The Impact Of Technology On Faming System
Technology is one of the biggest factors of the industry standard and an important factor in the growth of society. Technology is dominating the world and changing human life in many ways including affecting human behavior, attitude, habits, social impact, and business impact. The food industry is a sector that has been greatly impacted by technological advancements, particularly the farming industry. Although, the relationship between technology and farming are now almost inseparable, the societal impacts of this bond of technology and farming does not yield only positive results since the creation of the technology has been mainly driven by financial and quantity demands rather than qualitative and health driven ones that can be observed from functionalist, conflict and interaction perspective.
From a functionalist perspective, technology has played a critical role of the contribution of farmers producing food for the world’s ever increasing population. Humans learned about farming in the first place are to survive because food is an essential element for them to live. Farmers produce food in order to fulfill supply and demand of society. The farming system is evolving by adapting with the climate change, surrounding environment, human needs, and rapid growth in population. For example, the number of world population from 1950s until today has increased by doubled. Population increase has caused higher demands of food quantity in shorter amount of time. As a result, it has lead to modernization of farming system in order to meet the demands of society and creating a critical role of technology on farming. Farmers have adapted innovative process in order to produce mass quantity of food.
Furthermore, now farmers allow people in society convenience to be able to purchase food for their basic necessities and to attend their modern day work. Without modern day farming, people need to somehow provide their own food and work at the same time. Farmers contribute to society by allowing people to focus on other aspects of society that helps with more advancements and improvement.
In conclusion, the farmers have not only adapted to major population increases over the time, but they also play critical role of creating opportunity for society to have their modern day jobs.
Through conflict perspective, one can understand how the conflicts are created between corporation demands on farmers and the demands of consumers on farmers. The objective has changed after the farmers utilized the technology, which empowered automation and expanded productivity, to produce more food efficiently and productive for society. The initial goal of producing good quality of food for society is shifted to making more profit by reducing the quality of food with applying some chemical, building greenhouse, and modified the genetics of the crops and livestock that potentially have risks to human, other life forms and environment. For example, farmers use more chemical to make the crops and livestock grow faster, bigger and develop new plants, animals and microbial strains for us as human food. Chemical fertilizers have become popular on farming fields for providing consistency of nutrients for the plants and controlling of the availability for consumer. Chemical can supply valid data electronically and definite results of the growth with an affordable and cheaper price which nature could not provide.
In addition, the creation of greenhouses, high tech production facility, also crucial in farming industry, which can monitor the optimization of plant growth, is using modern technology such as temperature control. They utilize the technology by building greenhouse in order to have more control on controlling the temperature for the optimization of the production and reducing the risk prior to cultivation of specific corps. This method of farming may have potential negative impacts on both health and environment.
In conclusion, the big corporation has a big roll on controlling farmers on producing food for society due to the imbalance between low supply and high demand in society. The dominance of the big corporation takes over the control by demanding big amount of crops and livestock from the farmers at the time to increasing the income. Also, they use their authority to force the farmers to produce more by utilizing chemical excessively and building green houses that caused negative impact not only to society, but also to our ecosystem.
From an interactionist perspective, food corporations have shaped consumer’s views of their food product through advertisements and commercials to exactly how they want it to be believed as; nonetheless, through more readily available information available today, the former one-sided consumer view has now turned into skepticism on majority of products created by large food corporations. Consumers are skeptical with all products that corporations have produced are contaminated with the chemical. As a result, it has lead society to buy more organic food from small market or local market because it is more reliable and believe that local market produce healthier product.
Harvard Health Publishing stated that “While organic foods have fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and are free of hormones and antibiotics”. Consuming more organic food will give more positive impact for society not only for health issue but also it will provide better environment for living.
Furthermore, the organic food became a trend as a “healthy food” in society. As consumers experimented, typically with organic fruits and vegetables, some claimed they had better taste and flavors that conventional produce seemed to lack. It convinced people to buy organic food because it claimed as healthier food and tastier. On the other hand, the organic food is more expensive than regular product. Organic food has higher price because special treatment to produce a better quality.
In conclusion, the society has a mindset that the fruit and vegetable has been treated with chemicals, they tend to choose to purchase organic foods even though there is no scientific proof of the negative or harmful impact from the chemical
In summary, conflict perspective on technology and farming is able to cover the key contributors to the issue and the conflict it has generated in the food industry that has negatively impacted the consumers and society. The conflict perspective is able to capture the manifest and latent functions of the issue that is contained in a functionalist perspective through its identification of key contributors and their actions causing the issue -- the imbalance of its monetary relationship between mega corporations and its farmers is a conflict that has impacted society through the unhealthy product they are consuming.
References
- Roser, M. , Ritchie, H. , & Ortiz-Ospina, E. (2013). World Population Growth. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata. org/world-population-growth#how-is-the-global-population-distributed-across-the-world
- Siegner, C. (2018, March 19). The ongoing evolution of organic: Why it's popular and where it's heading. Retrieved from https://www. fooddive. com/news/the-ongoing-evolution-of-organic-why-its-popular-and-where-its-heading/519268/
- Should you go organic?. (2015) Retrieved from https://www. health. harvard. edu/staying-healthy/should-you-go-organic
