Posts Tagged the environment
Vertical Agriculture On The Up
Over the next 40 years the UN predicts a global population boom, leading to agricultural land shortages. Great Stuff Hydroponics thinks we can overcome this problem and help to reduce the environmental impact of our cities by building vertical hydroponic agricultural buildings in urban centres.
Supplying food in the West is not an issue, where agricultural land is available and complex distribution systems are already set up. However, the UN predicts that by the year 2050, there will be an additional 3 billion people on this planet, approximately 80% of whom will live in urban centres. This poses a problem, particularly in developed societies where farmers are a dying breed and food often has to be transported over vast distances before it ends up on peoples’ dinner tables.
Currently, some cities are greener than others; Singapore, Hanoi and Havana have all been cited as food producing cities. Whilst they are not yet self sufficient, other cities still have very far to go. New York, for example, has to import nearly every morsel of food which is consumed there, and trucking all that food into the city every day takes its toll on the environment and is an incredibly inefficient use of resources in a sophisticated society.
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The Benefits Of Agricultural Biotechnology
Agricultural biotechnology is any technique in which living organisms, or parts of organisms are altered to make or modify agricultural products, to improve crops, or develop microbes for specific uses in agricultural processes. Simply put, when the tools of biotechnology are applied to agriculture, it is termed as “agricultural biotechnology”. Genetic engineering is also a part of agricultural biotechnology in today’s world. It is now possible to carry out genetic manipulation and transformation on almost all plant species, including all the world’s major crops.
Plant transformation is one of the tools involved in agricultural biotechnology, in which genes are inserted into the genetic structure or genome of plants. The two most common methods of plant transformation are Agrobacterium Transformation – methods that use the naturally occurring bacterium; and Biolistic Transformation – involving the use of mechanical means. Using any of these methods the preferred gene is inserted into a plant genome and traditional breeding method followed to transfer the new trait into different varieties of crops.
Production of food crops has become much cheaper and convenient with the introduction of agricultural biotechnology. Specific herbicide tolerant crops have been engineered which makes weed control manageable and more efficient. Pest control has also become more reliable and effective, eliminating the need for synthetic pesticides as crops resistant to certain diseases and insect pests have also been engineered. Phytoremediation is the process in which plants detoxify pollutants in the soil, or absorb and accumulate polluting substances out of the soil. Several crops have now been genetically engineered for this purpose for safe harvest and disposal, and improvement of soil quality.
Tags: agricultur, agricultural, agricultural biotechnology, agricultural product, agricultural products, agriculture, biotech, biotechnology, crops, department of agriculture, fertilizer, food crops, genetic engineering, genetically engineered, herbicide, herbicides, insect, living organisms, organisms, pesticide, pesticides, pests, plants, species, the environmentRelated posts