Global Climate change is a rising issue amongst the world at the moment and every living thing on this planet is affected. For human beings, this impact is much greater than simply affecting our personal, it affects the society, affects the economy, and one thing that relates to our basic survival – it affects agriculture. If the agricultural methods are affected due to global climate change, then our basic need for survival – food, will be affected as well.
With unstable weather patterns exposed to the farms, crop yields are greatly affected by the event, and the use of open-field farming is now endangering the farms. Open-field farming is the most basic method of agriculture where the crops are on the fields without any protection, making it vulnerable to outside damages. This is therefore taking an enormous hit onto the lives of farmers.
Let’s look at example, the Chinese community is one of the growing countries of the world, a developing country. One of their problems involve the lack of awareness for the issue of global climate change. China, which still uses the conventional open-field farming method, suffered when global climate change took a hit in the year of 2006. The table below suggests this exactly, in the year 2004, the number was high in the 72 million region, by the time 2006 stroke, which was the year the worst dust storms his China, the number dropped down to 54 million.
Economic damages to the farmer’s lives and basically affecting their way of surviving in this world. More and more farmers are now searching for an energy- and cost-efficient model that can help save their own business. One of those models introduce the concept of greenhouses.
Greenhouses are glass buildings in which crops are grown, to protect them from the cold weather outside, this type of glass greenhouses are considered the traditional method of greenhouse farming. Traditional greenhouses may use the glass as walls to collect heat from the outside and storing them inside to keep the greenhouse at a relatively warm temperature. Global climate change presenting the unstable weather patterns will affect this setup. First of all, with frequent-changing temperatures, the greenhouses cannot store heat efficiently because of fluctuating temperatures on a near-daily basis. Second of all, traditional greenhouses aren’t excellent heat-storing devices.
The saviour of agriculture in this time would be known as solar greenhouses. Ever since the concept of “global warming” was introduced to mankind, most people turned towards solar energy to be more energy-efficient, and it is quite useful. Introducing the concept of solar energy to agriculture can greatly help the farmers.
Of course, there are different types of solar greenhouses: Passive or active. Passive solar greenhouses (the two greenhouses on the left of the diagram above) are ones that uses the building itself as the heat-storing device, therefore it is a very cost-efficient method of agriculture for it is cheaper. The active solar greenhouses (on the right of the diagram) are the ones who depends on an external device to store heat. This way it is much more expensive, but the farmer can control the heat much better than any other types of greenhouses. Most of the food that we are all eating today are known as high-value crops, meaning they are crops with high demand on them, for example, strawberries or potatoes. These high-value crops are usually grown in active solar greenhouses because they can be better grown inside a greenhouse where the temperature is much more controlled and can be kept at an optimum level.
Greenhouse Canada wrote an article regarding the effectiveness of solar greenhouses: “The Solar Solution”
Since active solar greenhouses can produce high-value crops at a high quality, the demand for these crops will eventually increase, with more output, the farmers are bound to increase their profit.
It sounds very easy I know, but if everything was this easy then we wouldn’t have any problems within the world. A book stated that “there is relatively little evidence that farmers have responded to recent changes in climate by changing their farming practice, or that they have much knowledge of potential future climate change.” The problem is that farmers are not aware of the situation, also that they are not willing to sacrifice a large amount of money for solar greenhouses in order to save their business. To most farmers, that process is just wasting money, but what they don’t understand is that active solar greenhouses is a long-term profit-making method of agriculture.
The ideal future for agriculture is NOT having solar greenhouses everywhere, why? If that’s the future that means we have simply accepted the fact that global climate change is here to stay and we won’t do anything about it. The most natural way of agriculture is still open-field farming. Solar greenhouses are the solution to saving our agricultural market RIGHT NOW because of the issue we are facing. Thinking about a counter-argument against myself, solar greenhouses are still wasting resources if we think about it, which is why we cannot have solar greenhouses everywhere in the future. They can replace traditional greenhouses permanently, but they are NOT the future where open-field farming is non-existent while all you see in the rural areas are high-tech solar greenhouses.
At this point you may be wondering how all this even relates to global climate change, well I’m here to say, it’s not a direct effect from global climate change, it’s more of an indirect effect that agriculture is suffering through climate change, therefore affecting human beings. Like I said earlier on, if agriculture is largely affected by global warming, food prices will go up since there is now short of supply, and food quality will go down due to issues such as pollution. In the end, we get less food and the food we get is low quality thereby affecting our own health. If agriculture were to be aided by the technology of solar greenhouses, the farmers will not suffer economic damages, and everyone can still enjoy clean food without the price going up.
Of course, this is only one fraction of what agriculture really is. Climate change is the issue that affects crop yield, in which greenhouses are the solution to the problem. There are several other issues affected by pollution, for example, food security, health issues, and food mileage, etc.
Some of the resources used are from peer-reviewed articles and governmental resource sites:
“Quantity of Potato Production of China.” 2003-2008. Food and Agriculture Organization” of the United Nations. <http://faostat.fao.org/site/339/default.aspx>
Korecko, J., et al. “Module Greenhouse with High Efficiency of Transformation of Solar Energy, Utilizing Active and Passive Glass Optical Rasters.” Solar Energy 84.10 (2010): 1794. Print.