美国农业英文版
FOOD MACINE IN AMERICA
——The Problems of Industrial Agriculure
Industrial agriculure is the law of industrial production applied to the agriculure .It takes soil ,water resources,the environment ,animals and plants as the industrial inputs.The mass production is organized completely by the will of human to design and control. Large-scale intensive animal husbandry and large-scale monoculture are the most typical.
Industrial agriculture makes it that just 2 % of population can feed the other 98%,which couldn’t image before one century in America.Meanwhile, the United States is the world's largest exporter of agricultural products, whose cultural production is high and technology is developed, but the disadvantages of the modern large-scale industrialized agriculture emerging now.
Large-scale intensive animal husbandry widely use the method of feeding commercial fooder and rearing livestock in pens with factory farming facilities.It has some advantages that the scale benefit is remarkable and cost is low, and make it possible which large-scale supply of cheap meat eggs and milk.However, environmentalists point out that anything needs pay the price.There are also easily cause enviroment pollution and disease disater .People use quantities of antibiotics in order to prevent the animal sick which residue in food at last.
A monoculture—a farm made up of a single crop which is more vulnerable to invasion by pests. This model is easily to mechanise and save manpower, but land which doesn’t intercropping or rotation is the ideal source of plant diseases and insect pests. So this model is more dependent on the chemical spraying to suppress the diseases and insect pests, and not like a biodiversitied farmland which can make use nature-based on the rule to keep healthy. Single plant also means don’t using green manure or keeping animals, so the farm fertilizer also have to come from outside. Fertilizer were available, but destroy the soil and pollute water .
From the movie ,we know that they had a handful of chemicals in the last century 30s,whereas ,now it’s not unusual for them to have 40 or 50 products avaiable, because without that the yield will suffer the insect pests .Industry has has to develop the wide ranging chemical pesticides .Sooner or late the pests evolve resistance to every new products.
At the same time meeting the need of human food, we should maintain soil health and environmental safety, change ‘ drain the pond to get all the fish’ modern
agricultural industrialization pattern. Agriculture should be combined with modern ecological science. By thinking ecological system as a whole, we should take the agriculture as part of the ecosystem.