Read the article below and answer ALL the questions that follow.

Why Small Farming Is Essential for Creating a Sustainable Future

Small farms like this can feed the world, and, in the long run, it may only be small farms like this that can. But criticisms must be addressed$$the compromises with the status quo, the low prestige, and the toil associated with an agrarian life, as well as the global flight from the land. One thing that encourages me is that, of the three responses I mentioned above, the first seems the commonest$$it simply isn$$t true that nobody wants to farm. But people aren$$t willing to farm under just any circumstances. Too often, farming is still a life of unrewarded toil, not because that$$s intrinsically how it has to be but because farming is$,$ as it were, the engine room of every society$$including our present ones$$where the harsh realities and dirty secrets of how it achieves its apparently effortless motion are locked away below decks. They need to be unlocked and shared more widely. But for now, my visitors who say, $$I can$$t because...$$ are correct. A congenial small farm life is a viable option for few$$not for the massed ranks of the employed, unemployed, or underemployed in the world$$s cityscapes, and not for its multitudes of rural poor, who can scarcely make a living from the land. But in both cases, the dream of the small farm lives on$,$ and that$$s an important place to start.

Of course, it$$s only a place to start, and a sketchy one at that. Notions of the agrarian good life are commonplace around the world, but often, they figure as little more than bucolic symbols, empty of pragmatic content. They seem to lack the power of the urban case for supremacy, which has deep historical roots. City, citizenship, civilization, and civility: so much that we value about our world shares an urban etymology.But if we want to build good lives on lasting foundations for the future, the time has come to abandon the unilluminating oppositions of city versus country and factory versus farm, as well as associated oppositions like progress versus backwardness.

Regrettably, that$$s not how public debate seems to be going. There$$s a veritable industry of opinion formers laying their bets only on the first half of those dualities and exhorting us to be $$optimistic$$ about a future presented as urban, capitalforming, high$-$tech, and non$-$agrarian. This neo$-$optimist or progress literature often invokes recurrent myths of human technological problem$-$solving as an inspiration for transcending present problems.

Take, for example, London$$s Great Horse Manure Crisis in the $1890$s$,$ where it$$s said that people feared the proliferation of horses would bury the streets under their feces, only to find horses were soon displaced by motor vehicles. Or take the idea that fossil fuels saved the whales when kerosene$-$burning lamps replaced demand for whale oil.

I call these myths partly in the everyday sense that they$$re untrue. There never was a Great Horse Manure Crisis in the $1890$s$.$ And the industrialized whaling of the $20$th century powered by fossil fuels put whales in danger. But they$$re also myths in the more profound sense that they$$re mystifying and oversimplifying stories that reveal cultural self$-$conceptions. Our modern culture$$s self$-$conception revealed in these myths is that our problems are discrete, technical ones with oneshot solutions.

These stories are mystifying because they tell tales of fossil fuel$-$based solutions to predicaments in the past at a point in our current history when fossil fuels present us with problems for which there are no apparent solutions. Right now, we need more than banal assertions that someone$$s bound to think of something. And they$$re oversimplifying because human capacities for technical innovation aren$$t in doubt. What$$s in doubt is the human capacity to find purely technical solutions for many current economic, political, cultural, ecological, biological, and geophysical problems with complex, interrelated feedback loops exhibiting imperfect information in real$-$time.

QUESTION $4(25$ Marks$)$

With reference to the article, what key changes are needed to create a more sustainable and equitable future? How can individuals and communities contribute to these changes?reference to the article, what key changes are needed to create a more sustainable and equitable future? How can individuals and communities cOntribute