Top 10 Facts About The Rise Of Modern Agriculture

2. Scientists are now able to modify crops at the genetic level

Genetically Modified Organisms are safe and part of everyday life. Go Ag!
Genetically Modified Organisms are safe and part of everyday life. Go Ag!

The agricultural changes made through selective engineering happened over many centuries.  At first they were made almost by accident but gradually farmers and scientists started to understand the principals of genetics.  The process was long winded taking up to 15 years to change a crop.  It was only in the 1860s that there were some movements in understanding the principals of genetic heredity with Gregor Mendel’s experiments on sweet peas.  His work was not truly understood

or appreciated in his lifetime.  In 1953 Watson and Crick had their breakthrough with the discovery of DNA and it was not long before people were experimenting with potential applications of this knowledge.

By 1973 the first ever experiment in genetic modification had taken place and it was being used commercially by 1976.  In 1983 a new strain of tobacco was the first genetically modified crop and in 1992, after successful field trials some GMOs were being grown commercially. While the old methods of selective engineering typically restricted farmers to manipulating the genes of a single species (or in the case of plants interbreeding between two closely related species) scientists are now able to add beneficial material from other species (transgenic engineering).  The majority of genetic alterations are made to increase crop resistance to pests or to add desirable traits.  Golden Rice, for example, is genetically modified to prevent Vitamin A deficiency in children in the developing world.

1. After an increase in chemical use organic farming became more popular in the 20th Century

Modern Farmers are backbone of America's Food Security.
Modern Farmers are backbone of America’s Food Security.

In 1910 the Haber-Bosch process to create a synthetic ammonium nitrate fertilizer allowed farmers to increase the fertility of their soils and for crop yields to increase.  As the world population increased and more land was put to more intensive agricultural use the application of pesticides such as DDT to protect the crops became more prevalent.  The safety of pesticides was first challenged by a number of people in the 1960s with the most well-known of the challengers being Rachel Carson with her seminal work Silent Spring which claimed that pesticide use harmed not only the pests that were targeted but also birds, fish, insects and potentially the environment at large.

The book was deeply flawed using anecdotal evidence and was poorly researched but it launched the environmental movement.  Many people were taken in by the hyperbole of Silent Spring and other similar publications and started to worry that the food that they were eating was unsafe, contaminated by pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals.  This concern tied in with the embryonic concept of organic farming which proposed the application of scientific knowledge to traditional and natural methods of farming without recourse to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Today some people seek to reverse those inventions and advances.  Many people are convinced that organic foods are safer for human consumption than more intensively farmed alternatives and that they are better for the planet.  Organic food is certainly better for the pockets of those involved in the industry with organic products market worldwide being worth $63billion in 2012 from items produced from just 0.9% of all farmed land (the worldwide market was worth just $1,660 Billion in 2011).

 

For most of human history, even with early developments in agriculture, the labor intensive nature of the work meant that most people had to struggle to produce enough food to feed us.   It was believed, by many people such as Thomas Malthus, that population growth would eventually outstrip supply leading to famine and misery.  Time and again, however, human ingenuity has managed to increase the productivity of crops and the land used to grow them.  Even during some of the worst famines in human history, for example the Irish Famine or the Soviet famines caused by collectivization came about as a result of human responses to a crisis.  Ireland, at all times, produced enough food to feed her people but it was required to be exported to England, collectivization was an ideological war on the peasants of the Soviet Union which resulted in a famine that destroyed many of their own population.  As a result of technological advances our world has always been able feed itself.  The problem is in distribution and not supply.

The organic lobby relies on the (mistaken but tempting) belief that the more organic a diet is, the closer it is to the simple foods our ancestors ate and therefore better for us.  These claims are not true.  Whether or not we eat an organic diet people around the world are healthier and live longer today than at any time in the past thanks to all the advances that separate modern agriculture from those first tentative steps towards wheat cultivation 11,500 years ago.