Agriculture becomes industry after 2000

Press, 7 February 1985, Page 21

Agriculture becomes industry after 2000

The twenty-first century cow may be free of disease, gain weight without synthetic hormones, and wear a computer chip under its skin so that the farmer can track its vital signs. The twenty-first century corn plant should be able to resist insects, frost, and drought, and brim with nutrition, unsullied by commercial fertilisers. It, too, may bear a microchip, linked to a computerised irrigation system. The twenty-first century farmer may step out the door and aim an infra-red gun at his crop to determine if it is dry.or at his animals to see if they are feverish. He may use seawater for irrigation and only the sun for power' He will spend less time on a tractor and more time at his computer, programming minute details about his crops, plugging into data gathered by orbiting satellites, and keeping up on the latest in genetic manipulation. Farming, twenty-first century style, will be a highly sophisticated business.

“American agriculture Will essentially be an industrial process,” says Dr Ronald D. Knutson, an agricultural economist at Texas A. and M. University. “At least half our food will be produced by 1 per cent of the farms. The only small farms that survive will be parttime operations.” In laboratories and greenhouses across the country, discoveries and inventions are blossoming that will shape and perhaps revolutionise agriculture of the future. While designed to save money and labour for the farmer, the innovations also have a larger purpose. The world’s population is expected to reach 8 billion by early next century, nearly twice that of 1984. Foreign markets for American farm products are expected to grow. A report by a Washington research organisation, “Resources for the Future,” predicts a 70 to 100 per cent increase in global demand for United States food and fibre by 2020. Helping to feed the world will be all the more difficult if arable land, fertile topsoil, and fresh water continue to disappear and the number of American farmers keeps dropping. Perhaps no new technology has greater applications for agriculture than has biotechnology, which includes several forms of genetic engineering. By isolating specific desirable genes in one organism and transferring them to another, scientists are custom-designing new farm products. Unlike conventional crossbreeding, which is restricted to related strains and can take several generations to create the desired progeny, the new

genetic engineering can combine any two organisms and achieve results in only one generation.

“I would think that by early in the next century, most of our major crops would have been replaced by others that are more nutritious, easier to digest, cheaper to grow, higher in yield, and less susceptible to pests,” says Daniel D. Adams, chairman and chief executive officer of Advanced Genetic Sciences in Greenwich, Connecticut. The value of new genetic improvements to United States crops is predicted to soar to $lO billion a year after 2000, according to a detailed "study by L. William Teweles and Company of Milwaukee. The study says that key cereal crops — corn, wheat, rice, and sorghum — as well as many vegetables will be transformed before 2000 and that the new plants’ seeds will be in wide use by farmers in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Advanced Genetic Sciences ,js. well on its way to creating frgsr” protection for plants. After determining that certain bacteria promote formation of ice crystals, scientists isolated the bacterial iceproducing gene and removed it. When applied to crops, the new, altered bacteria crowd out the original variety, lowering the plants’ freezing point. Used on a large scale, the new bacteria could lengthen growing seasons and push America’s crop belt hundreds of miles north.

Other companies, such as Agracetus of Middletown, Wisconsin, are designing disease and pestresistant plants. “They definitely should reduce the use of chemical pesticides,” says Dr Winston Brill, of Agracetus. Some specialists predict, however, that the use of herbicides (weed. killers) could go up as herbicide-resistant crops are developed. Dr Brill and other United States scientists also are trying to cut the farmer’s dependence on expensive nitrogen fertilisers. Leguminous plants such as soybeans do not need fertiliser; bacteria on their roots process nitrogen from the air. Dr Brill’s research is aimed at splicing these “nitrogen-fixing” genes into those of other crops or at transferring nitrogen-fixing bacteria to the crops to make them self-fertilising. Genetic engineers have their microscopes trained on farm animals as well as plants. Biological vaccines, some of them made from recombinant DNA rather than a whole virus, already are in use and are proving more effective than conventional vaccines, says Dr

