Intensive crop farming is a modern industrialized form of crop farming. Intensive crop farming's methods include innovation in agricultural machinery, farming methods, genetic engineering technology, techniques for achieving economies of scale in production, the creation of new markets for consumption, patent protection of genetic information, and global trade. These methods are widespread in developed nations.
The practice of industrial agriculture is a relatively recent development in the history of agriculture, and the result of scientific discoveries and technological advances. Innovations in agriculture beginning in the late 19th century generally parallel developments in mass production in other industries that characterized the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. The identification of nitrogen and phosphorus as critical factors in plant growth led to the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers, making more intensive uses of farmland for crop production possible.
Features
Certain crops have proven more amenable to intensive farming than others. large scale – hundreds or thousands of acres of a single crop (much more than can be absorbed into the local or regional market); monoculture – large areas of a single crop, often raised from year to year on the same land, or with little crop rotation; agrichemicals – reliance on imported, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to provide nutrients and to mitigate pests and diseases, these applied on a regular schedule hybrid seed – use of specialized hybrids designed to favor large scale distribution (e.g. ability to ripen off the vine, to withstand shipping and handling); genetically engineered crops – use of genetically modified varieties designed for large scale production (e.g. ability to withstand selected herbicides); large scale irrigation – heavy water use, and in some cases, growing of crops in otherwise unsuitable regions by extreme use of water (e.g. rice paddies on arid land). high mechanization – automated machinery sustain and harvest crops.
Criticism
Critics of intensively farmed crops cite a wide range of concerns. On the food quality front, it is held by critics that quality is reduced when crops are bred and grown primarily for cosmetic and shipping characteristics. Environmentally, industrial farming of crops is claimed to be responsible for loss of biodiversity, degradation of soil quality, soil erosion, food toxicity (pesticide residues) and pollution (through agrichemical build-ups and runoff, and use of fossil fuels for agrichemical manufacture and for farm machinery and long-distance distribution).
History
The projects within the Green Revolution spread technologies that had already existed, but had not been widely used outside of industrialized nations. These technologies included pesticides, irrigation projects, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
The novel technological development of the Green Revolution was the production of what some referred to as “miracle seeds.” Scientists created strains of maize, wheat, and rice that are generally referred to as HYVs or “high-yielding varieties.” HYVs have an increased nitrogen-absorbing potential compared to other varieties. Since cereals that absorbed extra nitrogen would typically lodge, or fall over before harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes. Norin 10 wheat, a variety developed by Orville Vogel from Japanese dwarf wheat varieties, was instrumental in developing Green Revolution wheat cultivars. IR8, the first widely implemented HYV rice to be developed by IRRI, was created through a cross between an Indonesian variety named “Peta” and a Chinese variety named “Dee Geo Woo Gen.”
With the availability of molecular genetics in Arabidopsis and rice the mutant genes responsible (reduced height(rht), gibberellin insensitive (gai1) and slender rice (slr1)) have been cloned and identified as cellular signalling components of gibberellic acid, a phytohormone involved in regulating stem growth via its effect on cell division. Stem growth in the mutant background is significantly reduced leading to the dwarf phenotype. Photosynthetic investment in the stem is reduced dramatically as the shorter plants are inherently more stable mechanically. Assimilates become redirected to grain production, amplifying in particular the effect of chemical fertilisers on commercial yield.