A crash course in changing the world.
In The recession of 2008, skyrocketing food prices brought much of the world to riots, social unrest & even death. Prices have leveled out, but not for long. Our population is still growing, relatively rapidly & with fluctuating temperatures & moisture caused by global warming, our food supply is in danger of yielding gains far beneath what we need to survive.
There are many solutions feasible to tackle this problem. Increased productivity through hybrid plants & innovative outdoor farming methods. Decreasing waste, preventing deforestation & climate change, utilizing water & nutrient use carefully & most importantly implementing sustainable practices as they are discovered.
Sharing knowledge is key. Someone halfway across the world might not be aware of some of the newest practices and simply needs to be. Localizing farming is what I believe will conquer this problem. If an area, be it a city, village, town, can produce most if not all of its own food & everyone everywhere can accomplish this, not much surplus is needed. Those places that are the best at this can share the extra. This means increased storage capacity, better testing (for safety & quality), protecting harvests, and putting the emphasis on research.
Researching my local area, Little Rock Arkansas, I found that most of the news took me back to a bigger stage, usually California, national, or international. An interesting piece popped up about child adoption & how our own country's youth suffers from poverty & hunger, but are largely ignored in favor of international adoptions. This is kind of unrelated, but I think it applies. Another tidbit is Heifer's international headquarters are located here. It is a Platinum LEED building, using grey-water, a water storage tank & many other innovative methods. www.heifer.org Heifer is a great organization that combats hunger & poverty by offering "living gifts". They will give a needy family an animal, like a cow or goat, that can earn them $ while also helping feeding them. They then give away one of the offspring to another needy family. These gifts have changed so many lives & this idea is so simple, yet effective.
So, back to the water & food crises. Many desert countries like Saudi Arabia are concerned with dwindiling water resources out of an already scant supply. A German scientist looking for water in the Saudi desert says that the capital city will be without water in less then 30 years at the present consumption rate. The balancing act typical for many parts of the world is, with water running out, how much water can be devoted to domestic agriculture? Will it be more cost & resource-effective to import agriculture & save water for drinking? Hopefully there will be nothing like a world water(& possibly food) war.
A big question is using water for things like plants & lawns & flushing toilets. I advocate whoever can to install some type of grey-water system in their place of residence to at least flush your toilets (if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down?) if not water non-edible plants &, if you must have one, your lawn. Why not rip that lawn up and replace with low-maintence, low-water plants that look nicer anyways? Lawns are outdated & a huge waste of water; notice in droughts how they are one of the first water usage things to be limited mandatorily. Rainwater is also wasted & things like rainbarrels(see beow) & drip irrigation should be used for all buildings. I love the idea of green roofs & walls(which can also be grown indoors). They subsist off of rain & ciould be another part of the solution. Please compost your food waste too. It is another resource we must take advantage of.
Another solution suggested & already being put into use is skyscrapers with parts reserved for farming. Vertical farming is an intriguing idea, that I believe will become one of the keys to feeding our world. One of the most eccentric but mind-blowing plans I came upon was an underwater skyscraper http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/03/09/underwater-skyscraper-is-a-self...
which is a self-sufficient city that floats in the water! This is the kind of innovation that will probably prove to be our saving grace. www.inhabitat.com wp-content uploads 03 scraper-city.jpg? 2010>
Here's a couple more links for vertical farming.
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/09/12/the-science-barge-making-waves-...
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/06/03/pyramid-farm-vertical-agricultu...
The downside is the amount of energy & water to farm indoors. This has been solved for the most part by built-in wastewater treatment & renewable energy like solar & geothermal.
Lastly, natural farming methods have been shown to work (growing plants close together that supplement each other, sometimes not even weeding, letting nature do its work.) Yes, with chemicals & such crop outputs are bigger. How is the quality affected? I believe it is usually subpar. This is another grey area that could be debated almost endlessly.
So there are possibilities out there to feed & water us all. I'm excited to see how the world responds to this growing deficit.
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