So our next unit is looking at
agriculture and even though you may not
own a farm, agriculture impacts our daily
lives multiple times during the day. When
we eat food we are inadvertently making
decisions that have consequences that
relate to the environment. Are you eating
organic food, non GMO food, did you pick
it up at a farmers market, or did you
pick it up at a Harris Teeter? And all
these different decisions we make have
impacts. Sometimes they're impacts to our
health, sometimes they're impacts to the
environment, and a lot of time it's both.
So although no you may not have a farm,
you're definitely eating food and you're
definitely making the decisions about
the foods that you do eat, which in turn
are going to impact the environment. So
this unit we're gonna talk about how we
do agriculture in the United States
and the different practices that most
farms employ and how that impacts the
world around us. But then we'll also make
it a lot more practical as well and
talk about the decisions you can make
that can help to alleviate some of the
issues that we're gonna see in this unit.
So before we can really dive into the
different issues surrounding agriculture,
it's important to understand where do we
do agriculture or really what land are
we doing agriculture. Although there's
enough a lot of numbers on this slide,
I'll emphasize the ones that I really
want you to know. So the first 3 rows are
just taking a look at our agricultural
land. So if we look at Earth's surface,
only about 29 percent of it is land in
the first place, the rest of it is ocean.
Of that land, so each of these bars is
breaking down the bar above it, of this
land about 70% of it we can actually
live on. And of the land we can live on
half of it gets used for agriculture,
which is actually kind of impressive if
you think about it. Half of it's agriculture and 1% is, of all
the land we can live on on earth, is
actually urban lands like where we live
here in Montgomery County. So here's the
numbers I kind of want you to focus on
because this ties back to our last unit
thinking about the relationships of
organisms in our ecosystems and energy
transfer. So
of this agricultural land, 77% or a
majority of it is being used for
livestock. So this is either pigs, cows,
chickens that are roaming on open land
or this is referring to cropland that is
used exclusively for livestock feed.
So 77% of this agricultural land is
going towards feeding or providing space
for our livestock, whereas only 23% is
actually going towards crops that you
and I consume. So if we take a look kind
of separately, because you may say "oh
well if we're using all this land for
livestock we must be getting a lot out
of livestock" but in reality we don't. So
food caloric supply, so if we look at the
calories that you and I are consuming
and where those calories are coming from,
only about 17% of our caloric supply is
coming from meat and and dairy products.
Coming from our livestock only 17
percent, whereas 83%, an overwhelming
majority of our calories, is coming from
plant-based foods. It's coming from the
grains, it's coming from our fruits and
our vegetables. So this -- just these two
bars here, are really demonstrating that
energy transfer we talked about before.
That if we eat crops directly there is
no middleman in this case, let's say cows. That
we actually get a lot more energy,
there's a lot less energy loss, but when
we feed all of those crops to cows,
there's a lot of energy we lose. Their
energy we could have been consuming
directly. Now you may say well sure we're
not getting calories from that meat but
obviously meats have lots of proteins.
Well this study also looked at proteins
and they said okay if you look at all
the protein you have in your diet, only
about 1/3 is coming from meat and dairy
products and 2/3 are coming from
plant-based foods. So I'm not a
vegetarian myself, I personally try to
limit the amount of meat I eat,
but this is kind of compelling evidence
as to how being a vegetarian impacts our
environment because it uses a lot less
space but it supplies a lot more
calories and a lot more protein in
comparison to meat. So if we're running
out of land then we really need to focus
on crop production because crop
production can take us a lot further
than creating food for our meat or
creating space for our meat. So again,
you're not gonna need to know these
exact numbers, but you should know like
overwhelming majority of our agriculture
land is used for livestock and
overwhelming majority is used -- of plants
is get -- where we're getting our calories
from and where we're getting our protein
from. So all farms are not created equal
...at all. If we look across the entire
world we estimate that we have about 570
million farms so this is, this is a lot.
