Glory Of The Sun

The Green Revolution began as a simple method of resolving the growing concern of crop yield per area of farmland. Farmer’s were realizing that weather effects and reality of Von Thunen’s model were proving to be massive barriers between their money. Farmer’s who owned land far from a central market had to pay for transport and have to make due with lesser quality soil and outrageous weather. During the mid 19th century a so called great revolution began. New practices came to the attention of all farmland owners, first production inputs such as water, fertilizer and pesticides began to expand in global use. The easy solution to a big problem was to greatly increase the yield on a given area of owned land rather than to purchase more land to grow more crops. Irrigation areas roughly doubled between 1960 and 2004, the global consumption of fertilizers dramatically increased after the 1950’s along with pesticides and herbicides. Old traditional methods of reapplying nutrients into the soil by leaving the field to fallow have since ended and now cultivatable land is put under immense stress to produce a demanding supply of food. What many people do not realize is that although this revolution seemed like a good idea at the time it is now coming back to haunt us.

After several decades of what has been considered profitable crop yields from all over the world humans are beginning to realize the consequences paid for the success of the Green Revolution. Irrigation, which is very important for increasing crop yields has destroyed large areas of land, excessive salinity of soils resulting from poor irrigation in many countries has had a serious effect on the productivity of around 20-30 million hectares of land. The large quantities of water needed to supply the demands of the Green Revolution has led to extensive groundwater depletion, conflict between agricultural and urban/industrial water needs for developing countries. There are also many feared genetic consequences from the loss of traditional and subsistence agriculture techniques. One of the major worries is the loss of security that local native crop varieties use to provide along with the nutritional diversity and balance that multiple crop intensive gardening use to assure. What people are realizing is that commercial agriculture is a maximum profit job, farmer’s do not care about the quality of the food as long as maximum profit can be achieved. They try to conceal the methods of growth used to make the crops and what is actually used to achieve вЂ?healthy crops”. Pesticides and gene mutations have been used extensively to protect against pests and bad weather. Pesticides add to the growing concern over fresh water, the amount of pesticides used not only put’s consumers at risk but everyone within surrounding regions of these commercial farmlands. The pesticides leak into the soil and are absorbed into underground water streams which eventually leak into rivers and lakes poisoning drinking water supplies. Many third world nations cannot afford the materials necessary for commercial agriculture this put’s them in a very crude position. The massive corporations that produce the most crop yield would export their crops to the third world nations and then locals would be at a massive