Science and

Society:
Agricultural
Practice
Ananda Mustafiz
Lecture 2
Natural>>Organic>>GMO (?)

• Food and Nutrition are highly

subjective; it depends on society,
religion and many other aspects.

• There are multiple ways to achieve

proper diet and nutrition, no absolute
wrong or right approach.

• The individual may decide the proper

diet based on his/her lifestyle.
1. What do you understand by "organic" food/vegetables/fruits/grains?

• Definition of Organic in terms of chemistry/biology: Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen…Carbohydrate,

protein, fat……….
• Food grown without pesticides/fertilizers/chemicals.
• Food grown without human made - synthetic pesticides/synthetic chemicals.

Pesticides are used to reduce damage to crops from weeds, rodents, insects and
germs. This increases the yield of fruits, vegetables and other crops.
Pesticides are regulated by governments in terms of usages and safety. Some
pesticides like DDT are banned due to health and safety issues.
A review of decades of data in the US found outbreaks of illness resulting from pesticides in food
were not caused by the routine use of pesticides, but rather rare accidents in which individual farmers
applied a pesticide incorrectly.
Fertilizer: N, P, K needs to be replenished in the soil. Can artificial fertilizer harm/decrease the nutrient
quality of the plant? Yes, there is no doubt excess fertilizers might cause harm to environment, e.g.
River, Sea water……but do we have a choice.
Insects or Pesticide: It’s our choice

Brinjal and insect frass!!!!!!

Chocolate is toxic to dogs (and cats!). While rarely fatal, chocolate ingestion can result in
significant illness. Chocolate is toxic because it contains a chemical called theobromine,

Coffee/caffeine is toxic to most insects.

But Chocolate and Coffee are safe to human.

Toxicity cannot be generalized; it varies from species to species.

Eventually it also depends on amount of exposure and dosage.

Sugar

Fat

Gluten

Associated with life style diseases, diabetes, blood pressure, cardiac diseases.
 What are Natural and Organic
Food?
Common
Consensus

Natural/Organic
foods are free of
chemicals.

What are
“chemicals”?

James Kennedy, a high school teacher from Haileybury in

Australia, has created ingredients lists for ‘raw’ foods that have
not been processed in any way.
2. What do you understand by "natural" food/vegetables/fruits/grains?

• Common Understanding: Foods grown without human intervention, or the foods are found in
nature.

• Humans have always guided the Crop Evolution

• A small sample of wild type pants were chosen and domesticated.

• 10,000 years of Selection.

• All crops we grow today were once wild plants. But no crop today would survive in the wild any more!

Synthetic…..or Natural: We consume synthetic Vitamin C or Ascorbic Acid tablet……

Datura is Natural and Poisonous, most disease causing bacteria, viruses, fungus are natural
Selective Breeding Works Wonders
 Phytophotodermatitis From Celery Among Grocery Store Workers is reported in many occasions

psoralens

If Celery were a GMO, it would have not been released in the market!!!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-4362.1994.tb01539.x?sid=nlm%3Apubmed

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/548785
3. What is GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) or GM (Genetically Modified) food, when it is
on the label of food/vegetables/fruits/grains?

GMO: The organism is modified by genetic engineering in the laboratory to improve the trait
of the organism.

Example: Bt cotton, Insulin

DNA, Chromosome, Gene….

• What is Chromosome?

• What is DNA?

• What is Gene?
 Gene : determines traits of an
organism

CHROMOSO
NUCLEUS
ME
TISSUE CELL

PLANTOr Human Or any Living

Organism

DNA
Chromosome: Genes:
Genome

A/T/G/C  Letter in the

Alphabet where there are
only four letters

Codon/Triplet  Word  Code

for amino acid (eg. ATG
codes for methionine)

Gene  Sentence

Genome  Book or the

organism

This is just an analogy for

understanding.
 Gene : determines traits of an organism
BASE
PAIRS

Gene determines traits (characteristics) of an

organism e.g. height, colour, size etc
What's Plant Breeding

• The Art and Science of improving the heredity of plants for the benefit of human kind.

• The Science, Art and Business of improving plants for human benefits.

• About 500 out of one million pant species are being domesticated and cultivated for
past thousand of years
Crop Evolution and Human Civilization

• Humans have always guided the Crop Evolution

• A small sample of wild type pants were chosen and domesticated.

• 10,000 years of Selection.

• All crops we grow today were once wild plants. But no crop today would survive in the
wild any more!

• Crops strains and genes have moved around the globe.

