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Biology: Environment

This will cover:

Problems caused by Farming

Problems Caused By Farming:

Biggest Problems are caused by intensive farming,

Pros of intensive farming:

• You get a lot of crops from little land

• Provides a large variety of different foods all year round.

• Provides a lot of people with cheap food.

Cons of intensive farming:

• The destruction of natural habitat (eg removal of hedges).

• Destruction of meadows which are full of wild flowers, orchards, natural grasses etc.

• Overuse of fertilizers, which pollute rivers and lakes killing the wildlife inside them.

• Pesticides which disturb food chains and reduce insect, bird and mammal populations.

• Intensive farming of battery hens and other animals which is viewed by some as inhuman.

What is Sustainable Development?

• Sustainable Development meets the needs of todays population without harming the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Sustainable Development is basically environmentally friendly farming (or other forms of development).

Remember in exams to use details of environmental problems development causes and the pros and cons of development.

Pesticides:

• Are sprayed onto most crops to kill insects.

• Also kill harmless insects such as bees and beetles

• Cause shortage of food for insect eating birds

• Danger of passing on poisonous pesticides to other animals including humans.

Eutrophication:

What is eutrophication?

• Modern farming often uses fertilizers with nitrates.

• They are essential to increase food yields where food production would otherwise be low.

• Sometimes the fertilizers seep into the soil and then into ground water leading to rivers.

• Then plants like algae begin growing rapidly in the rivers.

• Some plants start to die off which means bacteria feeding off of the dead plants use up extra oxygen.

• This causes fish and other river wildlife to be starved of oxygen.

  
  

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