Abstract
Agriculture stands pre-eminent as the world’s first and largest industry. It is our most basic enterprise, and its products are renewable as a result of ‘farming the sun’. Through the production of green plants, agriculture is the only major industry that ‘processes’ solar energy. The greatest unexploited resource that strikes the earth is sunlight and the green plants are biological sun traps. Each day they store on earth 17 times as much energy as is presently consumed world-wide. The goal of agriculture is to adjust species and cultivars to locations, planting designs, cropping systems and cultural practices to maximize the biological harvest of sunlight by green plants to produce useful products for mankind. Many products of agriculture may be alternatively used as food, feed, fiber or energy. Conflicts over the agricultural use of land and water resources for food, feed or fuel production will arise as resource constraints tighten.
Agricultural Experiment Station publication No. 9708.
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Wittwer, S.H. (1982). Solar energy and agriculture. In: Mislin, H., Bachofen, R. (eds) New Trends in Research and Utilization of Solar Energy through Biological Systems. EXS 43: Experientia Supplementum, vol 43. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-6305-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-6305-6_2
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