Reflection and Questions on National Geographic Reading

From reading the article, it gave me a new insight on what it is like to grow our own food and how people and other countries grow their food. Something that really struck me in the reading was the section where it talks about the farmers in India and how people are now dying from cancer and other various diseases due to the pesticides and how the water is no longer a good quality drinking water. It’s really sad how they have to suffer through that and to top it off the farmers are in debt.

Something else I found striking was how scientist want to plant crops that are modified so that they don’t have to use as much fertilizer to grow the plant and that can withstand time without water. I think that would be a great idea because then it would give plants a better chance to survive instead of dying and that could be food for people. Because it sounds too good to be true I want to know the downsides to these plants. Are they’re any? Are we currently working on mass producing more plants like this? If not, why?

I think one of our main problems with growing anything is still our reliance on fossil fuels. I remember reading somewhere in the article about how farmers still need fossil fuel based fertilizers in order to grow their plants. I think what we need to work on now is how can we press forward growing these plants without solely relying on fossil fuels? Is there a way we can use another source for fertilizer that is just as good, if not better then fossil fuel based ones? Is there a natural fertilizer we can use only on our plants so that we can grow them? Is it possible to use material found strictly only in nature to grow what we need to grow so we don’t have to rely on any human source? I think those are the questions we really need to focus on now in order to be able to continue growing food to feed our growing population.