Skip to footer

Climate-smart farmers break new ground

More farmers seem more open to new practices, leading to to higher crop yields, or doing more with less. The limits in agriculture are fading as farmers show greater willingness for today's innovation.

|
AP Photo/file
A farmer in Cuba works at a hydroponic farm which uses specialized irrigation methods to grow vegetables in non-rural areas of Havana.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

Experts on global agriculture were startled last year when record crop yields started to show up in unlikely places, such as Africa. Were farmers adopting the latest seed varieties resistant to global warming? Were they using better fertilizers?

Not likely. The answer was that more farmers in poor countries are simply open to the many new ideas about agriculture.

The great leap in crop productivity since the 1960s, driven largely by better seeds, is continuing today but mainly because of wider acceptance of a range of practices, such as drip irrigation, minimum tilling, and GPS-assisted planting and harvesting.

One new idea on the horizon: Attaching sensors to crops – even barcodes – and tracking them from harvest to store so that consumers are assured of origin, freshness, and other aspects of their food. Such FedEx-style tracking could greatly reduce wastage and raise efficiency for farmers.

The umbrella terms for this new narrative in food production is “climate-smart agriculture” or “sustainable intensification,” according to the International Food Policy Research Institute. The effect on food security from the new techniques could be substantial. The institute predicts they could reduce the risk of hunger by close to 30 percent by 2050.

The strategy is to do “more with less,” largely by growing more food with currently available cropland and water resources. In a study published last week in Science magazine, a team of scientists found that better use of resources for only 17 crops could help feed an additional 850 million people. Oddly enough, that is about the same number of people who go hungry every day, according to the United Nations.

New innovations in raising yields are needed more than ever in an era of climate change and resource constraints. Yet the ideas just keep on coming. The real limit seems to be a farmer’s willingness to try them. Now perhaps even that limit has been broken.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Climate-smart farmers break new ground
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2014/0728/Climate-smart-farmers-break-new-ground
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe