Eating is an agricultural act - Wendell Berry

Saturday, August 28, 2010

the trip of scientists

when scientists come up with discoveries like "most significant breakthrough in agricultural science since the “green revolution”", it is quite amusing.
The achievement by scientists from the universities of Liverpool and Bristol and the John Innes Centre in Norwich would “revolutionise” wheat production leading to greater food security and lower prices, experts behind the research claimed.
lower prices?? spending too much time in smoky labs could be the reason.
The data, a version of which would be placed online so that farmers around the world could have immediate access to it, would help “accelerate the speed and accuracy of plant-breeding”...
how will farmers accessing the gene sequence help them?

all this research is aimed for...
...raising the prospects of bigger and faster disease-resistant crops to meet the looming global food shortage.
the food shortage is simply related to lesser people spending their efforts in growing food. there is no other way to solve the impending crisis, but for an increase in the number of farmers.

the ability to play god is an ego trip.
the ability to control nature is the hitlerian ego trip. and many scientists seem to have booked into this trip.

and here is a beautiful piece of 'scientist news' which made me smile...
Plants can summon insects to their aid to avoid being munched to death by caterpillars, scientists have found.

2 comments:

SurveySan said...

///here is no other way to solve the impending crisis, but for an increase in the number of farmers.////

hm. OR sophisticate the way we do farming back home?
the agri fields in the US and the big big machines that do the work amazes me. can't we combine machines and organic farm to strike a balance? :)

csm said...

oil...oil...oil is needed for big machines...
current agri is converting oil to food. and that SS is completely unsustainable.
fukuoka beautifully talks about energy output to energy input as an important parameter to evaluate farming. and large scale farming burn over 10 times the energy it produces.

for the record - the mega farms are really not very smart/profitable. recommend reading "omnivore's dilemma" by pollan. he analyses the american big farm.