Question: is there a way to continue farming large masses of crops without using harsh chemicals?
Comments
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I like Dominique’s answer. I would only add that farmers want to make a profit and so they would prefer to buy as few fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides as possible to keep thier costs down.
It’s not really possible at the moment to produce as much food as we do without using chemicals. There are lots of regulations to make sure there aren’t any dangerous levels of chemicals left in the fruit or vegetables when they are harvested and a lot of research is needed to keep testing chemicals to make sure of that. You can buy a lot of organic food these days but its very expensive to hire lots of people to weed the crops and process the products separately from chemically treated produce. It’s also very hard to control pests and diseases in organic crops.
We can use selective breeding and genetic modification or find disease resistant plants but diseases can usually adapt to new plants so we will need to keep on finding new resistant plants all the time. So it’s important to keep researching chemicals so farmers can use them when they have to but we can also research resistant crops and natural products as an alternative to synthetic chemicals =)
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