GMOs Are NOT Needed to Feed the World

This is our true future in agriculture. What we need to make that one hectare work everywhere is to design multiple ways to provide a power assist in all possible forms of agricultural method. as i have already posted a small robot able to do some grooming but actually able to correctly harvest single fruit types effectively will make any such farm a powerful partnership between the man's imagination and the robot's capacity for repetitive method.

After all i can grow an acre of strawberries, interwoven with an acre of raspberries and an acre of blueberries along with an acre of apples and an acre of cherries and an acres of plums and an acre of apricots and any number of additional plants as well.  What i cannot possibly do is to pick them all.  That has been the rub.

Thus a true multipurpose robot can easily take over that task.

 The real point is that productivity varies directly with input.  Making that input physical power support is the best way to optimize that families hectare.  Even 20 plus tons of rice is a pretty good payout for a modest investment and integrated cropping can be way more productive.

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GMOs Are NOT Needed to Feed the World

http://humansarefree.com/2016/09/gmos-are-not-needed-to-feed-world.html#more

In India’s poorest state, farmers are setting world-breaking records growing rice and other staple foods, without the help of genetically modified organisms, and none of Monsanto’s billion-dollar herbicides.

With the biotech industry claiming that the world can only be fed with heavily-doused herbicidal crops coming from genetically modified seed, it’s astonishing to see a region responsible for providing food for so many people, churning out some of the biggest yields ever — 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare of land, to be exact.

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The crop yields being realized by Indian farmers are simply phenomenal and have been achieved by employing age-old, yet simple, growing techniques like using farmyard manure and forgoing herbicides.

Farmers in India are beating long-held records with these organic growing techniques, too.

One Chinese agricultural scientist, Yuan Longping, previously grew 19.4 tonnes of rice, but Indian farmers still out performed him with their 22.4-tonne yield.

Even World Bank-funded scientists at the Philippines based International Rice Research Institute’s record has been broken, along with all multi-national companies’ genetically modified seed crops in both the U.S. and Europe.

Sumant Kumar and many of his friends in neighboring villages in Bihar, known as India’s poorest state, had to prove their astonishing results to University experts, who accused them of cheating the system.

Kumar’s success is due to SRI, an approach to crop development which evolved in France in the 1960s to deal with seed scarcity. The SRI system (System of Rice Intensification) aims to produce more from less — and so it has.

Kumar put the following elements into practice to get rice grains so large, they shocked local agriculturalists and experts:

Seedlings were transplanted at a young age, in single seeds, instead of clumps.

Wider spacing of plants was implemented, using a square pattern.

The soil used was moist, but not flooded, as in traditional rice farming.

Only organic fertilizers are used.

Rotary weeding is practiced. 

These techniques allow farmers to plant more on less acreage and gain higher yields, all without resorting to over-priced, royalty-driven GM seeds or the use of herbicides like glyphosate-basedRoundUp.

The SRI technique also drastically reduces farmers’ dependency on outside, industrial inputs, while also allowing them to adapt to their local climates and specific agricultural challenges.

Kumar’s success isn’t a one-time wonder, either, or limited to a single farmer.

His friends in Darveshpura village have all recorded over 17 tonnes of rice, and many others in the villages around have doubled their usual yields in recent years.

With record-breaking yields Kumar and his peers are breaking cycles of poverty, dependence upon biotech companies, and providing organic, healthy food for thousands.

Inspired by Kumar’s success, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has visited the Nalanda district and recognized the potential of this method of organic farming, telling the villagers they were “better than scientists.”

I’d add, “very much better than biotech scientists,” who have sold the world a lie that, “you can’t feed the masses without Monsanto’s, patented seed, and best-selling chemicals.”

Kumar just proved that the world can feed itself very well, thank you — organically.