Soil is the key to making agriculture sustainable

The increasing pressure to provide food security, enhance environmental quality, and address societal problems creates challenges for agriculture and requires changing current agriculture practices to become more sustainable. The need to change agriculture is outlined in a Chapter two of a new book from the American Society of Agronomy, “Challenging Balance between Productivity and Environmental Quality: Tillage Impacts,” by D.C. Reicosky, T.J. Sauer, and J.L. Hatfield. The new book, published by ASA and SSSA, Soil Management: Building a Stable Base for Agriculture, is suited to scientists, students, and professionals. It integrates management issues, soil research, and long-term conservation efforts.

According to the authors of the chapter, in many developed countries, access to quality food is taken for granted, and farmers and farm workers are poorly rewarded for acting as stewards of the earth’s land area used for agricultural production. There is little emphasis on the conservation ethic. More troubling, the environmental degradation caused by intensive agriculture will likely worsen as the global population grows to eight or ten billion in the next three decades. Read more ...

This blog is written by Martin Little, The Global Miller, published and supported by the GFMT Magazine and the International Milling Directory from Perendale Publishers