Researchers from Linköping University in Sweden developed a ‘bioelectronic soil’ that can speed up the growth of plants in hydroponic spaces, or farms that grow plants without soil in environments made up of mostly water and a place for roots to attach. After integrating the engineered ‘eSoil’ into the framework where seedlings grow, researchers discovered that sending electrical signals through the soil made plants grow 50 percent more on average.
The eSoil is made up of organic substances mixed with a conductive polymer called PEDOT, which can be found in things like sensors and OLED displays. Eleni Stavrinidou, the supervisor of the study, told Engadget that the soil’s conductivity was necessary for stimulating the plant roots. In this particular study, the researchers examined the effect of sending signals to barley seedlings over the span of 15 days before harvesting them for analysis. Applying a voltage as small as 0.5V on the eSoil electrically stimulates the roots, Stavrinidou explained. This, in turn, resulted in a recordable increase in the biomass of the electrically stimulated plants when compared to the non-stimulated seedings.
The stimulation’s effect on the barley seedlings was described as “steady” and “transient.” Stavrinidou told Engadget that nitrogen, one of the main nutrients involved in plant growth, was processed more efficiently through the stimulation. "We found that the stimulated plants could process the nutrients more efficiently however we don't understand how the stimulation is affecting this process,” Stavrindou explained, adding that the reason behind the growth process will be a focus of future studies.
PNAS
While hydroponic techniques are mainly used to grow vegetables, leafy greens and some vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes, the eSoil could offer a solution to create new ways to increase crop yields in commercial settings and especially in places where environmental conditions impact plant growth. The study highlights that this technique could minimize the use of fertilizers in farming.
The opportunity for technological innovation in farming is huge considering the number of US farms has steadily declined since 1982, according to the Department of Agriculture. Last year, the number of US farms reached 2 million, down from 2.2 million in 2007. Not only are farms on the decline, but the US is losing acres of land due to a host of reasons that range from climate change to worsening economic outlook for farmers due to inflation, making farming in controlled environments more popular.
But beyond improving crop yield, the implementation of eSoil to hydroponic farms could make it more energy-conscious. While traditional hydroponic farms use up less water, they require more energy to run. “The eSoil consumes very little power in the microwatt range,” Stavrinidou said. Before this technology can be applied to large-scale agriculture and other types of crops, more studies need to be conducted to observe how electrical stimulation can impact the whole growth cycle of a plant throughout its entire lifespan and not just in the early stages of seedling maturation. Stavrinidou also said that her team plans on studying how the technique affects the growth of other plant species.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/swedish-researchers-develop-electronic-soil-that-speeds-up-plant-growth-205630538.html?src=rss
Researchers say they have determined a way to make agrivoltaics — the process of growing crops underneath solar panels — more efficient. They found that red wavelengths are more efficient for growing plants, while the blue part of the spectrum is better for producing solar energy. Solar panels that only allow red wavelengths of light to pass through could enable farmers to grow food more productively while generating power at the same time.
Previous studies have found that agrivoltaics can reduce the amount of water required for crops, since they're shaded from direct sunlight. Researchers at Michigan Technological University determined in 2015 that shading can reduce water usage by up to 29 percent. Majdi Abou Najm, an associate professor at University of California, Davis' department of land, air and water resources, told Modern Farmer that by splitting the light spectrum, crops can get the same amount of carbon dioxide with less water while shielding them from heat.
The researchers put the idea to the test by growing tomatoes under blue and red filters, as well as a control crop without any coverings. Although the yield for the covered plots was about a third less than the control, the latter had around twice the amount of rotten tomatoes. Abou Najm noted that the filters helped to reduce heat stress and crop wastage.
Majdi Abou Najm/UC Davis
For this approach to work in practice, though, manufacturers would need to develop translucent solar panels that capture blue light and allow red light to pass through. Matteo Camporese, an associate professor at the University of Padova in Italy and lead author of a paper on the topic, suggested that translucent, carbon-based organic solar cells could work. These cells could be applied onto surfaces such as glass.
