Four fallacies of agricultural sustainability, and why they matter

Four Fallacies of Agricultural Sustainability, and Why They Matter: Part 1- We should tread more lightly on the agricultural land base Al Mussell Senior Research Associate August 2014 Four Fallacies of Agricultural Sustainability, and why they Matter: Part 1- We should tread more lightly on the agricultural land base Introduction The view that additional steps should be taken to confirm that food [...] Consistent with this, the downstream food industry has become much more interested in the upstream elements of its supply chain, especially the farm segments and the technologies/processes it employs, and has sought to derive metrics that measure and influence the sustainability of this food end product. [...] They observed that “our results demonstrate the importance of land use change emissions over direct emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from agricultural systems, and suggest that the climatic impacts of historical agricultural intensification were preferable to those of a system with lower inputs that instead expanded cropland to meet global demand for food” (Burney et al, 2010). [...] They found that more species were negatively impacted by 2 Four Fallacies of Agricultural Sustainability, and why they Matter: Part 1- We should tread more lightly on the agricultural land base agriculture than benefitted from it, suggesting a benefit to more intensive use of the existing agricultural land base and leaving other lands undisturbed. [...] This relates to the development and use of yield increasing and labour-saving technologies that allow for increased production but with limited expansion in land, labour, and water use.