Food Scarcity: When Food Becomes Scarce

With the increase in pollution and natural calamities, the world is facing some serious issues. Amongst them, food scarcity is a major one. Devastating drought at someplace, heavy flooding elsewhere. Food production is in danger and catastrophic famines wreak havoc. Throughout the world, researchers are searching for a solution to the potential food scarcity problem.

With the fear of food scarcity slowly turning into reality, artificial methods of agriculture is not a dream anymore. There are countries around the world where artificial agriculture is already in place to solve the problem of food scarcity. In Japan, after the Fukushima catastrophe, there was a lot of interest in these new greenhouses. These greenhouses enable one to produce the crops all year round, regardless of the external influences.

The contrast: agriculture in the fields. On the one hand greenhouse farming gaining some steam, the traditional farming methods are losing their popularity. Harsh weather conditions, Scarcity of water, and no moisture content in soil are a few of the many reasons. There are places on earth where temperatures go up to 45 degrees which in turn dries up the soil to two meters deep!

Larger parts of Germany are affected by severe drought in summer. This results in the total loss of harvest, with high financial losses. The expensive irrigation systems, strong fertilizers have become a must for any farmer practicing traditional farming. Without these facilities, nothing would grow on any farms, except artificial or greenhouse farms.

With the world already facing water scarcity, experts predict that more dry periods are expected. This would only make things difficult for traditional farming.

Can greenhouse farming be considered as an alternative to traditional farming?

Well, the thing is we don’t have much of an option left. With global warming increased to a level like never before. We ourselves have made things difficult. All this is our fault and it is we who have to find a way out of this. We have to find our new methods to finally defeat hunger in the 21st century.

Experts predict that in just under 30 years, twice the food would have to be produced as today. The conditions for this have become worse. In order not to exacerbate the climate crisis, the area available for food cultivation should not increase. And, if we are not able to meet today’s demand then how can we expect to meet the demands of future generations?

One of the many answers to this is fully automated farming. Protected from drought, frost, and storm. This isn’t the futuristic version. In Japan, this is already a reality. In an automated farming system, we can produce food under optimal conditions with high nutritional content and good taste, all year round. The environment in which this all will be done is clinical. The ones working in this have to wear protective suits that are hygienically prepared. The crops grown using this technique are free of pesticides. This method is also known as the vertical method in Japan.

This technique has worked well in Japan and there’s no reason why this wouldn’t work in different parts of the world!