The answer seems obvious: Our food comes from our farms. And yes, we couldn’t eat without the 2 million farms operating across America. But that’s only half the story. Without healthy land, not one of those farms could grow any food at all. And healthy land depends on how we farm. Understanding that relationship is part of every farmer’s job, and at the heart of the questions they ask themselves every day:
How healthy is the soil? What’s the most we can grow on it this season while protecting it for the next generation? What could we be doing better, more efficiently, more environmentally friendly?
Today, GMO Farming methods are providing farmers some promising answers. See for yourself:
Back-to-school sales. Memorial Day price drops. Black Friday blowouts. Hardly a month goes by without someone trying to sell us on the promise of getting more for less. It can be tough to tell if we’re saving anything at all. But GMO Farming actually delivers on that promise — helping us grow an average of 22 percent more food on the same amount of land, and saving trees and wildlife from being converted to farmland.3 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111629
Then there’s the cost savings. Specific yields may differ from crop to crop, but after decades of GMO Farming the big picture is clear: When farmers can grow more food more efficiently, the rest of us can pay less to eat. Economists studied nearly a decade of monthly grocery sales data for more than 10,000 products, and found that Americans have been paying up to 62% more for foods labeled non-GMO — and up to 90% more for organic labels.4https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919218301131
But the savings are most striking when you consider how much land we don’t have to farm because of this increased production.
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.
Today, as the climate continues to change and the population continues to grow, we need farms that can keep up. That’s even more true for the world our kids will inherit tomorrow.
But they’ll also inherit the tools GMO Farming is providing — to help us grow more food without converting more forests or wetlands into larger farms, to keep food costs from rising and to even help mitigate climate change. Check out the links below to find out what else is possible.
The Truth About These Major GMO Myths from Refinery 29
Why ‘GMO-Free’ Is a Marketing Ploy You Shouldn’t Fall For from The Washington Post
How Genetic Engineering Can Fight Disease, Reduce Insecticide Use and Enhance Food Security from Prof. Pamela Ronald’s TED Talk