There are other issues, including the fact wavelength-selective agrivoltaic systems may need to account for different crop types. Harvesting those crops efficiently might require some out-of-the-box thinking too. Still, the research seems promising and, with a growing global population, it's important to consider different approaches to using our resources more productively.
“We cannot feed 2 billion more people in 30 years by being just a little more water-efficient and continuing as we do,” Abou Najm said. “We need something transformative, not incremental. If we treat the sun as a resource, we can work with shade and generate electricity while producing crops underneath. Kilowatt hours become a secondary crop you can harvest.”
Beginning in the 1940s, Mexico's Green Revolution saw the country's agriculture industrialized on a national scale, helping propel a massive, decades-long economic boom in what has become known as the Mexican Miracle. Though the modernization of Mexico's food production helped spur unparalleled market growth, these changes also opened the industry's doors to powerful transnational seed companies, eroding national control over the genetic diversity of its domestic crops and endangering the livelihoods of Mexico's poorest farmers.
In the excerpt below from her new book Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction, author and Peter Lipton Lecturer in History of Modern Science and Technology at Cambridge University, Helen Anne Curry, examines the country's efforts to maintain its cultural and genetic independence in the face of globalized agribusiness.
Amid the clatter and hum generated by several hundred delegates and observers to the 1981 Conference of FAO, a member of the Mexican delegation took the floor. Participants from 145 member nations had already reviewed the state of global agricultural production, assessed and commended ongoing FAO programs, agreed on budget appropriations, and wrestled over the wording of numerous conference resolutions. The Mexican representative opened discussion on yet another draft resolution, this one proposing “The Establishment of an International Plant Germplasm Bank.” Two interlocked elements lie at the resolution’s heart: a collection of duplicate samples of all the world’s major seed collections under the control of the United Nations and a legally binding international agreement that recognized “plant genetic resources” as the “patrimony of humanity.” Together, the bank and agreement would ensure the “availability, utilization and non-discriminatory benefit to all nations” of plant varieties in storage and in cultivation across the globe.
Today, international treaties are integral to the conservation and use of crop genetic diversity. The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity aims to ensure the sustainable and just use of the world’s biodiversity, which includes plant genetic resources. Meanwhile, the 2001 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, also called the Seed Treaty, establishes protocols specific to crop diversity. Although it draws much of its power from the Convention on Biological Diversity, the roots of the Seed Treaty reach further back, to the 1981 resolution of the Mexican delegation and beyond.
Mexico’s resolution, like today’s Seed Treaty, offered conservation as a principal motivation. It told a story of farmers’ varieties displaced by breeders’ products, the attrition of genetic diversity, and the looming “extinction of material of incalculable value.” Earlier calls for conservation had sketched the same picture. Yet those who prepared and promoted the Mexican proposal mobilized this narrative to different ends. They may well have wanted to protect crop diversity. Far more important, however, was the guarantee of access to this diversity, once conserved. They insisted that a seed bank governed by the United Nations and an international treaty were needed to prevent the “monopolization” of plant genetic materials. This monopolization came in the form of control by national governments, the ultimate decision makers for most existing seed banks. It also resulted from possession by transnational corporations. By exercising intellectual property protections in crop varieties, seed companies could take ownership of these varieties, even if they were derived from seeds sourced abroad. In other words, the survival of a seed sample in a base collection, or its duplicate, did not mean this sample was available to breeders, let alone farmers, in its own place of origin. Binding international agreements were necessary to ensure access.
Mexico’s intervention at the 1981 FAO Conference was just one volley in what would later be called the seed wars, a decades-long conflict over the granting of property rights in plant varieties and the physical control of seed banks. Allusions to endangered crop diversity have been mostly rhetorical flourishes in this debate, deployed in defense of other things considered threatened by agricultural change—namely, peoples and governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the later twentieth century. Seed treaties were meant to protect not seeds, but sovereignty.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, in the midst of this struggle over seeds, consensus fractured about the loss of crop diversity—or, more specifically, about the meaning of this loss. When experts had gathered at FAO in the 1960s to discuss genetic erosion, most saw this as an inevitable consequence of a beneficial transition. Wherever farmers opted for breeders’ lines over their own seeds, the value of these so-called improved lines was confirmed, and agricultural productivity inched forward. In the 1970s genetic erosion featured centrally in a very different narrative. It was offered as evidence of the misguided ideas and practices driving agricultural development, especially the Green Revolution, and of the dangers posed by powerful transnational seed companies. Corporate greed emerged as a new driver of crop diversity loss. The willingness of wealthy countries to sustain this greed through friendly regulations meant both were complicit in undermining the capacities of developing countries to feed themselves. The extinction of farmers’ varieties and landraces was no longer an accepted byproduct of agricultural modernization. It was an argument against this development.
