scene alright if your romantic scene
included a farm raise your hand alright
there’s a few but I’m not seeing many
hands go up and and frankly I’d be
surprised if they did but the reality is
the fact is we’re bombarded with
romantic scenes and notions about our
food and where it comes from walk down
the aisle of your grocery store and look
at the brand labels and descriptions is
there anything that isn’t farm-fresh
nest fresh nature fresh nature’s best
nature’s have at nature sweet or 100%
natural and is there anything that
doesn’t come from wholesome happy places
like Sun Ridge Farms cobblestone farms
Sunnyside farms organic valley or the
the we’re in love with the idea of food
that’s delivered by Mother Nature
herself and romantic notions about
natural food and what the farm ought to
be fuel a lot of anxiety a lot of
emotion and a lot of questions why are
we tinkering with our food
why are scientists traipsing through our
farms why can’t we just live with what
nature gives us to eat the reality is
we’ve been tinkering and modifying our
food for a long time I’ll give you an
example about 10,000 years ago in what
is now Mexico some of the earliest
farmers on earth started cultivating a
wild plant called TIA sent a TIA sente
had edible grain but it was pretty
sparse on the plant and it was encased
in a hard
woody shell it was hard to eat but over
time these early farmers recognized
changes spontaneous changes what we now
know as mutations and some of these were
beneficial some affected the hard shell
around the grain some affected the
amount of grain per plant when these
were recognized the farmers specifically
saved from those plants and put those in
the subsequent crops what these farmers
were doing was something called
artificial selection and it’s the same
thing modern plant breeders do today
within a few thousand years of humans
arriving in the Americas our Native
ancestors our ancient ancestors
developed a food that didn’t exist in
nature corn this same story repeats
itself for most of our major crops most
most all of our crops ancestral bananas
were like thin-skinned seed filled okra
pods diverse wild grasses
some with names like goat grass
contributed to domesticated wheat
there’s almost nothing we grow for food
today that is easily recognizable out in
the wild and that’s because of ancient
domesticate errs the original
agricultural technologists and now
modern plant breeders using the
incredible power of genetics to serve
human needs science is irreversibly
embedded in the modern farm I was born
in 1960 that was only 15 years beyond
when the number of tractors surpassed
the number of working horses on the farm
in 1968 percent of the workforce was a
farmer but they were pretty productive
each farmer on average fed 26 other
people that’s pretty good
today with far fewer farmers comprising
less than 2% of the workforce
each one on average provides for 155
people that’s due almost entirely to
advances agricultural technological
advances based on science higher
yielding and better performing seeds
precision machinery incredible
forecasting and digital tools better
ways to manage pests think about this a
different way what if we could scrub all
of the contributions of agricultural
technology developed over my lifetime
that is to say what if we could bring
back the farm of 1960 to serve our needs
today the first thing you’d have to
account for is today’s farm is about
twice as productive per acre as it was
in 1960 that means to produce what we do
today you would need twice as much farm
and pasture land that’s another 900
million acres for we would need a total
1.8 billion acres do you know how much
that is that’s about the area the amount
of land in the continental United States
including the cities the mountains the
forests the deserts that would be a big
problem we would also need about twice
as much irrigation water as we did per
acre in 1960 because technological
advances have given us much more
efficient use of irrigation water from
rivers lakes and groundwater sources
irrigation today accounts for about 60%
of all of the freshwater withdraws that
we use in this country who wants to
increase that amount let alone double it
without advances in plant breeding since
1960 allowing much faster development of
drought tolerant climate resilient
disease resistant crops we would have
had devastating crop failures during
that drought from 2012 an annual
instability of the wheat supply due to
continually evolving diseases just like
cars computers and seemingly everything
else in our lives science and technology
have had a huge impact on the farm but
after one more generation planet Earth
is going to have about 2 billion more
people to feed and people around the
world are going to expect a better diet
by the middle of this century we’re
gonna have to produce and protect about
70% more food than what we produce today
technology that hasn’t been invented yet
is going to be required to grow yields
and protect yields without over
consuming freshwater without additional
farmland we don’t