Now I'm gonna share with you a couple of
different sizes of farms because we have
huge mega farms, that's kind of what's
common in the United States, but then we
also have small backyard farms that are
used to sustain populations. So these
numbers -- everything is given to you in
hectares and the way I kind of visualize
hectares is if you have two football
fields next to each other, so that would
be one hectare of farmland. Now there's
gonna be a lot of numbers coming up but
what I'm gonna want you to do is somehow
visualize these numbers and I'll talk
about that more in a moment. So there was this first point, so
worldwide farms of less than one
hectare, so less than two football fields
together, account for 72% of these
570 million farms. S most farms
around the world are incredibly small
farms. Now despite the huge amount of
small farms, they actually don't control
that much land. Yes they're less than a
hectare but you would think "well if we
have so many of them, they control a lot
of land" but in reality they don't. There
are only a very small amount of the land. If we
get a little bit larger hectare farms
that are 1 to 2 hectares in size, so two
to four football fields in size, account
for about 12% of all farms. So, so a
good chunk of them, but only controlling
about 4% of the land. So these really
small farms, if we add both of those
together: that's 84 percent of all farms
controlling over only 12% of the
land. However looking at mega farms, so
only 1% of all farms in the world are
larger than 50 hectares, but they control
65% of the land. Honestly this is almost an analogy to
kind of the world's wealth. Like 1% of
the top income people own like 80% of
like the amount of income that people
below them make -- things like that. So here
we see the top 1% owning a majority of
that land and here in the United States
and other developed countries as well
that's where those 1% is. That 1% are in
these huge mega farms mostly in
developed countries they do exist in
developing countries but a majority of
them are in the US. There are some in
South America as well. Now, I don't care if
you know these numbers or not. Similar
to the last slide, what I care about are
trends. What is the general takeaway? Do
the small farms own a lot of land or
not a lot of land? Are most farms bigger
or are they smaller? Now a much easier way to do this is to graph this data and what
I'd recommend is combining it into one
graph or you can do it in two different
graphs. But there's two things that you
want to look at: one what percentage of
farms are these different sizes? So what
percent are less than one hectare, one to
two hectares, etc.? But also how much land
are they controlling? Are they
controlling a lot of land or a little
bit of land? So that's what I want you to
graph, you can either do that in two
separate graphs or
one graph. But keep in mind there's a
missing piece.
I tell you less than one hectare, one to
two hectares, and bigger than 50 hectares.
Obviously we're missing a chunk there, so
you'll need to calculate, quite simply
just adding and subtracting but you'll
need to calculate those percentages as
well. So take your time to do that, I
would share your graph in the BioCafe just
to see what others come up with and make
your general trends from that. Don't try
to make general trends from all of these
numbers. So now I have an idea of what
our farms are like around the world. So
let's take a look at how we can separate
our agriculture and our types of
agriculture. So one type of agriculture
is our industrialized agriculture and
this picture is a pretty good summary of
what industrialized agriculture looks
like. You typically have huge
monocultures. So mono meaning one, so
we're talking about one crop being grown.
In this case this looks like this might
be wheat or some other grain. And we have
a huge, huge field; really as far as you
can see. Tons and tons of this one single
crop. This would be an example of that
one percent of farms, huge mega farms.
They grow one thing but they're also
very specialized in that one thing. Yes
they have tons of different machinery
but it's actually the same exact machine.
You can become an expert in how do you
grow that food. You can become an expert
in how do you harvest that food and
process that food. So there are some
benefits to it because you can become an
expert in that food and usually if you
can become an expert, you can increase
the yields of it because you know what
kind of fertilizer works, what kind of
pesticide doesn't work, and it also is
going to generate a large amount of food
as well. So that's one type of agriculture.
The other type of agriculture is these small farms, the
less than one hectare or maybe one to
two hectares and we refer to it as
traditional subsistence agriculture. So
traditional in this,
it's like obviously industrialized
agriculture has not been around forever
because we haven't been industrialized
forever, and subsistence refers to making
food for yourself or your family. If you
have a slightly bigger farm maybe you're
making foods to sell at a local farmers
market or to your neighbors but the
thing is is you're not producing you
know tens or thousands of pounds of
produce and you're creating produce in a
very small scale. Now typically these are
gonna be polycultures because if you're
feeding yourself, you don't want to grow
just corn. You don't want to eat just
corn, you're eating lots of different
types of foods. We typically see this in
the developing world because they don't
have that industrialized agriculture so
if they want to get food it's much
cheaper just to grow your own versus
going out and purchasing food. This would
also potentially be your own backyard. Maybe you grow some vegetables yourself
and so that would be a type of
traditional subsistence agriculture. Now
remember this was actually what a
majority of farmland was, about 72% of
all farms were these really small
farms and although they don't control
that much land, they produce about 80
percent of the world's food.
It's just kind of crazy to think about. So
what's, what's the necessary, or
necessity, for these huge monoculture
farms? It's just because we have so many
families that are producing their own
food and can subsist themselves. If you
think about China and India, some of the
countries with the largest world
populations, a lot of them are farmers. If
you look in the rural areas, a lot of
them are farmers selling to or providing
food for themselves and selling it to
the local community. And so all of that's
considered subsistence agriculture. So
produces a lot of the food, it has a lot
of the land, or sorry has a lot of the
farms, but the actual amount of land that
they use is quite minimal.
Another reason for that as well is a lot
of our industrialized agricultures are
being used for for livestock. So they're
not necessarily producing food for
humans, they're producing food for our
livestock such as chickens and cows. So
we're going to go ahead and take a pause
here before we start on with our next
slide.
