How Your View of Animal Agriculture Has Changed over the Duration - Essay Example

Biotechnology, as an agricultural practice, entails employing technology to enhance crop and animal production. This technology enables humans to produce more and new commercial products and through it, humans are able to manufacture effective antibiotics that improve animal performance, hormone steroids that improve growth rates in beef cattle, etc.

The use of bacteria to develop fundamental animal proteins that are later transferred into their system for improved productivity has shown to be very efficient but faced initial obstacles in its early stages. Opposition to such a program resulted from the fear that products realized through such means could be unhealthy to humans, though this stance has continually softened with an increased demonstration of its efficacy. Another that has been of particular interest is genetic engineering.

The question of the moral acceptability of cloning is one that continues to the present moment, but which somehow provides a new perspective of life and food production. Research on this practice aims at improving the productivity of animals by creating new versions of the same animal but with better capabilities of producing and withstanding diseases as well as extreme weather conditions (Rischkowski and Pilling, 2007). However, this quest faces the challenge of approval of many, as people fear that such modifications may result in an offspring that is weaker and less adaptable compared to the parent (National Research Council, 2012).

Nevertheless, technological improvements continue to offer important insights into the practice, and hence improvements are expected.             Another area of interest especially in animal farming is land management and climatic changes. Grazing in public land avails animals of enough food, but at the same time, as Chambers, Roberts, and Woodings (2015) note, deprive other organisms, mostly plants, of the chances of survival in the face of increased changes in climatic conditions.

However, eliminating grazing does not promise to solve issues of climate change or dwindling species. Farmers can use technology to provide intensive care to the land, vegetation, and animals alike. Reducing overgrazing, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, and improving communal or shared grazing fields for e.g. pastoralists in areas where such is possible, can significantly help in reducing environmental degradation and at the same time improving the sustainability of animal farming.             Livestock farming is one field that has experienced extensive changes in the major practices that aim at improving food production.

Noteworthy among these changes is the mechanization of agriculture for efficient production, improved knowledge in biotechnology for enhanced production of commercial products as well as genetic engineering to enable the cloning of organisms that are better adaptable to environmental changes and with increased productivity. These developments contrary to being feasible also face challenges that include changes in climatic conditions and environmental degradation.