It may sound obvious, but growing more food on less land won’t help feed our families if it saps the soil so much that we can’t repeat the process each year. Soil, after all, is one of a farmer’s most precious resources.
GMO Farming has gained so much popularity because it helps farmers better protect their soil, employing the most advanced and environmentally friendly farming practices available today.
Take cover crops, which farmers plant between harvests to add precious nutrients and organic matter back into the soil. To clear them from the field before planting a new harvest, farmers traditionally had to choose between spraying potent pesticides or — for most organic farms — turning the cover crop under, which rips up the fields and releases CO2.
GMO Farming offers new, more sustainable options: Using fewer, milder pesticides that break down quicker and leave the soil intact.6http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/gmcr.20061 Or, even better, planting into a field that still has remnants of the last season’s crop — which act as a cover crop. Not only are these methods better for people and the environment, they help soil microbiology thrive,7https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161004125836.htm prevent erosion and runoff8http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095633915300630 and trap carbon in the soil where it can’t contribute to climate change.9http://www.pgeconomics.co.uk/pdf/2017globalimpactstudy.pdf
Simply put, GMO Farming is providing new ways for farmers to grow the food we need, at the scale we need it, all while delivering on sustainability and the vision of organic farming. Not to mention it’s one of the few tools we have to help halt climate change.