Question

Give a brief information about commercial farming with examples . Write their advantages and disadvantages​

Answer 1

Explanation:

As I am an urban farmer, and commercial farming is my natural sworn enemy, i’ll start with disadvantages:

Disadvantages:

1. Heavy use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. These negatively affect the environment, as well as animal populations. Deet was used in the past and endangered many birds of prey (eagles, for example) . Bee populations are still struggling due to widespread use of pesticides. Natural microbial processes in soil have been replaced with chemicals.

2. Monoculture. In commercial farming, typically one crop and only one variety of that crop is ever planted. Most land was not meant to support only one type of crop, so intensive chemical processes are used to produce one type of plant (see #1). We, as consumers of commercial farm products, also lose out on nutritional elements due to lack of variety.

3. Economy. I could easily write an entire essay on this alone. Big companies buy or squeeze out local competitors, who are everyday farmers. This costs people jobs, and creates monopolies. They make the buy in price to start a farm too great for the common man to get into the business. For example, Tyson chicken used their money political influence to make traditional chicken farming virtually impossible. Laws and practices were created that changed how chickens were required to be farmed. To keep up with the new regulations, local farmers had to purchase new, expensive equipment and techniques to conform to the regulations. Want to guess the only company with the capital to produce that expensive equipment? That’s right, Tyson. Chicken Farms either couldn’t keep up and had to close , or had to go into perpetual debt to tyson, or become a tyson “partner”, thereby removing them as owners of their own farms.

There are plenty of other disadvantages, but those seem to be the most important to me.

Advantages:

Uniformity - Commercial farms are really good at producing a consistent product

Efficiency - Commercial farmers, with all their capital , are able to use really cool and impressive techniques that maximize the per acre product in a farmed area. It’s honestly really cool

Consistency - they have this thing down to a science, and can get all their produce to the supermarket fresh and on time , every time . Have you ever been to the grocery store and they have been “out” of some kind of produce… Probably not

This is not an exhaustive list of either Advantages or disadvantages. But it’s a good place to start.