Many of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, from California’s Central Valley to Southern Europe’s arid Mediterranean basin, have become economically dependent on heavy irrigation. Irrigation supports the large harvest yields that such a large population demands. Experts predict that to keep a growing population fed, water extraction may increase an additional 15 percent or more by 2050. A great deal of this water is redirected onto cropland through irrigation schemes of varying kinds. Worldwide, agriculture accounts for 70 percent of human freshwater consumption. Below are brief descriptions of three ways intensive agriculture threatens the precarious balance of nonagricultural ecosystems. Many of the techniques and modifications on which farmers rely to boost output also harm the environment. Yet modern agriculture itself is also partly responsible for the crisis in sustainability. Global climate change is destabilizing many of the natural processes that make modern agriculture possible. The reasons for this have to do with ecological factors. In the coming decades, however, meeting the demand for accelerated agricultural productivity is likely to be far more difficult than it has been so far. According to World Bank figures, in 2016, more than 700 million hectares (1.7 billion acres) were devoted to growing corn, wheat, rice, and other staple cereal grains-nearly half of all cultivated land on the planet.
As the human population continues to grow, so too has the amount of space dedicated to feeding it. This tremendous rise in food production has sustained a global population that has quadrupled in size over the span of one century. At each stage, innovations in farming techniques brought about huge increases in crop yields by area of arable land. Agricultural methods have intensified continuously ever since the Industrial Revolution, and even more so since the “green revolution” in the middle decades of the 20 th century.
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