What threatens food security, making food production more efficient, sustainable fishing and mycoprotein (Biology only).
What you will learn
- Describe the threats to food security
- Calculate and compare feed conversion in different farming systems
- Explain fishing quotas and net mesh sizes
- Describe how mycoprotein is made
Enough food for everyone
Food security means having enough food to feed a population.
Threats: a rising population, changing diets in wealthier countries, new pests and pathogens, droughts and other climate change, the cost of fertiliser, fuel and feed, and conflict.
Farmers can make food production more efficient by keeping animals warm and limiting their movement, so less of their food is used in respiration and more becomes meat. Some people think this is cruel.
- Chickens indoors: 4.0 kg feed gives 2.0 kg gain
- 2.0 ÷ 4.0 × 100 = 50.0% of the feed becomes body mass
Eating the crop directly feeds more people than feeding it to animals, because so much biomass is lost at each trophic level.
The rest of this lesson and its 10 practice questions are locked.
In this lesson
- Enough food for everyone
- Fish and fungi
- Try it: Feed into meat
10 practice questions, marked as you go; about 20 minutes in all.
Key terms
Food security, Efficient, Quotas, Minimum net mesh size, Sustainable, Mycoprotein
In this unit: Ecology
Communities and adaptations, sampling with quadrats, transects and capture-recapture, food chains and the carbon, water and nitrogen cycles, decay, parasitism and mutualism, eutrophication, biodiversity and human impact, biomass transfer and food security.
- Communities, interdependence and adaptations
- Sampling with quadrats, transects and capture-recapture
- Food chains, cycles and decay
- Biodiversity and human impact
- Trophic levels, pyramids and efficiency
- Food security and farming
- Biological control and bioaccumulation
- Fish farming, introduced species and the cycles in depth