This shift pitted scientists committed to saving crop diversity against activists ostensibly interested in the same thing. It brought competing visions of what agriculture could and should be head to head. Invocations of the imminent loss of crop diversity, the one element everyone seemed able to agree on, reached a fever pitch during the seed wars. This rhetorical barrage often obscured on-the-ground realities. While FAO delegates, government officials, NGO activists, and prominent scientists waged a war of words in meeting rooms and magazines, plant breeders and agronomists tended experimental plots, tested genetic combinations, and presented farmers with varieties they hoped would be improvements. In 1970s Mexico some of these researchers were newly resolved to use Mexican seeds and methods to address the needs of the country’s poorest farmers. Keeping these individuals, their methods, and their corn collections in view grounds the seed wars in actual seeds. If the Mexican delegation’s invocation of crop diversity at FAO in 1981 was a rhetorical flourish in a bid to defend national sovereignty, the concurrent use of crop diversity by some Mexican breeders was a practical strategy for getting Mexican agriculture out from under the thumb of the United States and transnational agribusinesses. On the ground, seeds were not ornaments in oratory but the very stuff of sovereignty.
Inroads for Agribusiness
While scientists in Mexico searched for novel solutions to the country’s rural crises, critical assessments of agricultural aid bolstered the case for these alternatives. By the mid-1970s studies by economists, sociologists, and other development experts indicated that the much-vaunted Green Revolution had done more harm than help, thanks especially to the input- and capital-intensive model of farming it espoused.
The first critiques of the Green Revolution followed close on the heels of its initial celebration. In 1973 the Oxford economist Keith Griffin joined a growing chorus when he cataloged the harms introduced with “high-yielding varieties,” a phrase used to describe types bred to flourish with synthetic fertilizers. Their introduction had neither increased income per capita nor solved the problems of hunger and malnutrition, according to Griffin. They had produced effects, however: “The new technology... has accelerated the development of a market oriented, capitalist agriculture. It has hastened the demise of subsistence oriented, peasant farming... It has increased the power of landowners, especially the larger ones, and this in turn has been associated with a greater polarization of classes and intensified conflict.” In 1973 Griffin thought that the ultimate outcome depended on how governments responded to these changes. Five years later he had come to a final determination. “The story of the green revolution is a story of a revolution that failed,” he declared.
Griffin was a researcher on the project “Social and Economic Implications of the Large-Scale Introduction of High-Yielding Varieties of Foodgrain.” Carried out under the auspices of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, this project enlisted social scientists to document the uptake of new agricultural technologies — chiefly new crop varieties — and their social and economic effects across Asia and North Africa. Mexico was also included among the project’s case studies, since organizers pinpointed it as the historical site of the “first experiments in high-yielding seeds for modernizing nations.” An attempt to synthesize a single account from the case studies in the 1970s highlighted the problems arising from the integration of farmers into national and international markets. New varieties, chemical fertilizers, and mechanical equipment demanded that cultivators "become businessmen competent in market operations and small-scale financing and receptive to science-generated information." This was thought to be in marked contrast to their having once been "'artisan’ cultivators' who drew on 'tradition and locally valid practices'" to sustain their families. The fact that only a minority of better-off farmers could make such a transition meant that development programs benefited a few at the expense of the many. Drawing on her case study of Mexico, project contributor Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara extended this observation about market integration into a reflection on the flow of economic resources around, and out of, the country — from laborers to landowners, from farms to industries, from national programs to foreign businesses. The reconfiguration of agriculture as what she labeled a "capitalist enterprise" had not brought more money to the countryside but instead robbed peasants of what little they had.
