Blog Post:  What if traditional farming doesn’t meet our expectations for food justice? what are other solutions?

The “Traditional” farming or practices that are strongly linked historically and hold social value for individuals that are of that area, hold knowledge that could help agricultures be both sustainable, plentiful and economically balanced. The traditional farming is considered one of the healthiest and environmentally friendly methods of producing crops as we found in our reading from Holt-Gimènez. The practices are more essential than before, and the source of knowledge is continuously ignored and if not some are destroyed by westernisation. But they also could be our solutions for today’s problems and future food justice, even after the destruction of traditional farming.

Individuals such as Lyson, Allen and Kari supportive of community, and re-integrating historical food practice back to the land, which i agree is a good idea and with the amount of land in Oregon. It would be a perfect idea, however, with the population growing and America’s centralisation on food. It is questionable if we can move out into a community based food source, and with global warming we yet to know the effects it has on our crop cycles and the frequent changes in weather pattern^[1]. Even if the environment doesn’t affect our crops, we have the economic problem where company provide a cheap source of food in competition with farms who have a higher cost. One additional problem, is the amount of water usage that is used in agriculture and how it is used or wasted in the process of growing the crops conventionally^[2]. Even if we did move into a community based food, the question of waste and how much land can we spare without disrupting the balance between the nature replenishing cycles and the nutrients used.

Therefore, a solution that attempts to solve these problems is a vertical farm. Currently, it is applied in Singapore and so far looking promising^[3]. Although Singapore is small country that has very little resource compared with America, we need to take seriously of the space used in America to be able to utilize traditional farming and allowing land to heal and reintroduce traditional farming^[4]. The vertical farming is a farming technique that uses building or vertical stands of any sort, the ones used in Singapore uses rows and rows of soil and plants and rotated by hydraulics. The future though, is considering building agriculture of each floor of a high rise building. This would solve problems of accessibility to fresh foods, cost of foods, water waste and various other problems and vertical farms can be implemented in cities instead of urban, and urban farm can focus on traditional food variations by seasonal changes. The water usage on vertical farms are considered significantly less than conventional farming and can create a large number of food over a small area of land, with variation we can control what grows in it as well without harming the land and majority of water will be used for most plants^[5]. While others believe that hydroponics could be the later alternative to our food crisis issue, it is the farming technique that requires no land and using solutions to allow plants to grow in a solution which is healthy and free from most pest or fungus infections. This means that we can replicate nature by replicating the interaction between plants close to lakes and fishes in lakes, the constant replenishment of nutrients for both species will be beneficial with little amount of input required^[6].

Traditional farming is important to maintaining the land, and generating food for food justice and accessibility, but we cannot deny that there is a possibility that we cannot just depend on traditional farming when environmental external factors could affect our food. Therefore, Vertical farming and Hydroponics might be other solutions in alternative conventional farming without harming the land sacred to groups of people or hold some value to the land.