Intensive farming

Intensive farming or intensive agriculture is an agricultural production system characterized by a low fallow ratio and the high use of inputs such as capital, labour, or heavy use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers relative to land area.

This is in contrast to many sorts of traditional agriculture in which the inputs per unit land are lower. With intensification, labor use typically goes up, unless, or until, it gets replaced by machines (energy inputs) at which point labor use can decrease dramatically. Agricultural intensification has been the dominant response to population growth, as it allows for producing more food on the same amount of land.

Intensive animal farming practices can involve very large numbers of animals raised on limited land which require large amounts of food, water and medical inputs (required to keep the animals healthy in cramped conditions). Very large or confined indoor intensive livestock operations (particularly descriptive of common US farming practices) are often referred to as factory farming and are criticised by opponents for the low level of animal welfare standards and associated pollution and health issues.

Modern day forms of intensive crop based agriculture involve the use of mechanical ploughing, chemical fertilizers, plant growth regulators or pesticides. It is associated with the increasing use of agricultural mechanization, which have enabled a substantial increase in production, yet have also dramatically increased environmental pollution by increasing erosion and poisoning water with agricultural chemicals.

Advantages

Intensive agriculture has a number of benefits:

• Significantly increased yield per acre, per person, and per GBP relative to extensive farming and therefore,
• Food becomes more affordable to the consumer as it costs less to produce.
• The same area of land is able to supply food and fibre for a larger population reducing the risk of starvation.
• The preservation of existing areas of woodland and rainforest habitats (and the ecosystems and other sustainable economies that these may harbour), which would need to be felled for extensive farming methods in the same geographical location. This also leads to a reduction in anthropogenic CO2 generation (resulting from removal of the sequestration afforded by woodlands and rainforests).
• In the case of intensive livestock farming: an opportunity to capture methane emissions which would otherwise contribute to global warming. Once captured, these emissions can be used to generate heat or electrical energy, thereby reducing local demand for fossil fuels.

Disadvantages

Intensive farming, however, alters the environment in many ways.

• Forests are destroyed to create large open fields and this could lead to soil erosion. Intensive farming affects the natural habitats of wild animals.
• Use of fertilizers can alter the biology of rivers and lakes. Some environmentalists attribute the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico as being encouraged by nitrogen fertilization of the algae bloom.
• Pesticides sprayed on crops not only destroy pests and contaminate the crops but also kill beneficial insects. Eventually, these chemicals are passed on to the human beings when they consume the agricultural produce.
• Is often not sustainable if not properly managed—may result in desertification, or land that is so poisonous and eroded that nothing else will grow there.
• Requires large amounts of energy input to produce, transport, and apply chemical fertilizers/pesticides
• The chemicals used may leave the field as runoff eventually ending up in rivers and lakes or may drain into groundwater aquifers.
• Use of pesticides have numerous negative health effects in workers who apply them, people that live nearby the area of application or downstream/downwind from it, and consumers who eat the pesticides which remain on their food.
• Erosion of biodiversity
• Intensive farming has also damaged the environment at large by means of deforestation and the emission of greenhouse gases or other air pollutants
• Fruits and vegetables purchased from farms that promote intensive farming are covered with invisible pesticide. These are not easily washed off. The residue of these pesticides affect the health of human beings.

Pre-modern intensive farming

Pre modern intensive farming techniques and structures include terracing, rice paddies, and various forms of aquaculture.

Terrace

Terrace rice fields in Yunnan Province, China

Main article: Terrace (agriculture)

In agriculture, a terrace is a leveled section of a hilly cultivated area, designed as a method of soil conservation to slow or prevent the rapid surface runoff of irrigation water. Often such land is formed into multiple terraces, giving a stepped appearance. The human landscapes of rice cultivation in terraces that follow the natural contours of the escarpments like contour ploughing is a classic feature of the island of Bali and the Banaue Rice Terraces in Benguet, Philippines. In Peru, the Inca made use of otherwise unusable slopes by drystone walling to create terraces.

Rice paddy

Main article: Paddy field

A paddy field is a flooded parcel of arable land used for growing rice and other semiaquatic crops. Paddy fields are a typical feature of rice-growing countries of east and southeast Asia including Malaysia, China, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. They are also found in other rice-growing regions such as Piedmont (Italy), the Camargue (France) and the Artibonite Valley (Haiti). They can occur naturally along rivers or marshes, or can be constructed, even on hillsides, often with much labour and materials. They require large quantities of water for irrigation, which can be quite complex for a highly developed system of paddy fields. Flooding provides water essential to the growth of the crop. It also gives an environment favourable to the strain of rice being grown, and is hostile to many species of weeds. As the only draft animal species which isn wetlands, the water buffalo is in widespread use in Asian rice paddies. World methane production due to rice paddies has been estimated in the range of 50 to 100 million tonnes per annum.

Paddy-based rice-farming has been practiced Korea since ancient times. A pit-house at the Daecheon-ni site yielded carbonized rice grains and radiocarbon dates indicating that rice cultivation may have begun as early as the Middle Jeulmun Pottery Period (c. 3500-2000 BC) in the Korean Peninsula (Crawford and Lee 2003). The earliest rice cultivation in the Korean Peninsula may have used dry-fields instead of paddies.

