Is farming sustainable

Answer 1

Yes, it's definitely sustainable because it doesn't harm the environment.

: The above answer is certainly believed by many. The truth is a bit more detailed, though.

Farming involves growing things on a given plot of soil. When the growth of those plants is over, they are harvested and moved away, so as to be sold and consumed elsewhere. Only the smallest percent of farm grown food is actually ate at the farm.

This leads to an increasingly large percent of the nutrients and chemicals necessary to plant growth to be lacking in the soil. The yields of food will then go down. The solution then is to add fertilizer. And such must be done in increasing amounts to sustain the yield.

Crop rotation used to be of great assistance as different plants removed different nutrients and chemicals from the land. But with our intensive agricultural processes now, the addition of fertilizer is all but required.

Therefore, the sustainability does not have anything to do with it not harming the environment, as it does substantially affect the natural environment. Nor does it have to do with farming being "natural", because over the last 150 years it has increasingly not been natural.

It has everything to do with our ability to keep the soil fertile through the artificial methods we have developed - and are still developing. Given human ingenuity, and the fact that doing so is so crucially important, I believe the answer is still "yes", it is sustainable.

But only because we work so hard and unrelentingly, in the labs of this nation, to make it so.