Farming in the United States - Research Paper Example

An American farmer today feeds about 155 people worldwide through agricultural exports, an incredible increase in efficiency from his ability to feed only about 26 people back in 1960 (Center for Food Integrity 1) on the same land. However, there are obvious limits to what farming in the United States of America can do. As the country’s population grows, which now number about 313 million and then still growing fast due to immigration, there is pressure on the environment to produce more food.

There is always the question about how the Malthusian theory plays out if this trend continues when population growth will have outpaced agricultural production growth. In other words, a reality check can happen anytime soon but Man always found ingenious ways to produce more food as the population keeps growing. An example was the introduction of mechanized farming which greatly increased industrial food production, followed a few decades later on by the so-called Green Revolution which increased crop yields and brought prices down, saving at least a billion people worldwide from hunger, malnutrition, and death by preventing famines.

American farming is now on the brink of another technological revolution which will again increase food crop production to feed a growing global population using GMO crops. GMO crops are alternatively termed as biotech crops because these are plants whose DNA has been modified using genetic engineering. GMO means genetically modified organism which can refer to both plants and animals. It refers to any living organism from the simplest life forms such as bacteria, fungi, and yeast to go up higher to include successively complex organisms such as insects, birds, fishes, and mammals.

Plants are GMOs because these are living organisms whose genetic material contains a novel combination using modern biotechnology techniques to improve a trait or obtain superior strains of a plant species. GMO are