Organic Farming And Chemical Fertilizers Reading Answers

Jan 25, 2023

Organic Farming And Chemical Fertilizers Reading Answers is an academic reading topic and a detailed study about Vitamins as a health supplement. The given IELTS topic has originated from the book named “Easy IELTS Academic Reading”. The topic named Organic Farming And Chemical Fertilizers Reading Answers comes with 13 different wide range of questions. Three different types of questions are included in this topic, like, choose the correct letter, Yes/No/Not Given, and no more than two words. The candidates should thoroughly read the IELTS reading passage to recognize the synonyms and identify the keywords and answer the questions below. IELTS reading practice papers can be taken into consideration by the candidates in order to score a good score in the reading section, in which similar topics like Organic Farming And Chemical Fertilizers Reading Answers has been included.

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Section 1

Read the Passage to Answer the Following Questions

Organic Farming And Chemical Fertilizers Reading Answers

The world’s population continues to climb. And despite the rise of high-tech agriculture, 800 million people don’t get enough to eat. Clearly, it’s time to rethink the food we eat and where it comes from. Feeding 9 billion people will take more than the same old farming practices, especially if we want to do it without felling rainforests and planting every last scrap of the prairie. Finding food for all those people will tax predicting farmers’—and researchers’—ingenuity to the limit. Yet already, precious aquifers that provide irrigation water for some of the world’s most productive farmlands are drying up or filling with seawater, and arable land in China is eroding to create vast dust storms that redden sunsets as far away as North America. “Agriculture must become the solution to environmental problems in 50 years. If we don’t have systems that make the environment better~not just hold the fort-then we’re in trouble,” says Kenneth Cassman, an agronomist at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. That view was echoed in January by the Curry report, a government panel that surveyed the future of farming and food in Britain.
It’s easy to say agriculture has to do better, but what should this friendly farming of the future look like? Concerned consumers come up short at this point, facing what appears to be an ever-widening ideological divide. In one corner are the techno-optimists who put their faith in genetically modified crops, improved agrochemicals, and computer-enhanced machinery; in the other are advocates of organic farming, who reject artificial chemicals and embrace back-to-nature techniques such as composting. Both sides cite plausible science to back their claims to the moral high ground, and both bring enough passion to the debate for many people to come away thinking we’re faced with a stark choice between two mutually incompatible options.
Not so. If you take off the ideological blinkers and simply ask how the world can produce the food it needs with the least environmental cost, a new middle way opens. The key is sustainability: whatever we do must not destroy the capital of soil and water we need to keep on producing. Like today’s organic farming, the intelligent farming of the future should pay much more attention to the health of its soil and the ecosystem it’s part of. But intelligent farming should also make shrewd and locally appropriate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The most crucial ingredient in this new style of agriculture is not chemicals but information about what’s happening in each field and how to respond. Yet ironically, this key element may be the most neglected today.
Clearly, organic farming has all the warm, fuzzy sentiment on its side. An approach that eschews synthetic chemicals surely runs no risk of poisoning land and water. And its emphasis on building up natural ecosystems seems to be good for everyone. Perhaps these easy assumptions explain why sales of organic food across Europe are increasing by at least 50 per cent per year.
Going organic sounds idyllic-but it’s naive, too. Organic agriculture has its own suite of environmental costs, which can be worse than those of conventional farming, especially if it were to become the world norm. But more fundamentally, the organic versus-chemical debate focuses on the wrong question. The issue isn’t what you put into a farm, but what you get out of it, both in terms of crop yields and pollutants, and what condition the farm is in when you’re done.
Take chemical fertilizers, which deliver nitrogen, an essential plant nutrient, to crops along with some phosphorus and potassium. It is a mantra of organic farming that these fertilizers are unwholesome, and plant nutrients must come from natural sources. But in fact, the main environmental damage done by chemical fertilizers as opposed to any other kind is through greenhouse gases-carbon dioxide from the fossil fuels used in their synthesis and nitrogen oxides released by their degradation. Excess nitrogen from chemical fertilizers can pollute groundwater, but so can excess nitrogen from organic manures.
On the other hand, relying solely on chemical fertilizers to provide soil nutrients without doing other things to build healthy soil is damaging. Organic farmers don’t use chemical fertilizers, so they are very good at building soil fertility by working crop residues and manure into the soil, rotating with legumes that fix atmospheric nitrogen, and other techniques.
generates vital soil nutrients and also creates a soil that is richer in organic matter, so it retains nutrients better and is hospitable to the crop’s roots and creatures such as earthworms that help maintain soil fertility. Such soil also holds water better and therefore makes more efficient use of both rainfall and irrigation water. And organic matter ties up C02 in the soil, helping to offset emissions from burning fossil fuels and reduce global warming.
Advocates of organic farming like to point out that fields managed in this way can produce yields just as high as fields juiced up with synthetic fertilizers. For example, Bill Liebhardt, a research manager at the Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Pennsylvania recently compiled the results of such comparisons for corn, wheat, soybeans, and tomatoes in the US and found that the organic fields averaged between 94 and 100 per cent of the yields of nearby conventional crops.
But this optimistic picture tells only half the story. Farmers can’t grow such crops every year if they want to maintain or build soil nutrients without synthetic fertilizers. They need to alternate with soil-building crops such as pasture grasses and legumes such as alfalfa. So in the long term, the yield of staple grains such as wheat, rice and corn must go down. This is the biggest cost of organic farming. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, estimates that if farmers worldwide gave up the 80 million tonnes of synthetic fertilizer they now use each year, total grain production would fall by at least half. Either farmer would have to double the amount of land they cultivate- at catastrophic cost to natural habitat –or billions of people would starve.
That doesn’t mean farmers couldn’t get by with less fertilizer. Technologically advanced farmers in wealthy countries, for instance, can now monitor their yields hectare by hectare, or even more finely, throughout a huge field. They can then target their fertilizer to the parts of the field where it will do the best, instead of responding to average conditions. This increases yield and decreases fertilizer use. Eventually, farmers may -incorporate long-term weather forecasts into their planning as well, so that they can cut back on fertilizer use when the weather is likely to make harvests poor anyway, says Ron Olson, an agronomist with Cargill Fertilizer in Tampa, Florida.
Organic techniques certainly have their benefits, especially for poor farmers. But strict “organic agriculture”, which prohibits certain technologies and allows others, isn’t always better for the environment. Take herbicides, for example. These can leach into waterways and poison both wildlife and people. Just last month, researchers led by Tyrone Hayes at the University of California at Berkeley found that even low concentrations of atrazine, the most commonly used weed killer in the US, can prevent frog tadpoles from developing properly.

