Agriculture in the 21st century

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Agriculture in the 21st Century J O S E P H F. C O A T E S

The cornucopia o f benefits brought by science and technology to agriculture in the present century seems almost without limit. Prosperity for the farmer and better and cheaper food resulting in more nutritious and balanced diets for people are the broadest o f the effects. The change in the economy o f the farm is amazing: in 1920, 40°70 o f the U.S. workforce labored inside the farm gate; in 1995, about 1.8070 does so. Even more amazing is that during this same time period, the productivity of the American farm skyrocketed. These beneficial developments are not without their undesirable and uncertain side effects, many o f which came about due to public and private mismanagement rather than the technology o f agriculture itself. As we discuss correcting those misfires, let us jump ahead to the first third o f the next century to see how agriculture may change even further. First, in agriculture we will continue to see the general pattern o f replacing human skills with knowledge and capabilities imbedded in machines, supplies, and devices. One example o f this process is the robotization o f agriculture. Until now, robots have been primarily indoor factory tools used as substitutes for human labor. As the result of research at N A S A and the Department o f Defense, robots will acquire mobility, weatherization, on-board intelligence, and other desirable features, making it practical for them to operate outdoors. Their uses will not be limited to agriculture, but will include mining, undersea work, construction, and other heavy, dangerous tasks o f all sorts. The farmer will be less and less visible and the machines of automated agriculture more and more prominent. The farmer will spend much time indoors, operating, monitoring, planning, controlling, data gathering, and decision making about an ever more informatized farm. The farm itself, like urban facilities, homes, buildings, streets, and other structures, will become smart in all o f its aspects-self-monitoring and, t o a large extent, self-operating and self-correcting. Not only will robots be able to perform present jobs more easily and cheaply, but they will be able to plant individual seeds while simultaneously testing the JOSEPH F. COATES is President of Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a futurist consulting firm. Address reprint requests to Joseph F. Coates, Coates & Jarratt, Inc., 3738 Kanawha Street NW, Washington, DC 20015. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 50, 105-109 © 1995 Elsevier Science Inc. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010

0040-1625/95/$9.50 SSDI 0040-1625(95)00163-5

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micro environment around them and adding exactly the right composition of adjuvents to the soil for optimal growth of the individual seed. Genetics will be one of the most powerful forces reshaping agriculture. Today there are about 3,000 edible plants; of these, about 300 are eaten somewhere on the planet, about 30 are used in commerce, and 6 supply 90o7o of human nutrition. As a result of genetic research, the quality and nutritional balance of each of those foods already in commerce will be improved. More significant will be the introduction into commerce of ever larger numbers of that marginal underused pool of 300, as the specific characteristics that leave them outside our commercial food chain are dealt with genetically. Some are left out because their skins are too tough or they have an unpleasant odor or a bad taste or require too much energy to cook or are too difficult to handle or too fragile or too easily attacked by mold. Each of these characteristics will be eliminated, modified, or replaced. Going beyond the mere improvement and, hence, the expansion of foods in our diet will be the introduction of transgenic species of plants that will be the basis for as yet unnamed and, to some extent, as yet unimagined foods. Transgenic organisms combine characteristics of two separate and distinct species: for example, a plant that may combine characteristics of a potato and a tomato or a banana and a bean. The capability of agricultural science will be truly protean as it becomes able to combine characteristics in almost any arbitrary way, to allow us to create new plants to fit specific environmental conditions, weather, soil, water, and other factors. A third area of plant manipulation coming out of genetics will likely use plants as chemical factories. There is nothing in the world more democratic than DNA, the basic genetic material of all living things. It is ready, willing, and able to accept DNA from any other source and incorporate it into its own machinery. Assuming that there is no intrinsic contradiction or biophysical incompatibility, we should be able to introduce limitless numbers of chemical manufacturing capabilities into plants. In all likelihood, the products will be pure and, hence, less subject to the undesirable consequences and side effects of trace materials found in traditionally manufactured chemicals. Early plant factories will produce complex products that are too expensive or too difficult to make by traditional chemical synthetic means. In the long run, however, plants may well become the source of commodity chemicals and the basis either for the continuation of what we now call the petrochemical industry or for its replacement by a new phytochemical industry. The question of which three or four simple chemicals produced by plants could become the basis for the petrochemical industry could be answered by a sophomore taking organic chemistry. The real question lies in the techno-economic trade-offs. They are too complex to anticipate at this time. Today, because of the enormous interest in the potential for production drugs, vaccines, and related biochemicals from both plants and animals, the term"pharmproduction" has acquired a special meaning of its own. The Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences recently announced that research out of Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, and Texas A&M has produced vaccines in potatoes by transferring the DNA from the hepatitis B virus so that mice that ate the raw potatoes built up an immunity. Later, perhaps better-tasting products will be produced. An alternative strategy is to work with animals. Goats are now able to produce monoclonal antibodies in their milk in far higher concentrations and in much greater quantities than are available from other sources, such as mice milk. Specific monoclonal antibodies have the capability of attacking individual disease-causing viruses. Research is under way to produce monoclonals from dairy cows.