This apparent contradiction in Mexico’s agricultural development invited scrutiny from many besides Hewitt. The preceding three decades had been characterized by steady economic growth, thanks to increased international trade during World War II, government policies that encouraged national industry, and investments in infrastructure and education. This period of the so-called Mexican Miracle had also seen a transition from food dependency — needing to import grain to feed the nation — to self-sufficiency. At this level of abstraction, Mexico’s prospects for sustaining adequate food and nutrition looked rosy. When sociologists and economists delved into specifics, however, the miracle revealed itself a mirage. Investments in agriculture had focused on supplying food to urban workers and developing new products for export. State food-aid programs, too, had been oriented to urban labor, with set prices that kept food affordable for consumers in the city but made its cultivation unprofitable for farmers in the countryside. While well-off cultivators in the north of the country benefited from state-funded irrigation programs and guaranteed prices, poor farmers working small plots without access to state grain purchasers found that they could not sustain their families by selling surplus corn. Hewitt estimated that in 1969–70, one-third of the Mexican population experienced calorie deficiency. A 1974 national survey came to similar conclusions, calculating that 18.4 million Mexicans, over a quarter of the population, suffered from malnutrition.
The persistence of poverty in Mexico, in spite of the country’s celebrated economic growth, could be traced to the model of development embraced by national leaders since the 1940s. Politicians and policy makers had assumed that subsistence farmers could be made irrelevant, with their surplus labor absorbed into the growing industrial economy. Yet industry had not acted the sponge, with the result that this “irrelevant” segment of the population had grown while continuing to be neglected by the state. The economist David Barkin linked faulty Mexican policies to a more fundamental problem of emulating the market capitalism of its northern neighbor. The apparently flourishing Mexican economy had invited the interest of foreign investors, in particular US corporations. Despite protectionist policies, these companies had moved in, and national industries had been sold off, leaving Mexicans vulnerable to the whims of private capital.
Agriculture offered a prime example of this pattern. By the 1970s US firms dominated across the sector, from farm machinery (John Deere, International Harvester) to chemicals (Monsanto, DuPont, American Cyanamid) to production and processing (United Brands, Corn Products) to animal feed (Ralston Purina). Observing this trend, another economist pinpointed Mexican agriculture as the place of origin of a “new, world-wide modernization strategy.” He traced a path from the interventions of the Rockefeller Foundation to the stimulus these gave to the importation of costly agricultural inputs to the management of Mexican farms by foreign firms. Foreign control and deepening ties to international markets affected food self-sufficiency. It made sense, from the perspective of increasing individual profits, for large and well-financed producers in Mexico to focus on the crops that would bring the best prices. These were more likely to be fruits and vegetables for US supermarkets or sorghum to feed cattle than corn or wheat to feed Mexican workers. Thanks to these patterns, it was possible to see much of Mexican agriculture as an extension of US agribusiness, operating chiefly “to exploit Mexican rural labor, Mexican land and water resources, and Mexican private and public capital for the principal benefit of US entrepreneurs.” The ultimate outcome of technical assistance to enhance agricultural production, ostensibly undertaken for the betterment of Mexican farmers and the Mexican economy, was the dominance of transnational companies in that very task, for their own aggrandizement. This portended ill for Mexico and especially for the poorest Mexicans.
Feeding the planet's 8 billion people is challenge enough and our current industrialized commercial practices are causing such ecological damage that we may soon find ourselves hard-pressed to feed any more. For decades, scientists have sought out higher yields and faster growth at the expense of genetic diversity and disease — just look at what we've done to the humble banana. Now, finally, researchers are working to revitalize landrace and heirloom crop varieties, using their unique, and largely forgotten, genetic diversity to reimagine global agriculture.
In his new book, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to preserve and restore them. In the excerpt below, Saladino takes a look at all-important rice, the cereal that serves as a staple crop for more than 3.5 billion people around the world.
