TWC Session 7: Agriculture

This week’s lesson basically talks about how technology changes the ways of agriculture, how biobusiness helps in industries, and also how maintaining the environment. We started the lesson by examining the need for greater efficiency in terms of food production. With the rapid urbanization of the world, more people are migrating from the farms to towns in search of better living. Thus for the same human population, there are actually less people to produce these food sources.

One of the largest components of the biobusiness in agricultural sector is no doubt the emergence of genetically modified (GM) food. On the macro scale, genetically modified food has been ongoing since along time ago. Farmers tend to “select” the genes by using the seeds of the fruits with desirable traits and growing more fruits with those seeds. This way, in the long run, the fruits produced will be all of better quality. Farmers knew about the concept of heredity long time ago and the selection of genes had been largely trial and error. Until recent times, with the emergence of genetic engineering, humans are now able to select the favorable genes. To go a step further, some organisms’ genome is altered by insertion of gene sequence from another different species. This has enabled us to create super crops that can be pest resistance, seedless, tasty, huge, and the list goes on.

One interesting issue brought up was GM food labeling. Is it necessary for GM food to be labeled and differentiated from other forms of food? I generally am a strong supporter of GM food and feel that GM food should not be differentiated. It is human nature for people to be worried about things they do not fully understand. In the past, things that could not be explained were often classified as the act of devil, and there are many examples where people are put to death because of the possession of devilish powers when in fact, it was just undiscovered science. The same rule applies here; when people are unsure of GM food, they will just choose to shun it and avoid it. Since the main purpose of GM was to enable food security, the rejection by consumers to this kind of food effectively defeats the purpose. Moreover, with lesser people receptive towards GM food, the cost of this technology will be spread over a smaller consumer base and this will just drive the price of GM food up and causes even more problems to food security,

Waste energy is another interesting issue brought forward in the lesson. Within waste there is always energy that have not been utilized. There is therefore great potential to harness this energy for better sustainability. From the waste, useful sources of energy can be collected such as natural gases and bio oil. One may argue, how much natural gases can waste produce? From what I read before, the amount of natural gases in landfills can be extremely large. In one case there was even an explosion due to the natural gases present in the landfill. Moreover, even if very little energy can be extracted form the waste, it is still better than nothing.

Before this lesson, I have always thought that the biobusiness is mainly about healthcare industries and biomedical sciences, but today’s lesson gave me interesting insights on other aspects of biobusiness and it is therefore extremely engaging for me. As such I give this lesson a rating of 9/10.