Solution and Explanation
Questions 1-4
Apply the passage's information to link the individuals (listed A-D) with the opinions or deeds stated below.
Fill in boxes 1-4 on your response sheet with the corresponding letters A-D.

Vaclav Smil
Bill Liebhardt
Kenneth Cassman
Ron Olson

By combining weather data, it is possible to optimize the use of chemical fertilizer.
Organic farming produces nearly as much as orthodox farming.
A more favorable agricultural environment is critical for resolving environmental problems.
Significant productivity losses would occur if all farmers abandoned synthetic fertilizers.

By combining weather data, it is possible to optimize the use of chemical fertilizer.

Answer: D (Ron Olson)
Supporting Sentence: Farmers may eventually incorporate long-term weather forecasts into their planning as well, allowing them to reduce fertilizer consumption during periods of poor weather, according to Ron Olson, an agronomist with Cargill Fertilizer in Tampa, Florida.
Keywords: weather forecast, fertilizer
Keyword Location: Section K, 6th line
Explanation: According to Ron Olson, an agronomic at Cargill Fertilizer in Tampa, Florida, if long-term weather forecasts become more widely available, farmers may be able to incorporate them into their planning as well, enabling them to reduce fertiliser usage during bad weather spells.

Organic farming produces nearly as much as conventional farming.

Answer: B (Bill Liebhardt)
Supporting Sentence: To back this up, Bill Liebhardt, research manager at Kutztown, Pennsylvania's Rodale Institute, says that organic fields in the United States produce 94 to 100 % of what conventional ones do on average.
Keywords: organic fields, conventional crops.
Keyword Location: Section I, 5th line
Explanation: Farmers who use organic practises want to remind us that their operations may provide yields that are comparable to those of areas fed with synthetic fertilisers. According to Bill Liebhardt, research manager at the Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, the yields of organic farms in the US were between 94 and 100% of those of conventional fields.

A more favorable agricultural environment is critical for resolving environmental problems.

Answer: C (Kenneth Cassman)
Supporting Sentence: In the next 50 years, agriculture will have to be a sustainable solution to environmental concerns.
Keyword: Agriculture, solution to environmental problems
Keyword Location: Section A, 9th line
Explanation: More advanced farming techniques will be necessary to feed the world's 9 billion people, especially if we wish to preserve the rainforests and plains. Aquifers that provide water to some of the most fertile farmlands in the world are already running dry or becoming seawater-filled. As a result, according to Kenneth Cassman, an agronomic at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, agriculture must in 50 years become the answer to environmental problems.

