The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century by Ronald Bailey

Author:Ronald Bailey [Bailey, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Biotech Farmer and the Organic Environmentalists Should Be Friends

“The farmer and the cowman should be friends,” sing the folks in the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! So why shouldn’t biotech and organic growers be friends, too? After all, both want to make decent livings as they produce nutritious food for a hungry world while enhancing soil fertility; fending off diseases, pests, and weeds; reducing costly and environmentally damaging inputs; preventing erosion and fertilizer runoff; conserving water; and protecting biodiversity. Some environmentalists are arguing that the world should “freeze” the amount of cropland at current levels and produce food for the 9 billion people living in 2050 only from the acres already being cultivated. Since organic agriculture as currently practiced produces on average about 75 percent of the yields of conventional farming, a global switch to organic farming would make it impossible to freeze cropland for today’s population, much less for 9 billion in four decades.

On the other hand, high-yielding biotech seeds combined with organic soil management techniques could deliver just the sort of “sustainable intensification” that humanity needs. Organic soil management recycles nutrients, increases organic content, and enhances moisture retention. Adding crop varieties that can generate their own fertilizer, resist drought, flourish in saline soils, fight off diseases and pests without chemical sprays, and grow without weeding and plowing makes organic agriculture that much gentler on the natural environment.

In their 2008 book Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, the wife-and-husband team of University of California at Davis plant geneticist Pamela Ronald and organic farmer Raoul Adamchak write, “We believe that the judicious incorporation of two important strands of agriculture—genetic engineering and organic farming—is key to helping feed the growing population in an ecologically balanced manner.” Sounds about right.

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