The earliest Mumun features were usually located in low-lying narrow gulleys that were naturally swampy and fed by the local stream system. Some Mumun paddies in flat areas were made of a series of squares and rectangles separated by bunds approximately 10 cm in height, while terraced paddies consisted of long irregularly shapes that followed natural contours of the land at various levels (Bale 2001; Kwak 2001).

Mumun Period rice farmers used all of the elements that are present in today's paddies such terracing, bunds, canals, and small reservoirs. Some paddy-farming techniques of the Middle Mumun (c. 850-550 BC) can be interpreted from the well-preserved wooden tools excavated from archaeological rice paddies at the Majeon-ni Site. However, iron tools for paddy-farming were not introduced until sometime after 200 BC. The spatial scale of individual paddies, and thus entire paddy-fields, increased with the regular use of iron tools in the Three Kingdoms of Korea Period (c. AD 300/400-668).

Modern intensive farming types

Main article: Industrial agriculture

Modern intensive farming refers to the industrialized production of animals (livestock, poultry and fish) and crops. The methods deployed are designed to produce the highest output at the lowest cost; usually using economies of scale, modern machinery, modern medicine, and global trade for financing, purchases and sales. The practice is widespread in developed nations, and most of the meat, dairy, eggs, and crops available in supermarkets are produced in this manner.

Sustainable intensive farming

Main article: Sustainable farming

Biointensive agriculture focuses on maximizing efficiency: yield per unit area, yield per energy input, yield per water input, etc. Agroforestry combines agriculture and orchard/forestry technologies to create more integrated, diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable land-use systems. Intercropping can also increase total yields per unit of area or reduce inputs to achieve the same, and thus represents (potentially sustainable) agricultural intensification. Unfortunately, yields of any specific crop often diminish and the change can present new challenges to farmers relying on modern farming equipment which is best suited to monoculture. Vertical farming, a type of intensive crop production that would grow food on a large scale in urban centers, has been proposed as a way to reduce the negative environmental impact of traditional rural agriculture.

Intensive aquaculture

Main article: Aquaculture

Aquaculture is the cultivation of the natural produce of water (fish, shellfish, algae, seaweed and other aquatic organisms). Intensive Aquaculture can often involve tanks or other highly controlled systems which are designed to boost production for the available volume or area of water resource.

Intensive livestock farming

Main article: Factory farming

A commercial chicken house raising broiler pullets for meat.

"Factory farming" is a term referring to the process of raising livestock in confinement at high stocking density, where a farm operates as a factory — a practice typical in industrial farming by agribusinesses. The main product of this industry is meat, milk and eggs for human consumption. The term is often used in a pejorative sense, criticising large scale farming processes which confine animals.

Managed intensive grazing

Main article: Managed intensive grazing

This sustainable intensive livestock management system is increasingly used to optimize production within a sustainability framework and is generally not considered Factory farming. Intensive farming or intensive agriculture is an agricultural production system characterized by the high inputs of capital, labour, or heavy usage of technologies such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers relative to land area.

This is in contrast to many forms of sustainable agriculture such as permaculture or extensive agriculture, which involve a relatively low input of materials and labour, relative to the area of land farmed, and which focus on maintaining long-term ecological health of farmland, so that it can be farmed indefinitely.

Modern day forms of intensive crop based agriculture involve the use of mechanical ploughing, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, plant growth regulators and pesticides. It is associated with the increasing use of agricultural mechanization, which have enabled a substantial increase in production, yet have also dramatically increased environmental pollution by increasing erosion, poisoning water with agricultural chemicals, and destroying forests to make room for farmland.

Very large or confined indoor intensive livestock operations (particularly descriptive of common US farming practices) are often referred to as Factory farming and are criticised by opponents for the low level of animal welfare standards and associated pollution and health issues.

Individual industrial agriculture farm

Major challenges and issues faced by individual industrial agriculture farms include:

• Integrated farming systems
• Crop sequencing
• Water use efficiency
• Nutrient audits
• Herbicide resistance
• Financial instruments (such as futures and options)
• Collecting and understanding own farm information
• Knowing products / markets / customers
• Satisfying customer needs
• Securing an acceptable profit margin
• Cost of servicing debt
• Ability to earn and access off-farm income
• Management of machinery and stewardship investments

Integrated farming systems

See also: Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture and Zero waste agriculture

An integrated farming system is a progressive biologically integrated sustainable agriculture system such as Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture or Zero waste agriculture whose implementation requires exacting knowledge of the interactions of numerous species and whose benefits include sustainability and increased profitability.

Elements of this integration can include:

• Intentionally introducing flowering plants into agricultural ecosystems to increase pollen-and nectar-resources required by natural enemies of insect pests
• Using crop rotation and cover crops to suppress nematodes in potatoes

Crop rotation

Main article: Crop rotation

Satellite image of circular crop fields in Haskell County, Kansas in late June 2001. Healthy, growing crops of corn and sorghum are green (Sorghum may be slightly paler). Wheat is brilliant gold. Fields of brown have been recently harvested and plowed under or have lain in fallow for the year.

