Modern agriculture is an evolving approach to modern technology in agriculture, innovative concepts, and farming practices helping farmers achieve efficiency in agricultural processes, reduce resource utilisation, and the energy needed to meet the world’s demands for food, fibre, and fuel. Future agriculture will have modern agricultural practices such as intensive farming, agribusiness, organic farming, and sustainable agriculture.
Modern agriculture is an urgent need to reduce the impact of agricultural emissions, waste, and pollution on the planet. The concept of modern agriculture and modern technology in agriculture is based on sustainability and eco-friendly solutions and practices. It also aims to improve the affordability of nutrition-rich food, increase food supply, enhance supply chain management, produce biofuels, and ensure food safety. Simultaneously, it may cause environmental problems as it depends on high input high output technique through hybrid seeds for high-yield variety, abundant water, pesticides, and fertilisers. The impact of modern agriculture on the environment is discussed below:
Erosion of Soil: Some of the modern agriculture practices need excessive water supply that removes top fertile soil in the farmland. It leads to reduced nutrition-rich soil required to grow crops and hamper productivity. Additionally, it causes global warming due to soil carbon release in the process of slit of water bodies.
Ground Water Contamination: One of the crucial water sources on the planet for every day as well as agricultural use is groundwater. The nitrogenous fertilisers from agricultural lands leach into the soil and contaminate groundwater. Moreover, chemicals from pesticides, disease control spraying are important sources to contaminate soil and water.
Water logging and salinity: The excess use of chemicals have reduced soil fertility over years and caused the salinity of soil leading to reduced productivity of lands. The improper farm drainage management in fields causes insufficient air to plant roots that result in low crop yield and low mechanical strength.
Excess Pesticide Usage: Modern technology in agriculture keeps monitoring crops to detect pests and diseases at the early stage. To reduce the damage of crops due to pests and boost production, pesticides are used. Earlier pesticides helped farmers to control harmful pests but also targeted beneficial pests. Moreover, most pesticides are non-biodegradable that are harmful to human beings through food chains.
Therefore, the future of agriculture should be safeguarded with sustainable and eco-friendly modern technology in agriculture. Solutions should focus on reducing the above mentioned impacts of modern agriculture on the environment while maintaining productivity, affordability, efficiency, and flexibility of agriculture.