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A further consequence of applying molecular biology and genetics to plants is the opportunity for devising a new payment system for genetically modified crops. Consider hybrid corn, the most successful agricultural product ever developed. It is successful for two quite independent reasons. First, the product itself is extremely good, but that is not sufficient. The necessary additional characteristic is that every year the customer must go back to the hybridizer for the seed. Consequently, this built-in payment system encourages the hybridizer to continually improve and diversify hybrid corn. In general, self-propagating plants have not enjoyed the intensity of research to improve quality, universality, productivity, and low cost that hybrid corn has. A breakthrough making it possible to channel vast amounts of research into self-propagating crops lies in the following future development. Right now it is routine in genomic research to read the DNA or the genetic message in any organism. But this process is slow. Were we able to accelerate that reading time by a factor of 104 and 105 and do so at relatively low cost, we could sample a carload of wheat or rice or barley or tomatoes or any other crop that is self-propagating and perform a genetic analysis. This could establish that 40°70 of the carload is genetic variety A, 30070 genetic variety B, 15070genetic variety C, and the rest random and presumably natural types. We could then pay royalties to the developers of the A, B, and C varieties. Independent of whether that system develops, we can anticipate a second green revolution. Some have argued that a new green revolution based on molecular biology is not likely to pay off because traditional genetics has already brought us the bulk of the benefits one might anticipate from the more direct application of molecular biology. We disagree because the speed, diversity, and range that molecular biology can introduce into the crop will not only create more balanced traditional grains but, at the same time, develop grains that will have better environmental resistance, perhaps even repellants to indigenous pests, and be capable of growth in what are now marginal or unsustainable environments. Packaging is a general factor in the food sector. In the advanced nations, packaging is the centerpiece around which the system from planting to ultimate garbage disposal rotates. Increasingly food is grown, designed, and prepared for packaging, and increasingly the packaging is designed to assist in delivery and the ultimate management and disposal of the food and the package itself. The second green revolution will be a revolution in the packaging of foods, especially in nonindustrialized countries. While estimates vary and the numbers are questionable, somewhere between 20 and 50070 if all food produced for human consumption is lost before it reaches a human m o u t h - l o s t to rats, mice, other pests, weather, fungus, and other factors. As a result, pest control has always been an important traditional factor in agricultural research. We see two, if not three, new strategies for pest control emerging to prominence. Some years ago I saw a man, as part of a demonstration, swallow a spoonful of 2,4-D, a common herbicide. He could do this with some confidence because the mechanism by which that herbicide operates, that is, the biochemical pathway that it disrupts in the plant, is not found in humans or in other vertebrates. In the future, pest control, whether directed at plants, insects, vertebrates, or other animals, will be playing to specificity-looking for unique biochemical pathways in target organisms that make them vulnerable to control without attacking even closely related species. The second path we foresee pays close attention to the behavior of pests. For example, the most modern of household roach killers depends on the fact that the cockroach has a genetically derived passion for low ceilings. It is not just that the roach runs to a crevice because the crevice is there. Biologically it prefers a low ceiling-one low enough to