Significant productivity losses would occur if all farmers abandoned synthetic fertilizers.

Answer: A
Supporting Sentence: According to Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, overall grain production would drop by half if farmers worldwide stopped using the 80 million tonnes of synthetic fertilizers they currently use each year.
Keywords: productivity losses, synthetic fertilizers
Keyword Location: Section J, 6th line
Explanation: Without synthetic fertilisers, farmers are unable to grow crops continuously. Soil-building crops like pasture grasses and alfalfa should be included in their rotation. If farmers stopped utilising the 80 million tonnes of synthetic fertilisers they use annually, the amount of grain produced worldwide would be slashed in half.

Questions 5-9:

Is the information in Reading Passage 1 consistent with the following statements?
Mark your answers in boxes 5-9.

YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

In the face of rising population and depleting irrigation water, the agricultural industry is on the verge of collapse.
In terms of fertilizer, farmers have just two choices: chemical fertilizer or a natural approach.
It is currently more expensive to use chemical fertilizers than to use natural fertilizers.
Organic farmers must vary their planting methods in order to maintain the soil's nutrients.
Environmentally harmful technologies are utterly prohibited in "organic agriculture."

In the face of rising population and depleting irrigation water, the agricultural industry is on the verge of collapse.

Answer: Yes
Supporting Sentence: The global population is growing at an alarming rate. A staggering 800 million people are undernourished despite the advancements in high-tech agriculture. It's obvious that we need to reevaluate the food we consume and the sources from which it comes.
Keyword: growing population
Keyword Location: Section A, 1st line
Explanation: Despite substantial advancements in high-tech agricultural production, it is estimated that 800 million people remain undernourished. Therefore, it should go without saying that we should consider both the sources of the food we eat and the food itself.

In terms of fertilizer, farmers have just two choices: chemical fertilizer or a natural approach.

Answer: No
Supporting Sentence: With no chemical fertilizers, organic farmers are excellent at improving soil fertility through the use of crop residue and manure, rotation of grain crops with legume crops that fix atmospheric nitrogen as well as other methods.
Keywords: chemical fertilizers, organic farmers
Keyword Location: Section G, 1st line
Explanation: Utilizing crop residues, manure, rotating grains with nitrogen-fixing legumes, and other techniques, organic farmers increase soil fertility. Therefore, it is dangerous to use chemical fertilisers to supply all of the soil's nutrients.

It is currently more expensive to use chemical fertilizers than to use natural fertilizers.

Answer: Not given
Explanation: No relevant inforation was found inside the reading passage.

Organic farmers must vary their planting methods in order to maintain the soil's nutrients.

Answer: Yes
Supporting Sentence: Unless farmers use synthetic fertilizers, they cannot cultivate crops year after year. Soil-building crops like pasture grasses and legumes like alfalfa must be rotated by farmers.
Keywords: synthetic fertilizers, soil-building crops
Keyword Location: Section J, 2nd line
Explanation: Numerous benefits come with organic farming, particularly for small farmers. Contrary to what many people think, "organic agriculture" is not always better for the environment. Without synthetic fertilisers, farmers are unable to raise their crops year after year. Alfalfa and pasture grasses are two examples of crops that need to be rotated by farmers.

Environmentally harmful technologies are utterly prohibited in "organic agriculture."

Answer: No
Supporting Sentence: Organic agriculture, especially for small-scale farmers, has a number of advantages. Nevertheless, rigorous "organic agriculture," which forbids some technology while allowing others, isn't necessarily preferable in terms of sustainability.
Keyword: Organic agriculture
Keyword Location: Section L, 1st line
Explanation: If organic farming becomes the norm worldwide, its environmental effects might be worse than those of conventional farming. However, it is harmful to just rely on artificial fertilisers to supply soil with nutrients.

Questions 10-13:

Complete the remaining summary of the Reading Passage paragraph.
Each answer should contain no more than two words from the reading passage.
Fill in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet with appropriate responses.

Numerous 10) Farming approaches must be implemented to ensure that the world's population does not die of hunger.

A team called 11) Curry confirmed a scholar's position through a survey in British agriculture. In recent years, an increasing number of European farmers have embraced

12) Natural/organic farming. The organic versus

13) Chemical debate appears to be incorrect.

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