What are the negative sides of COMMERCIAL FARMING? PLEASE HELP...?

Question

I need it for a class discussion. Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

How about all the pesticides they spray on their crops?  That drains into our ground water.

Sometimes the farmers get government subsidies to not grow anything. - HUH?

Answer 2

I am highly suspicious of a class discussion based on the "negative sides of Commercial Farming"  It would appear the discussion leader already has a fixed negative opinion of farming.

Any farming operation that markets produce can be classified commercial.  Subsistence farming in my definition means raising food and produce for your own consumption with none of the product being marketed to the general public.  

Currently one farmer grows the food for about 127 other people in addition to himself.  Farming, generally speaking, anymore is highly productive per man hour.  It is very capital intensive.  Because of the high cost of equipment, the expense of inputs such as weed control, fertilizer, water if irrigated, electricity if irrigated with center pivot irrigation, the cost of fuel it has become very capital intensive.  Manual labor has been replaced by expensive machinery, which is costly to operate and maintain.  The support structure for farming has deteriorated greatly.  Right now my closest John Deere dealer is over 30 miles away, and I had better call ahead to be sure they have the parts I need if I have a breakdown.   Any farming operation is highly susceptible to the weather.  they are subject to droughts, floods, wind storms, hail storms blizzards.  Farming is also subject to the markets.  Let food go up 10% and everbody screams, let the Federal Reserve raise interest 500% and nobody says a word.  Mq2 doesn't even understand that most herbicides and pesticides are "organic" and many fertilizers approved for "organic" farming are totally inorganic compounds.  Muriate of Potash is not approved, Potassium sulfate is approved for example, both are inorganic.

Answer 3

The negative sides of commercial farming are:

The high cost of land

The high cost of machinery

The high costs of inputs, fertilizer, insecticide, herbicides, seed

The uncertainty of weather, you could lose your entire crop

The lack of control of prices received for your products

The negative opinion of the general public of farmers

By the way the term commercial farming includes organic

farming and subsidence farming if they produce a product to be sold in the market place.

If you are going to have a knowledgeable discussion about commercial farming you should also get the information on the positive sides of farming as well.

Answer 4

Unsustainable use of land, monocropping, susceptibility of soil to erosion due to open ploughing, use of inorganic farm inputs like fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, mechanisation increases air pollution, high energy use etc.

Answer 5

I guess the most negative side of commercial farming really is that it is a largely too efficient. There are lots of downsides to highly efficient problems to commercial farming.

Because of commercial farming, we have created a system whereby the distribution of wealth is very disparate. In systems whereby commercial farming is large. Entire populous and civilizations rest upon a few core decision makers on what we eat. Another downside is that as that happens, many people do not understand the difficulties of farming and food production as a huge lot of it is automatized.

Furthurmore, the world's food supply is dependent on a few large companies who could raise the prices at whim , or reduce the quality , or even partake in unethical decisions against even regulatory bodies. This of course is an extreme scenario.

Furthurmore, the loss of jobs from commercial farming also means radical changes in the economic lives of indivuduals coming out from a developing economy. The question to ask what is the extent of commercial farming that is acceptable to the global society as a whole.