Whereas the global Green Revolution was largely steered by American science and finance, China’s push for greater food production was more self-contained. Both efforts happened more or less in parallel. Mao’s attempt at rapid industrialization, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the late 1950s, forced farmers off their land, leading to famine and the death of millions. Soon after, an agricultural researcher, Yuan Longping, was given the task of helping China’s recovery by increasing the supply of rice. Based in a lab in Hunan, Yuan, like Borlaug in Mexico, spent years working with landraces and crossing varieties in meticulous experiments. By the early 1970s, he had developed Nan-you No. 2, a hybrid rice so productive it had the potential to increase food supply by nearly a third. Farmers were told to replace the old varieties with the new, and by the start of the 1980s, more than 50 per cent of China’s rice came from this single variety. But, as with Borlaug’s wheat, Yuan’s rice depended on huge amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and lots and lots of water.
In the 1960s, in another part of Asia, a team of scientists were also breeding new rice varieties. What became known as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was funded by the American Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The IRRI’s plant breeders also made a breakthrough drawing on the genetics of a dwarf plant. This new pest-resistant, high-yielding rice, called IR8, was released across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1966. Using the Green Revolution package of irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides, IR8 tripled yields and became known as ‘miracle rice’. As it rapidly spread across Asia (with the necessary agrichemicals subsidized by Western foundations and governments), farmers were encouraged to abandon their landrace varieties and help share the new seeds with neighbors and relatives in other villages. Social occasions, including weddings, were treated by Western strategists as opportunities to distribute IR8. A decade later, rice scientist Gurdev Khush, the son of an Indian rice farmer, improved on the ‘miracle rice’ (IR8 wasn’t the tastiest rice to eat and had a chalky texture). A later iteration, IR64, was so productive that it became the most widely cultivated rice variety in the world. But while most of the world was applauding the increase in calories created by the new rice varieties, some people were sounding a note of caution about what was also being lost.
In July 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled ‘The Genetics of Disaster’. As the world’s population was increasing faster than at any time in history, Harlan said, crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. ‘These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,’ he argued. ‘In a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on these materials.’ Bad things can happen at the hands of nature, Harlan reminded his readers, citing the Irish potato famine. ‘We can survive if a forest or shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice, or maize were to be destroyed? We are taking risks we need not and should not take.’ The solutions being developed in the Green Revolution would be as good as they could be until they failed – and when they did, the human race would be left facing disaster, he warned. ‘Few will criticize Dr. Borlaug for doing his job too well. The enormous increase in . . . yields is a welcome relief and his achievements are deservedly recognized, but if we fail to salvage at least what is left of the landrace populations of Asia before they are replaced, we can justifiably be condemned by future generations for squandering our heritage and theirs.’ We were moving from genetic erosion, he said, to genetic wipe-out. ‘The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner, and the public is unaware and unconcerned. Must we wait for disaster to be real before we are heard? Will people listen only after it is too late?’ It may be nearly too late, but, fifty years on, people are listening to Harlan.
One of them is Susan McCouch, Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University and an expert on rice genetics. Her research includes the less familiar aus rice which evolved in the Bangladeshi delta. ‘It has the most stress-tolerant genes of all the rice we know,’ says McCouch. ‘It grows on poor soils, survives drought and is the fastest species to go from seed to grain.’ And yet aus is endangered. Most farmers in Bangladesh have abandoned it and switched to more commercial varieties. Only the poorest people have saved the rice, farmers who couldn’t afford to buy fertilizers and build irrigation systems. Its genetics are so rare because, unlike japonica and indica which travelled far and wide, aus stayed put. ‘The people who domesticated it never left the river delta,’ says McCouch. ‘They weren’t empire builders, didn’t have armies and never enslaved populations.’ But by bequeathing the world aus, they have left their mark.
In 2018, McCouch, along with researchers from USDA, released a new rice called Scarlett. It was, the team said, a rice with nutty rich flavors but also ‘packed with high levels of antioxidants and flavonoids along with vitamin E’. To create it, McCouch had crossed an American long-grain rice called Jefferson and a rice that was discovered in Malaysia. The reason the new rice was packed with nutrients and called Scarlett was because the Malaysian plant was a red-colored wild species. One person who would have been unsurprised at the special qualities of these colored grains was Sun Wenxiang, the farmer I had visited in Sichuan.
