Organic farming
"While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil." --Thomas Jefferson.
As a species with an ever-burgeoning population, man has had to invent clever ways to keep himself fed. The reason why the development of agriculture proved so crucial in the development of civilization was that it allowed huge amounts of food energy to be available to man predictably and regularly. The fundamental change from hunting and gathering is the aggregation of many productive food-bearing plants. By definition this is the process of making plants fruitful beyond their natural tendencies. Agriculture is generically the process of creating a huge monoculture of food-producing plants, but beyond simply growing the right kind of plants, people make the plants themselves produce more food. Throughout recorded history, this process has involved using fertilizer. In old times this was done without knowledge of chemistry, merely by spreading animal waste, compost, or other organic material over the fields. However, since the development of the different processes, chemically produced fertilizers have come into widespread use. Nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, be they horse manure or artificially produced ammonium nitrate, have allowed for huge improvements in the fertility of world agriculture. This was a crucial development making possible the explosion in human population that has occurred over the last two centuries, and the continued use of fertilizers as well as other agricultural technologies is equally crucial in sustaining a food supply for our rapidly multiplying species.
The proliferation of fertilizers to expand food supply comes at a large cost to our environment. More stringent measures must be taken to measure the amount of fertilizers needed to increase crop yield while minimizing the amount of nutrients released from the soil.
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