A Comparison of Agricultural Farming Methods and their Impact on the Environment
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Abstract
The agricultural industry faces many challenges today, with one of the primary challenges being its impact on the environment. An increasing population size combined with increasing world hunger, environmental issues, greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land and water availability are all key drivers for the development of alternative, sustainable farming solutions. Sustainable farming solutions such as advanced farming are still in relatively early stages of development, and require a lot of work to make these methods economically viable and accessible to farmers around the world. While a lot of theoretical, scientific and development work has taken place in this area, many challenges still remain in reduction production and development costs of sustainable methods of farming. This research aims to eestablish the current state of the agricultural industry in terms of farming methods used globally and to find out if the use of alternative methods of farming could reduce the environmental impact of the agricultural industry. Other aspects have also been explored, fertiliser use, pesticide usage, the use of genetic modification and how these can also impact the environment. A comparison of all farming methods used in the top agricultural producing countries was also carried out to identify the impact risk each method of farming had on the environment.