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touch. The strategy is to coat the ceiling of the pesticide container with a fungus that rubs off on the roach's back, then attacks and penetrates the tough chitin surface, eventually leading to the roach's death. Much is also known about rat behavior and how to influence their consumption of pest control agents. The third route to pest control likely, but by no means as certain, to emerge is based on the recognition that many of the best stable systems in nature are in complex balance. One tolerates a certain population of pests rather than attempting to eliminate them all. Balance rather than elimination may become the third strategy in pest management. The expanding number of foods discussed earlier may be complemented by factorygrown nutrients. In facilities resembling a brewery or a pharmaceutical plant, microorganisms will produce highly nutritious, protein-rich microorganisms that can then be handled the way we now handle commodity flour or commodity sugar to supplement prepared foods. More striking may be the ability to grow, in factories, such totally simulated foods as tomato juice that has never come from a tomato, orange juice that has never seen a tree, and bacon unconnected to any pig. The health movement will be a shaper of agricultural business, and there is no likelihood that the movement will be reversed. As the population of the advanced nations becomes better schooled, more aware, more autonomous, more concerned and informed about their health, and more willing to act on their own behalf, the food suppliers will be pushed toward satisfying a wide range of health requirements. Vegetarianism may get a tremendous boost from molecular biology because we are able to grow fully nutritionally balanced plant products and, more importantly, from the point of view of food choice, incorporate into them physical and gustatory characteristics that we have generally associated with meat and fish. Vegetarians of the future may be able to enjoy a far wider range of foods than they do now and, in addition, have available foods whose gustatory appeal is implicit in our omnivorous genetic history. The restructuring of the farm is already well on the way to a likely new end state. Agribusiness farms will continue to grow by supplying such commodity crops as potatoes, corn, and wheat. The family farm as a full-time operation will probably be capitalized in current dollars at the level of $300,000 to $1.5 million; it will be a family business that employs some incidental full-time or occasional help. The third variety of farm, and the majority of them, will be the part-time farm. He and she will have jobs in town and maintain their farm as a marginal source of income. Finally, of growing importance will be the fourth type of farm, the hobby farm, varying from a few acres to several hundreds of acres on which prosperous people, urbanized, ex-urbanized, retirees, and others will turn or return to the earth for many of the putative advantages of a bucolic life. Not all hobby farms will necessarily operate as sound investments; some will operate simply for self-satisfaction. The business market for each of these four farm types will be strikingly different. For example, the robotized farm will be part of both the agribusiness and the full-time family farm. On the other hand, one might anticipate the unrolling of prefabricated water-soluble strips in whose compartments are all the nutrients needed for the crop. This idea may sell best to the part-time, family, and hobby farms. Ecology is a rapidly expanding science whose competence in applications will grow dramatically over the next decades. Ecology will expand from its traditional attention on the natural environment to the ecology of managed environments. The application of ecological principles to the managed environment of the farm will go hand in hand with the evolution of the concept of sustainable agriculture. This concept is complex because it implies several variables operating simultaneously-changes in crop mix, changes in the economics of farm products, changes in soil treatments such as herbicides

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and pesticides, and changes in the quality of grain through genetic manipulation. But stepping back from those complexities, the concept of sustainability in agriculture is no different than the concept of sustainability elsewhere, namely, enjoying the benefits that the earth affords today without prejudicing their availability for future generations. In agriculture that means learning to use our resources without depleting them, irreversibly degrading them, polluting them, or making them unproductive for future generations. It in no way implies that those resources will be unchanged; they could be markedly different from what they look like today, but they will remain productively available for future generations. R&D will continue to generate productivity gains. Central government R&D must remain a basic factor in agriculture throughout the world. Private sector research will particularly flourish in the use of such technologies as robotization and molecular biology in the new agricultural system, where productivity gains can be tried to revenue. The largest of public or private research facilities are likely to undertake ad hoc fee-for-service research as a new business service. Finally, those at the basic end of the agricultural and food c y c l e - t h o s e selling seed, chemicals, and machinery-will move in a radically new direction. Each of the main components of the industry now sells a service or a product. But the user, particularly the farmer, is not primarily interested in the service or product; the farmer acquires those things because he must put them together to accomplish some function necessary to growing a crop or tending animals. Businesses serving the farm sector will move away from merely selling products or services to selling functionality or integrated performance systems. Whatever products or services will make that functionality real will underlie their business. Received 17 June 199S