Crop rotation or crop sequencing is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of crops in the same space in sequential seasons for various benefits such as to avoid the build up of pathogens and pests that often occurs when one species is continuously cropped. Crop rotation also seeks to balance the fertility demands of various crops to avoid excessive depletion of soil nutrients. A traditional component of crop rotation is the replenishment of nitrogen through the use of green manure in sequence with cereals and other crops. It is one component of polyculture. Crop rotation can also improve soil structure and fertility by alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants.

Irrigation

Main article: Water conservation

Overhead irrigation, center pivot design

Crop irrigation accounts for 70% of the world's fresh water use. The agricultural sector of most countries is important both economically and politically, and water subsidies are common. Conservation advocates have urged removal of all subsidies to force farmers to grow more water-efficient crops and adopt less wasteful irrigation techniques.

Optimal water efficiency means minimizing losses due to evaporation, runoff or subsurface drainage. An evaporation pan can be used to determine how much water is required to irrigate the land. Flood irrigation, the oldest and most common type, is often very uneven in distribution, as parts of a field may receive excess water in order to deliver sufficient quantities to other parts. Overhead irrigation, using center-pivot or lateral-moving sprinklers, gives a much more equal and controlled distribution pattern. Drip irrigation is the most expensive and least-used type, but offers the best results in delivering water to plant roots with minimal losses.

As changing irrigation systems can be a costly undertaking, conservation efforts often concentrate on maximizing the efficiency of the existing system. This may include chiseling compacted soils, creating furrow dikes to prevent runoff, and using soil moisture and rainfall sensors to optimize irrigation schedules.

Water catchment management measures include recharge pits, which capture rainwater and runoff and use it to recharge ground water supplies. This helps in the formation of ground water wells, etc. and eventually reduces soil erosion caused due to running water.

Nutrient audits

Better nutrient audits allow farmers to spend less money on nutrients and to create less pollution since less nutrient is added to the soil and thus there is less to run off and pollute. Methodologies for assessing soil nutrient balances have been studied and used for farms and entire countries for decades. But at present "there is no standard methodology for calculating nutrient budgets and there are no accepted 'benchmarks' figures against which to assess farm nutrient use efficiency. [A standard methodology] for calculating nutrient budgets on farms [is hoped to help reduce] diffuse water and air pollution from agriculture [through] best management practices in the use of fertilisers and organic manures, as part of the continued development of economically and environmentally sustainable farming systems."

Herbicide resistance

Main article: Weed control

In agriculture, large scale and systematic weeding is usually required, often performed by machines such as cultivators or liquid herbicide sprayers. Selective herbicides kill specific targets while leaving the desired crop relatively unharmed. Some of these act by interfering with the growth of the weed and are often based on plant hormones. Weed control through herbicide is made more difficult when the weeds become resistant to the herbicide. Solutions include:

• Using cover crops (especially those with allelopathic properties) that out-compete weeds or inhibit their regeneration.
• Using a different herbicide
• Using a different crop (e.g. genetically altered to be herbicide resistant; which ironically can create herbicide resistant weeds through horizontal gene transfer)
• Using a different variety (e.g. locally adapted variety that resists, tolerates, or even out-competes weeds)
• Ploughing
• Ground cover such as mulch or plastic
• Manual removal

Australia's Great Barrier Reef Collapse

Nutrient-rich slurry from farms in Australia had been contributing to the collapse of the corals in the Great Barrier Reef for 90 years, researchers at the University of Queensland have revealed. The corals collapsed between the 1920s and 1950s as European settlers started to incorporate farming as their source of living, according to John Pandolfi at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and his colleagues. The researchers took cores from three reefs and worked out when the corals died. Two had little coral left after the 1950s, while the third had been colonised since then by different types. This may be because, the researchers pointed out, by the 1920s, European settlers were farming intensively near rivers flowing onto the reef, boosting agricultural run-off by up to a factor of 20. Though events like cyclones kill coral, the extra nutrients in the water help seaweed move in afterwards, preventing coral from regenerating, said Terry Done of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, Queensland. The reefs were already in decline again when monitoring began in the 1980s, said Joana Figueiredo of James Cook University, also in Townsville. Pandolfi’s work, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, shows that it was pristine until the 1920s.

Intensive Hog Farming in Manitoba

Intensive hog operations have grown at a rapid rate in Western Canada. The growth of factory hog farming in Manitoba is analysed as a case study of a "transnational treadmill of production." Output and exports have increased dramatically and the industry has become more concentrated, but negative environmental externalities, notably odour and water-quality concerns, have become more visible. Provincial governments have promoted the expansion of this industry through neo-liberal policies and have been reluctant to impose regulatory restrictions. The hog barn approval process has been largely downloaded to the rural municipal level. However, this has resulted in fierce political controversy in many local communities, which has forced the Manitoba government to consider more active regulation of hog factory farms.

See also

• Environmental issues with agriculture
• Green Revolution
• Integrated Multi-trophic Aquaculture
• Permaculture
• Polyculture
• Small-scale agriculture
• System of Rice Intensification
• Dryland farming