With the world's population growing so quickly and steadily, agricultural issues have become one of the most pressing global problems, needing solutions as soon as possible in order to feed everyone. You may have heard of the starving children in Africa or China, but there are more people suffering from starvation all over the world, including in the United States and Western Europe. While this topic is not new in itself, there are obstacles that cause more problems and add a great deal of stress to those who farm and those who need the food, and these hurdles should be looked at, as well as the steps being taken to get around them.
As far as statistics go, one of the numbers being repeated on sites discussing this topic is the predicted population count by the year 2050. Researchers seem to agree that the population will increase from 7.3 billion people today to 9.7 billion people in 2050. Clearly, this is just an estimate, so the total population may be lower than that by 2050; however, it could also end up being higher. With people already deprived of the nutrients they need right now, it means finding solutions for the problem now so we are at least moving in the right direction before 2050.
One such obstacle that needs to be carefully and constantly observed is the amount of clean water a crop, or livestock, needs to be productive. When you rely on growing your food, you need to make sure that you not only have enough water, but that it has no chemicals, such as pesticides, or salt water from the ocean, in it. There are salt-tolerant crops that can be grown to reduce the salt content in the soil so that regular crops can be grown the following year, and there are ways of making sure you can develop a drought-resistant farm as well. This can be even more difficult for those farmers who live in parts of the world where clean water is rare, which makes advances in this area quite valuable.
Problems with the soil itself is another area that is being worked on but still has a long way to go. Since nutrients that a plant needs to start and support growth are in the soil, it is a necessary part of farming everywhere; unfortunately, there has also been a large increase in soil erosion, depleting crops of nutrient-rich dirt. To find ways of getting crops the nutrition they need, innovators such as Jai Shroff decided to look into seed development as a way to possibly create a tougher crop that can survive using fewer nutrients. Others find that having more plants is a decent way to keep soil from washing away during rainstorms.
Recognizing that there is a problem all over the world is an important first step as far as this goes, but there are still many obstacles, whether financial or political. Here are demonstrated just a few hurdles that deal only with the farming issues themselves and what is being done about them now, to promote awareness of the way agriculture is changing and why.
