Sustainable agriculture

So, what is the current trend of agriculture in Malaysia? In fact the whole world?

I remember on my first day of my class, my professor, who is an expert in biological control introduced me the concept of sustainable agriculture.

What is sustainable agriculture? A picture speaks thousand words. Let's have a look here.

Definition from wikipedia (sorry for the plagarism haha but i think this definition explain nicely):

In simplest terms, sustainable agriculture is the production of food, fiber, or other plant or animal products using farming techniques that protect the environment, public health, human communities, and animal welfare. 

Why sustainable agriculture?

Due to expanding world population and since green revolution, the agriculture has been improved very much on productivity and efficiency, but somehow we neglected something important, which is the agro-ecosystem.

Some key characteristics of modern agriculture:

- Monoculture

- Chemical fertilizer

- Chemical pesticides

- Tillage

It sure solved a lot of problems such as world hunger, malnutrition, etc. But all these are unfavourable to the concept of sustainable agriculture.

Monoculture, strongly deplete the soil resource due to no diversification of crops.

Chemical fertilizer, strongly affect the soil fertility. We call the soil 'alive' because it is in fact a habitat for many living organisms in there! Putting so much of chemical fertilizer is in fact giving the soil so much of stress! And not forgetting leaching, which contaminate our water.

Chemical pesticide, applying so much of pesticide is not necessary good. In fact, it creates bigger problem, I will talk about this in next post. Currently, the trend is moving towards integrated pest management (IPM) instead of spraying pesticide blindly.

The concept of sustainable agriculture is so important. The world is always changing, so does agriculture! Next post, I will be talking about chemical pesticide and the impacts.

 See you guys on next post ;)