Inside a room on his farm, Sun was packing up small parcels of his special red rice to send to customers in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hangzhou. They order his red mouth rice on WeChat, the Chinese social media app used by more than a billion people across Asia that is part Twitter and part PayPal (and so much more). Some have told him they buy it for its taste or intriguing color, but most buy it for its health properties.
For farmers such as Sun working to save China’s endangered foods, help is at hand at the Centre for Rural Reconstruction, a modern day iteration of a movement founded a century ago to empower peasants and revitalize villages. In the 1920s a group of intellectuals and smallholders set up the original Rural Reconstruction Movement to develop farms, improve crops, establish co-operatives and sell more produce in China’s towns and cities. After the revolution, and during Mao’s rule, it disappeared, but in the 1990s was resurrected. A former government economist named Professor Wen Tiejun believed rural communities across China faced serious decline as manufacturing boomed and millions of people migrated from thousands of villages. By 2010, the country had experienced the largest and most rapid rural-to-urban migration ever witnessed in human history. Professor Wen began to ask what this meant for the future of China’s small-scale farmers and the food they produced and, as a result, he launched the New Rural Reconstruction Movement.
The garden surrounding the two-story training center 50 miles north of Beijing is a statement of intent: its raised beds are fertilized with night soil, the nutrients processed from a row of eco-toilets (an ancient technique, as Chinese farmers enriched their fields using human and animal waste for thousands of years). The idea came from a book written a century ago, not by a Chinese agricultural expert, but an American one. Farmers of Forty Centuries by Franklin Hiram King has become essential reading matter for some students at China’s Centre for Rural Reconstruction.
In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the United States Department of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansion the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientists in Washington, King left the United States in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia. ‘I had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese farmers,’ he wrote in the book’s introduction, ‘to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt.’ King died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next twenty years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain’s organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour. The farmers who visit the Centre for Rural Reconstruction and come across King’s book, will read an account of how food was produced in China’s villages a century ago. Crops grown then, now endangered, are also being resurrected.
Inside a storeroom at the center, now a bank of some of China’s rarest foods, I was shown boxes full of seeds and jars and packets of ingredients all produced by farming projects in villages supported by the New Rural Reconstruction Movement. All were distinctive products that were helping to increase farmers’ incomes. There was dark green soy from Yunnan in the south; red-colored ears of wheat from the north; wild tea harvested from ancient forests; and bottles of honey-colored rice wine. And among other varieties of landrace rice was Sun Wenxiang’s red mouth glutinous grains.
‘When we lose a traditional food, a variety of rice or a fruit, we store up problems for the future,’ Professor Wen told me. ‘There’s no question China needs large-scale farms, but we also need diversity.’ With 20 per cent of the world’s population, China encapsulates the biggest food dilemmas of our times. Should it intensify farming to produce more calories, or diversify to help save the planet? In the long run, there is no option but to change the system. China suffers from wide-scale soil erosion, health-harming levels of pollution and water shortages. As a consequence, land has become contaminated, there are algae blooms around its coastline and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
There are signs of change. In September 2016 China ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Among the specific targets it set was zero growth in fertilizer and pesticide use. To conserve more of its genetic resources and crop diversity, China is one of the few countries investing heavily in new botanic gardens to protect and study endangered species. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has also built a collection of half a million samples of landrace crops, varieties now being researched for future use. This is what Jack Harlan might have called the genetics of salvation. It’s a long way from King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, but there is clear recognition that China’s current food system can’t go on as before.
‘We need to modernize and develop, but that doesn’t mean letting go of our past,’ said Wen. ‘The entire world should not be chasing one way of living, we can’t all eat the same kind of food, that is a crazy ideology.’ And then he shared the famous quote attributed to Napoleon: ‘Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.’ ‘Well,’ said Wen, ‘we have woken up and we’ve started to eat more like the rest of the world. We need to find better ways of living and farming. Maybe some answers can be found in our traditions.’