have it with less waste and spoilage
with better preservation of soil and
with more carbon sequestered in the soil
and with far fewer greenhouse gas
emissions that are contributing to an
unacceptable pace of climate change our
grand challenge is not just providing
food security for a growing changing
world but rather doing so in an
ecologically responsible way that
doesn’t do irreparable damage to the
environment in the planet just like the
moon shot from the 1960s or the Mars
shot in the decades ahead we can’t get
there without science there’s also
something else we need to confront today
there are about 800 million smallholder
farmers around the world cultivating one
or a few acres of land for themselves
their families and their villages
they’re over-represented among the nine
hundred million people living in extreme
poverty on one to two dollars per day
and they’re among the world’s most food
insecure they’re people like who get to
do guma grew up with as a young man I
was born and raised in a small village
in western if you Opia and my parents
are subsistence farmers so growing up
was surrounded by crops and livestock so
until I left home which is after high
school I was doing the very level
intensive hand weeding before and after
school which is part of the life that my
parents still do gay to
his parents and his brothers and sisters
were the labor force on their small farm
in the Ethiopian village of cocoa Fay
raising corn teff a few vegetables and
some cows their seeds produced low
yields they lacked fertilizer they
lacked equipment gay – and his father
prepared land with a plow pulled by two
oxen they planted seeds by hand and gay
– as he just said pulled weeds lots of
weeds before and after school gay – and
his family didn’t benefit from science
on the farm like you and I did neither
did the hundreds of displaced farmers
who were relocated to Cocoa Fay during
the horrifying famines of the 1980s gay
– made it through the 6th grade in Cocoa
Fay the highest you could go in his
village he made it through high school
in a town 20 miles away that he walked
to and from every weekend with his
brothers and sisters he persevered
he kept achieving step by step he
graduated from college and in 2006 he
received a PhD from the University of
Pretoria gay to do gamma became a
scientist gay – his life in my life
intersected about four years ago when he
joined us at the Danforth Plant Science
Center in a team led by Nigel Taylor
working to address one of the biggest
threats to food security affecting 30
million smallholder farmers in East and
Central Africa
specifically those who cultivate cassava
as a staple food for these farmers
cassava is a true food security crop
when other crops fail due to drought or
poor soil cassava thrives but it’s got
an Achilles heel cassava is highly
susceptible to damaging viruses like one
called the brown streak virus when the
Brown Street virus gets into a cassava
field there is no harvest and there is
no cure for scientists looking to make
an impact that’s the kind of problem
that holds our attention in my case for
35 years that’s how long I’ve been
working and my lab has been working to
figure out why plants get sick when
they’re infected by viruses we’ve
studied how viruses replicate and how
they move through plants and we’ve
studied how plants defend themselves
against viruses we learned for example
that plants have an antiviral immune
system but it’s not like the immune
system in me and you it involves
something called gene silencing the
plant literally turns off the virus
genes we and many other groups have
shown that you can use gene silencing to
immunize plants achieving the same
outcome as when we get the measles
vaccine in an ambitious humanitarian
project gay – Nigel their team here and
their partners in East Africa are using
gene silencing to develop improved
cassava varieties that are immune to the
Brown Street virus they’re doing this by
making a tiny genetic modification that
activates gene silencing immunizes the
plants and they’ve shown that this works
to protect the plants against the brown
streak virus in the field in Kenya and
you
and this is the same technology that we
have access to in the United States and
that protects some of our crops against
damaging viruses and in the future when
our crops are threatened by new viruses
just like when zika or ebola viruses
emerge in human populations
we’ll use gene silencing or will use
accelerated breeding or gene editing or
some other technology based on science
to solve the problem and protect our
food I want you to consider three
questions is it okay if science and
technology that assures our food
security bypasses another generation of
how certain are you that we can achieve
food security for 10 billion people and
environmental security without far
better nature compatible technology on
the farm and finally as you walk the
aisles of your grocery store next week
how comfortable are you forming opinions
and making choices based on romantic
notions about your food and where it comes from