Biotechnology Agriculture
Essay Preview: Biotechnology Agriculture
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Biotechnology Agriculture
People may think that agriculture is a simple process with not much involved. But actually there is a big process before the crops are even grown. In todays era farmers around the world rely on what they call Genetically Modified crops. These Genetically modified crops are created before the seeds hit the field. The main purpose of them is to reduce the amount of weeds, disease and insects that tend to harm crops, and reduce agricultural productivity. With planting the GM crops farmers have experienced increase in yield, less pesticides and insecticides used, increase of safety for some species, and lastly a reduced amount of greenhouse gases have been recorded since these GM crops have been introduced.
How these GM products actually work is the crops issues are studied, for example, when growing a certain product such as soy beans many weeds like night shade a rag weed appear in fields and they actually work against the growth of the beans. To prevent this from happening traits are expressed by a given bacterial gene in the crops, so the crop can adapt new and better ways, similar to how animals adapt to changing environments. And now that GM crops have been in the making for approximately 12 years they have now gone on whats called “Stacking Traits”, more than one gene is being added to these crops so they adapt to all the different things so growth is efficient as possible.
Since the 12 years farmers have been planting GM crops it is estimated that 1.7 billion acres have been planted without one single health incident involved. And a new record has been found at a 12.3% increase in acreage from the previous year so that just shows the yield increase the GM products are giving us. Not only do these GM products make our crops better but they also have almost no harm to human beings. In fact it is proven that GM plants may even possibly be better for the human being. Study show how similar the new crop is to the old crop with a safe history record. Therefore GM crops have no significant impacts on us or our environment as far as we know it.
In the future we will see these GM products be worked on continuously; most likely they will never be perfected, nor shut down. They will most likely come up with better and better results from year to year until eventually it has met appropriate standards where crops will not simply die off to a freeze or insect attack.