Plant breeding

Plant breeding has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. When people in the modern era of the human species think about plant breeding, most thoughts turn towards genetically modified organisms or GMOs for short. However, plant breeding doesn’t just involve genetically modified organisms. Plant breeding can be much less complicated. Farmers have bred plants for longer than the lifespan of genetically modified organisms. Early farmers’ version of plant breeding was as simple as choosing seeds from their plants that produced the most crops. This method of plant breeding existed over 10,000 years ago (“HISTORY OF Plant Breeding,” n.d.). The history of plant breeding has to begin with Gregor Mendel, the acclaimed father of modern genetics.…

foods have the promise of producing the quantity of food necessary by accelerating the reproductive outcomes of repeated plant sexual crossings. Nature cross breeds and selects for certain traits, and the conventional breeding process can take up to fifteen years to achieve a certain desired characteristic. The developers of GM foods select favorable characteristics in plants and are able to produce them in one generation matriculation (Key et al., 2008). With the use of the appropriate…

1980s, to meet the challenge of the possibilities of starvation due to the increase in the human population and the and the unavailability of food (Wu & Butz, 2004). From then to now cereal production has increased by 200% with a mere 30% increase in land under cultivation and only 100% increase in human population (Pingali, 2012). The green revolution saw the official formation of a system that allows plant breeders to have access to germplasms in all parts of the world. these germplasm had…

In the article Hunger in the Balance : The New Politics of International Food Aid, Clapp, J says “it is lack of scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs more broadly fed into lack of clarity in international rules regarding trade in GMOs” that make people suspicious. Many of the concerned scientists and anti-GM groups are in fact asking for control and regulations on these crops for as it stands they are considered a free-for- all-activity. There have been reports for example of GM plants…

natural resources. This high demand has led to the use of genetically modified organisms or GMO to help counter act this. For those of you who do not know a “GM crop plants contain artificially inserted gene(s) or “transgenes” from another unrelated plant or from a completely different species via advanced genetic engineering techniques”…

Christopher Rosa Prof. Click ENG 100 9 Dec. 2014 Breeding Uncertainty Recent developments in food engineering have substantially increased man’s potential to reduce human intervention, and supply a vast amount of food for the ravenous world population. Genetically engineered (GE) crops were initially introduced in 1996, and appeared to have an auspicious future because they were announced to be immune to destructive insects and herbicides. Before the alteration in food production in the…

such as fertilizers and pesticides were developed and still developing now. (Janick, Altieri, and Colwell) Due to this development, less people had to be involved in farming, and the percentage of farmer’s dropped from 90 percentiles of 1790s to 1.9 percentile of 1990s.(Janick, Altieri, and Colwell) From these statistics you may think “Everything is great and going well in our agriculture. So what is the problem?” Well, due to the fast development, our food supply is being genetically modified.…

The world hunger is a really worrying problem, either today and in the future. It is estimated that more than 12% of the humanity suffer with the scarcity of food nowadays (Long, C. (2013, March). Global food crises, food insecurity and measuring hunger. Retrieved from http://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/food-agriculture/impact-global-food-crisis-self-assessed-food-security#sthash.DFq7ZVzQ.dpuf). We have been fighting against the hunger since the Green Revolution in the 20th…

so that the labeling of them in unnecessary, but the facts seem to sing a different song. Genetically modifying foods has been praised for the impressive number of crops the practice yields with the use of “harmless” biotechnology. But as you will soon discover, GMOs are anything but harmless. Although it may appear beneficial to some, America should not continue production of genetically modified crops and livestock because of the negative effects on: health, the food crisis, the environment,…

Allergic reactions are incessantly tied to the consumption of GM foods. If an organism eats GM foods then a person who is allergic to the particular protein could potentially eat the organism and suffer an allergic reaction. The creation of new viruses and toxins is also associated with these foods. This could be potentially dangerous to human health as it could create new diseases or be carcinogenic. (4) (8) The graphs illustrate the correlation between the increase in genetically modified…