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Agricultural biotechnologySince time began we humans have always relied on plants and animals to provide us with food, shelter, clothing and fuel, and for thousands of years farmers have strived to better these in order to continue providing us and to meet the needs of evolution. As the population grows and expands then so does the need for resources provided by plants and animals.With the population expected to reach over 10 billion by the year 2030 it is estimated that the world food production will have to double on the farmland that exists today, if it is to compete with the anticipated growth in the population. The ever-increasing needs of yields of crops and the decreasing crop inputs such as water and fertiliser can all be helped by biotechnology as can advancements in providing pest control that is better for our environment. Crop biotechnology Horticulturists and farmers have always relied for centuries on cross breeding and hybridizing plants and making genetic modifications to them in order to make improvements in the output and quality of food and fibre crops. They have made great advancements in building in protection against pests and diseases and protection from the harsher elements. We learned from the Stone Age farmers to make a selection for next years crops from those plants that were strongest and healthiest and to save seed from these with which to replant. By selectively sowing seeds the earliest agriculturists performed modifications genetically to turn plants growing in the wild into domesticated crops, a long time before the science of genetics was really understood. Over the years, knowledge and understanding of plant genetics improved and we gradually began to purposefully cross breed plants with the traits we wanted in order to produce plants which had the benefits of both parents, leaving undesirable traits behind. Virtually every plant that is grown for food today has come from cross breeding or hybridization or a combination of both. Although we have come a long way in such a short time the process we were using to produce these crops was time consuming, costly and inefficient. Here is where the tools of biotechnology come into play, biotechnology allows us to take single genes from plants that give us the desired traits and move them freely from one plant to another. This is a far more precise process than what we used to use and eliminates the thousands of genes of unknown function which was transferred along with the good traits into our crops. Biotechnology can also help us to remove the technical obstacles when moving genetic traits between plants and opens up a whole new world in benefiting food production. How biotechnology can improve crop production Agricultural scientists are incorporating biotechnology into crop production and protection, using the same traits that have been used throughout the decades and incorporate cross breeding and genetic modifications. Techniques are being used to increase the size of the yield of the crops, make crops resistant to disease caused by bacteria, fungi and viruses and give them the ability to better withstand harsher elements. Biotechnology has also given us a better understanding of how we can make better use of the plants built in defence systems and it has opened up new avenues allowing us to work with nature by providing us with new bio pesticides. These new pesticides allow us target crop pests but do not harm humans, animals, birds, fish and insects; they are also beneficial as they can control pests which have become resistant to the more conventional pesticides. |
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