Franklin Pass, president of Molecular Genetics Inc., of Minneapolis. The company also is engineering biological hormones, but they may be only stepping stones to new, improved farm animals that grow more quickly without heavy use of antibiotics. “I don’t think we’re going to see cows that look like elephants,” Dr Pass says. “The goal is economic relief for the farmer. Animals growing faster means less feed consumption.” Most United States beef cattle and other animals are bred conventionally today, but artificial insemination will be used more in the future. Experimental techniques that trick nature will be applied widely in the next century, predicts Dr George Seidel, professor of physiology at Colorado State University. Animal embroys can be manipulated in a variety of ways to improve and multiply offspring. The embryonic cells of a cow with favourable genetic traits, for example, could be removed at an early stage and split in half; one half could be returned to the mother for development, the other half frozen. If the offspring met expectations, the frozen half could be thawed, weeks or even years later, and allowed to develop. The superior animal’s embryo theoretically could be divided into many parts, each one planted in a surrogate mother for development into identical offspring, or desirable genes could be injected directly into a fertilised egg of a pregnant animal. “These techniques might mean lots of offspring per cow each year instead of only one, and creation of a different animal for every environment,” Dr Seidel explains. Genetic engineering is raising environmental, ethical, and economic concerns for the future. “A genetically produced growth hormone for cattle could greatly increase milk production, and the response could be a one-third reduction in the nation’s dairy herd,” says Jack Doyle, director of the agricultural resources project of the Environmental Policy Institute. “Fewer dairy cows mean fewer dairy farmers.” Doyle foresees other hazards as genetic engineering becomes more sophisticated, spawning plantgrowth regulatorss, synthetic seeds, microbial pesticides and viruses, and genetically enhanced bacteria. “Who will decide whether these products are safe, economical, and efficient in fostering agricultural production?” he asks. Almost everything a farmer uses will be electonically monitored on most future farms. Traditional re-

cord-keeping systems are on the way out, says Norman Brown, who raises pigs near Aledo, Illinois, and also sells computer software. But computer accounting is only the first step toward an all-elec-tronic farm, which will give new meaning to the phrase “cow chip.” A few dairy cattle already wear transponders around their necks — microchips that beam radio waves to a computer. As a cow enters a feed stall, the animal’s identification number on her transponder is read by a sensor and relayed to the farmer’s computer. “The computer would already know that cow number 301 is in her eighth week of lactation and producing 601bs of milk a day,” says Scott Sklare, of Valmont Industries in Valley, Nebraska. “Based on output, the computer would calculate the quantity and nutrient mix of feed the cow needs and would trigger the bin to dispense the proper amount.” Microchips planted on strategically selected crop plants will advise the farmer, through his computer, about such conditions as soil moisture or fungi, predicts Dr Terry Kenney, administrator of the United States Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service. In response, the computer will trip the irrigation system or issue recommendations for controlling the disease. Next century’s farm hands will include robots that could edge out migrant workers, says Wayne Rasmussen, an Agriculture Department historian. “We’ll see a continuing disappearance of backbreaking labour on farms,” he says. And farmers undoubtedly will seek more guidance from satellites. Microwave-beaming satellites, for example, will peer through clouds and the crop canopy to evaluate soil moisture. “It would not be far out to think of a farmer dialling a phone number, plugging in the coordinates of his farm’s location, and receiving a display on his computer of the conditions of his crop, as reported by satellite,” says Dr Ted Engman, of the Agricultural Research Service. Agriculture accounts for 80 to 85

per cent of the total water con sumed in the United States. Worries about dwindling water supplies are spawning alternatives to traditional agriculture. “If you look al the planet, two-thirds is covered with water, but only half of 1 per cent is fresh water,” says Carl Hodges, director of the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona. “If we could supplement fresh-water agriculture with a new kind, we would make a significant contribution to world food supplies.” Hodges and his co-workers have scoured the world’s estuaries and bays for halophytes, plants that thrive in seawater. Out of more than 1000 halophytes gathered, 12 show promise as major crops, some of them protein-rich, Hodges says. They were growing well on test farms and are expected to be produced commercially in five years. Water holds further promise as a source for twenty-first century menus. Offshore pollution and overfishing will force large-scale reliance on fish grown on farms, predicts Kevin Fitzsimmons of the University of Arizona.

Today’s farm bounty is based on heavy use of fossil fuels to provide power and to produce fertilisers and pesticides. “Agriculture as we know it would collapse if we lost our supply of fossil fuels,” says historian Rasmussen. He predicts that within 20 to 50 years, solar energy will open the next major phase in American agriculture.

Nothing would shake up agriculture more than a widespread climatic change. Some scientists expect the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases to raise the average global temperature a few degrees by 2040. One study concludes that the Great Plains would suffer severe declines in rainfall, becoming a permanent dust bowl. In response, we might consider moving agriculture indoors — and redesigning food. Dr Cyril Ponnamperuma, of the University of Maryland thinks coal, broken down into its chemical components, could become part of our diet.