Battle Between Feeding a Growing Population & Conservation of Biodiversity

We know the basic things we eat like pork, beef, chicken, fish, fruits, and vegetables. We see them as "important", therefore we pay closer attention to their growth and continuance to breed and produce. They are one of the primary needs of our lives. But do you know where the food you eat comes from? Do you know where it comes from? Do you know how it affects our biological diversity? Which method is used to produce these products? What about the plants and animals that we dont see as "important"? What happens to them?
In this time we depend on the usual meats like livestock, poultry, fish and crop varieties but our dependence on these alone allows us to overlook the growing amount of less productive breeds of animals and crops that are becoming extinct. Much of the products we consume are from a form of farming called Industrialized Agriculture which allowed a large amount of products to be more efficiently produced. This method includes production using machinery, genetic technology and "achieves economies of scale in production". But this method of farming uses large amounts of chemicals and fossil fuels to run. It takes a huge toll on our environment. It does a huge damage on our biodiversity. It affects the natural habitats of species by using huge amounts of water, energy, and chemicals with no regard to the organisms affected. Huge amounts of toxic chemicals are being put into our environment. These large amounts of chemicals create large amounts of "dead zones" where organisms cannot survive, especially aquatic ones that are the victims of the amounts of nitrogen compounds traveling down coastal fisheries.
An alternative method used in farming is the Sustainable Agriculture method where the harvesting and producing of the animals and plants are done using the principles of ecology. This method is focused on being an agricultural method that is healthy and doesn't have a negative impact on the environment, natural diversity, and human health. Sustainable agriculture follows a set of values that is aware of the ecological and social realities that include conserving resources and minimizing the environmental damage. All these and this type of agriculture also produces nutritious, uncontaminated products. Their goal is to turn the damage that Industrial Agriculture has done to our environment while still having a consistent production.
Before this bioblog, I haven't payed much mind to the food I eat and where they come from. I am sure that most of the human population doesn't know if what they are eating are from an Industrial Farm or a Sustainable Farm. Who knew that just by knowing we could do so much for our environment. I think that producers are just trying to match the growth of the consumer population which led them to make such a method as INDUSTRIALIZED AGRICULTURE. It is sad, but despite the fact that we could switch to SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE, the population will keep going up and the amount of the livestock and crops we eat would definately grow, meaning the amount of extinct less productive breeds will also grow. As we "take what we need" which would be the productive livestock and crops that we consume on a daily basis, the less productive breeds would be left behind and are seen as "less important" in some people's eyes. In reality, these plants and animals will vanish and we would most likely not even care or notice.

SOURCES:
wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_agriculture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture
Ecological Agriculture Projects
Union of Concerned Scientists