I have been reading a book titled Hybrid, authored by Noel Kingsbury. It is about the history and science of plant breeding. It is in this book that I have come across a statement that, in my view, deserves reflecting upon by all of us who spend time daily finding food for ourselves and for our loved ones.
Kingsbury says: ‘Most of us are alive not just because of historically recent advances in medical science and an awareness of basic hygiene but also because of advances in agriculture: improved plant nutrition, crop protection, and plant breeding. Our access to food is so much more secure than that of our ancestors, our choices are incomparably wider, and our food is safer than ever before.”
Much of this security and choice are down to plant breeding. With the varied diet we have today, it is difficult to imagine what it must have been like for our ancestors; their diet was often not just poor but incredibly monotonous.’
Our ancestors did not, for example, see grafted mangoes or oranges. They did not know about the qualities of hybrid seeds and the advantages of planting them. Today we have cloned crop seedlings. We have crops that take much shorter to bear fruit.
If anybody wants to earn money quickly from Robusta coffee farming, the best decision would be planting cloned seedlings from a registered coffee nursery. Harvesting normally takes place within less than two years after planting, with good agronomic practices. Many crops are bred to be much better tasting, drought tolerant, disease resistant, more nutritive, and higher yielding.
Agriculturists tend to refer to the formation and development of new individual plants as plant propagation. It perpetuates plants as individual units and ensures that the cultivated crops are under man’s control and that they are not lost to him by reverting to less desirable forms.
Through selection and propagation of only particular varieties with desirable characteristics scientists have built up a wide range of crop plants of great economic and nutritional importance from naturally and traditionally exiting species but of different characteristics.
We therefore have to go for farming practices that meet our desires. We have a much bigger population to feed, yet the land on which to grow the required amount of food is not elastic. We are also working against odds like climate change and stubborn pests, among other challenges.