Sustainability

The event I went to was Sustainability Agriculture on Friday. I chose this event because I was raised on a farm when I was little and curious to see how it was important to the environment. The lady teaching us about this was from the community supported agriculture group. She was very impressed on how our school is up to date on trying to keep sustainability at our college. For example, our school stopped using food trays and now saves about 8,000 gallons of water. Also in the new buildings we are using circulated Co2 instead of stall air which is supposed to help the brain keep focus.
The first info our teacher gave us was a very helpful website called foodroutes.org. The website gives very good information on how important small farms are in our community. There are many benefits to supporting small community farms compared to large industrial farms. One of the major reasons is the amount of fuel wasted to transport our food. About 80% of our fossil fuels are used for the transportation of goods. Usually its takes about 1500 miles for the average food item to get transported to where it needs to go. Fuel is not the only problem to be worried with the transportation of most of our foods. More pesticides and chemicals are also used to keep the vegetables and fruits bug free while transportation.
One of the main questions asked by most people in Michigan about farming is how can we stick to local farms when we have such long winters? One thing a lot of people do not know is Michigan is actually the number two ranked in crop diversity, only behind California. This makes it a lot easier to farm certain types of food and store them over the winter, so it definitely is possible. Small farmers also treat the local land better and do not erode the soil as much. Usually industrial farms will farm the same land over and over not being worried about how much of the soil is being eroded, but worried more about how much they can produce.
This session helped a lot in... [continues]

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