Technology Will Not "Feed The World." Farmers Might

I've spent more than 30 years working in the agricultural technology sector.  I've written scores of blog posts defending it over the last three years.  That said, I don’t believe that "technologies" as such are going to feed the world.  Only farmers can possibly feed us as we face the epic challenge of doing so over the next few decades.  If farmers have great technology options, that can help both their productivity and environmental footprint; however, the burden falls on the farmers to integrate those technology options into a set of extremely complex and high-risk set management decisions.  Technology is just one component of their responsibility.

One often reads or hears assertions that "X" can or can’t "feed the world" (Organic, Conventional, GMO, Local...)   I think that all these statements miss an important point.  Anyone who farms on a commercial scale has to make scores of critical decisions each growing season.  There is no one suite of technologies or farming philosophies/rules that determine whether that farmer will be successful from either a food production point of view or an economic viability point of view.  A successful farmer will have integrated many interlinked choices about technology, practices, and timing.  These will have been based on monitoring of economic, climatic, and pest status.  They will involve numerous "bets" about the unpredictable course of those and other factors.  Farming is no business for the faint of heart.

Put Yourself In A Farmer’s Shoes

Think about the risks that an annual crop farmer takes.  They spend a good deal of money on their crops many months before it will be harvested and in many cases even longer before it will be sold.  They choose the seed variety to plant (many options in terms of traits, GMO and otherwise, suitability for their farm in terms of a host of adaptability).  They choose how to fertilize that crop, how to irrigate it if they have that option, how to manage its pest issues from before planting to in-season.  They have already had to decide whether to plant a winter cover crop.  They have had to decide about what sort of tillage system to use in and between crops (no-till, strip-till, conventional...).  They have to choose and maintain increasingly sophisticated equipment and they have the option to employ a whole range of “precision farming tools” and detailed databases about their farm.

All of this has to be done with only a limited ability to predict weather patterns and extreme events that can have a huge effect on the crop.  Farming is a high risk venture.  We all depend on farmers being willing to take those risks.

The Consumer Side

In America, and the West as a whole, we have been taught that “the customer is always right,” and that we are supposed to have any choice that we desire.  When it comes to food production, we can choose what we buy, but we don’t have a legitimate right to tell farmer what they can and can’t do based on our own urban sensitivities.  Farming is already a heavily-, and mostly well-regulated business.  If the USDA, EPA and FDA approve of a technology option, and if farmers find that it makes their job easier, less risky, or more profitable - who are we to begrudge them that opportunity?

Consider, for instance, the disparity between farmers and the broader population on the question of GMO crops.  Most farmers have been enthusiastic adopters of biotech crops where ever they are available in both the developed and developing world.  Many consumers remain wary of, and poorly informed about, the technology even after 16 years and billions of acres of cultivation without actual issues.

If people choose to reject science and regulators, it is certainly their option, but only for their own consumption.   A commenter on one of my posts recently said that he "should have a voice in how we produce our food."  Considering that the "we" was gratuitous, I said that while he should have a choice in what he buys, that cannot extend to the right to deny a farmer choices that fall within well-regulated norms.  We don't want to imitate the Europeans who have let politics trump their own scientific assessments.  There was a good recent post from a frustrated Portuguese farmer about this.

The vast majority of us depend on farmers, not just for survival, but also for the considerable pleasure and health benefits that are available at a remarkably affordable cost in modern society.  We would do well to appreciate the complex, risk-laden enterprise of the farming community, as well as their lack of leverage in the food system.  We should have more respect for their opinions.  

  

You are welcome to comment here and/or email me at savage.sd@gmail.com

no-till corn image from Indiana NRCS

How I Helped Create A Superweed

This last week I've been engaged in blogosphere discussions about "Roundup Resistant Weeds," and other so-called "Superweeds."  Many people want to assign blame for this development. The truth is that many factors were involved and the adaptability of weeds has been and always will be a big challenge.  I should know:  I actually once helped to select for a "superweed!"  I did so in the process of trying to find a "greener" alternative for weed control.

My Move Into Biocontrol

In 1989 I joined a small company called Mycogen, that was in the business of developing biocontrol agents - living organisms that control pests.  I had been working in synthetic fungicide discovery at DuPont and felt very good about the sort of safe, new products we were developing, but I wanted to give biocontrol a try (it also didn't hurt that I would be living in San Diego instead of Delaware).

