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.
Read more about this topic: Intensive Farming
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“If the minds of women were enlightened and improved, the domestic circle would be more frequently refreshed by intelligent conversation, a means of edification now deplorably neglected, for want of that cultivation which these intellectual advantages would confer.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)