is the way it is today. Back then almost everyone was a farmer of some kind. Nowadays there are less than a third of the numbers of farmers there were in the 1930's. That is because the shift of manual labor and use of farm animals went to the use of technologically advanced machinery. This has in turn made us more dependent on fossil fuels. While this is reasonable for the farmers because they are not losing much in wages, it does drive our prices at the marketplace and gas pumps. The government has put a few practices in line were they reimburse farmers for retiring erosion prone land and plant it with trees and grasses. But this all came at the expense of several forest and wetlands. Now to offset the cost of striping new lands the farmer found new ways to increase the yields of their crops by using manure and supplements. When chemical fertilizers came on the line, they grew even larger yields of crops and became more readily available than manure (not to mention less smell came from fertilizer which was a plus for surrounding neighbors). For about 40 years, from 1950 to 1990, chemical fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides became the world’s leading technological achievement in the field of agriculture. During these 40 years, pesticides and herbicides came very popular in the farming community. The company Monsanto developed a chemical (herbicide) also known as Round-up, in 1974. (Monsanto, 2014) With this chemical in the soil, the results started to show that there was less erosion of soil from water and wind between harvest season and planting season. Now with all the fruit to spare because of the chemical herbicide (which was helping produce an abundance of these fruits) there then became an influx of pest. Burring