I joned the "bioherbicide" group, and our most interesting project involved a bacterium in the genus Xanthomonas that had been discovered by a researcher in the Midwest  It infected a weed called Annual Bluegrass (Poa annua,  or ABG for short.  See the photo at the top of this post)  ABG is a big problem in turf because it makes lots of unsightly seed heads, creates lighter green patches, and has a tendency to die from disease in the summer leaving bare patches.  Golf course and park managers hate it.  However, because this grass is closely related to other desirable grasses, it has always been difficult to find ways to control it in turf.

OK, we knew that if we solved this problem we weren't saving the world, but this was a great place to start in biocontrol.   If we could make a product work for this high value market, that would fund the needed research to improve ways to grow and stabilize live products in general.  Also, even though bacteria usually only infect plants through wounds, that was not going to be a problem because this Xanthomonas biocontrol was applied during the process of mowing the turf.  Its effects were quite dramatic in greenhouse tests.  As one of my technicians once described this to a visitor: "this grass is not only merely dead, it's most sincerely dead."

Hurdles to Pass

Before we could field-test this "bioherbicide" option, we had to demonstrate to the USDA that this pathogen didn't just occur in the Midwest, and that it wouldn't kill any desirable plants.  I also got to go to Japan to help our partner company find isolates there as well.  That essentially meant touring lots of famous shrines and gardens while furtively reaching down and pulling up ABG plants and stuffing them in baggies to take back to the lab.  We had to learn to grow substantial volumes of the bacteria and how to keep them alive at least long enough to take to the field to test.  We had to test our bacteria in small plots of planted ABG to determine what rate was needed.  Once all that was done we were finally ready to try using this in the real world.

Early Success

At first our experiments on actual golf courses, etc. were pretty exciting.  A week or so after the bacteria were applied, the ABG plants began to wilt.  It happened slowly enough that the desired grass had time to fill-in, and the area nicely transitioned from a splotchy, weedy mess to a nice, uniform turf.  We had lots of work left to do on stabilization before this new "bioherbicide" could be commercialized, but we had already started generating quite a bit of interest in the turf management community and elsewhere  (VP candidate Dan Quayle came to visit Mycogen during this period - we were just that cool - lol).


Problems Arise

Soon, however, there was a problem.   We started finding that some of the ABG plants in our plots didn't wilt.  They looked just fine.  We collected seed and took it back to the lab.  It turned out that there was a "bio-type" of ABG which was not susceptible to this pathogen.  It was a "perennial biotype" of "annual" bluegrass (I know that sounds dumb for something named "annual", but instead of dying after going to seed like the annual type, this strain kept growing via rhizomes).  Our bioherbicide was simply selecting for those tolerant types.  We had selected for a "superweed" (in modern parlance).

This phenomenon turned out to be common for biocontrol agents.  Their beauty is that they can be super specific and thus safe to non-target plants and everything else.  Their downside is that populations of things like weeds almost always involve a wide mix of genotypes, and so our nice, "green," biocontrol agent selected for tolerance far faster than any synthetic herbicide.

Was This Really A Superweed?

Is it fair to call our Poa annua nemesis a "superweed?"  Actually that term is greatly over-used.  How "super" the weed is depends more on its original biology than on how it was selected (by a regular herbicide, by a herbicide used on a tolerant crop, by a biological agent...).  The most troublesome weeds are those that make a great deal of seed quickly, that emerge over a wide window, that have ways to spread seed, and which are highly competitive with the crop.  ABG has all those characteristics and that is part of why you can find it just about anywhere.  The resistant lines that we had "created" by spraying out bacterium were no worse than the original.  They were just resistant to our bioherbicide. The same is true with weeds that have become resistant to Roundup or to a host of other herbicides.  The reason some of the current resistant weeds are important is that they grow in important food crops.  The US has something like 50 million acres of managed turf, but that isn't feeding anyone except some rabbits.  So, the "superness"  of weeds isn't  a function of whether they are related to GMO crops, it comes down to their fundamental biology.  Also, to be accurate no one "creates" a super weed.  We just select for something that natural biological processes have generated.

So that's how I helped select for a superweed.  This technology was not commercialized because the weeds had already beat us.  It is poetic irony that annual bluegrass is a huge issue in my own lawn and garden. (See the lighter colored areas in my mixed clover and tall fescue lawn.)

Oh, by the way, I still keep up with the status of the biocontrol industry since I left it in 1996.  They are definitely making some good progress, but its still a very small part of how we control pests.  That's OK, we need all the tools we can find.

You are welcome to comment here and/or email me at savage.sd@gmail.com