The Phytogeographical Basis for Plant Breeding (Vavilov 1935) he summarizes and pulls together all his previous work on
centers of origin and diversity. In this he recognizes eight primary centers, as follows.
I. The Chinese Center - in which he recognizes 138 distinct species of which probably the earlier and most important were
cereals, buckwheats and legumes.
II. The Indian Center (including the entire subcontinent) - based originally on rice, millets and legumes, with a total of 117
species.
IIa. The Indo-Malayan Center (including Indonesia, Philippines, etc.) - with root crops (Dioscorea spp., Tacca, etc.)
preponderant, also with fruit crops, sugarcane, spices, etc., some 55 species.
III. The Inner Asiatic Center (Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, etc.) - with wheats, rye and many herbaceous legumes, as well as
seed-sown root crops and fruits, some 42 species.
IV. Asia Minor (including Transcaucasia, Iran and Turkmenistan) - with more wheats, rye, oats, seed and forage legumes,
fruits, etc., some 83 species.
V. The Mediterranean Center - of more limited importance than the others to the east, but including wheats, barleys, forage
plants, vegetables and fruits -especially also spices and ethereal oil plants, some 84 species.
VI. The Abyssinian (now Ethiopian) Center - of lesser importance, mostly a refuge of crops from other regions, especially
wheats and barleys, local grains, spices, etc., some 38 species.
VII. The South Mexican and Central American Center - important for maize, Phaseolus and Cucurbitaceous species, with
spices, fruits and fibre plants, some 49 species.
VIII. South America Andes region (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador) - important for potatoes, other root crops, grain crops of the
Andes, vegetables, spices and fruits, as well as drugs (cocaine, quinine, tobacco, etc.), some 45 species.
VIIIa. The Chilean Center - only four species - outside the main area of crop domestication, and one of these (Solarium
tuberosum) derived from the Andean center in any case. This could hardly be compared with the eight main centers.
VIIIb. Brazilian-Paraguayan Center - again outside the main centers with only 13 species, though Manihot (cassava)
and Arachis (peanut) are of considerable importance; others such as pineapple, Hevea rubber, Theobroma cacao were
probably domesticated much later.
Jack R Harlan in 1971 propose the theory that agriculture originated independently in three different areas and that, in
each case, there was a system composed of a center of origin and a noncenter, in which activities of domestication were
dispersed over a span of 5,000 to 10,000 kilometers
Genetics of Crop Domestication

• Few genes and genomic regions involved

• Genes for domestication represent a small subset of genes/trait for a species

• Domestication could occur quite rapidly

• May not carry adequate genetic diversity

 There is a common suite of traits—known as the “domestication syndrome”—that distinguishes most seed and fruit
crops from their progenitors (Hammer, 1984).

• Compared to their progenitors, food crops typically have larger fruits or grains.

• A loss of natural seed dispersal so that seeds remain attached to the plant for easy harvest by humans.
•
• Remarkably, crops often have fewer (although larger) fruits or grains per plant than their progenitors.

• A variety of physiological changes are also involved. These include a loss of seed dormancy, a decrease in bitter
substances in edible structures, changes in photoperiod sensitivity, and synchronized flowering.

Cell, Volume 127, Issue 7, 29 December 2006, Pages 1309-1321

Classical Plant Breeding

• Finds or creates genetic variation

• Evaluates variation over different environments.

• Selects improved genetic types for specific faming systems and for desirable traits.

• Develops and provides farmers with improved varieties.

Classical plant breeding in last 100 years

• Increased crop productivity by many fold.

• Developed and introduced hybrid cultivars.

• Developed and introduced resistance to diseases and insect pests.

• Increase food quality and quantity.

• Developed crops adaptable for mechanical harvest.

Developed crops adaptable for mechanical harvest.

• Cost of labor, and production is less.

• Monoculture is more prone to disease and environmental stresses!

• Need fertilizers and pesticides!

• The whole process is against “Nature” and not environment friendly!

 • Lifted Billion Plus out of
Green Revolution poverty

• Undernourished from
38% to 19% in past 20
years

• Food consumption per

capita has increased.

• India: Food production

from 50 to 200 million
tons in past 5 decades;
Wheat: from 6 to 82
million tons per year
• Less starvation and
famine
• Increased food self
sufficiency
Green Revolution

• Focused on a few grain groups, wheat, rice and maize

• Selected for response to improved management; fertilizer and pesticides

• Crop yield was the major goal

• Very successful in Asia.

The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from
starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet.
• Farmers traditionally consumed a limited and unbalanced diet.
• Agricultural societies relied heavily on a single staple crop (e.g., wheat, rice, potatoes),
which lacked essential nutrients.
• Example: Traditional Chinese peasants typically ate only rice for all meals.
• In contrast, ancient foragers had a diverse diet, including berries, mushrooms, fruits,
snails, turtles, rabbits, and wild onions.
• This dietary variety ensured foragers received all necessary nutrients.
• Foragers were less vulnerable to food shortages, as they didn’t depend on one food
source.
Is agricultural revolution a major advancement
for humanity?
• It was viewed as a story of progress driven by increasing human intelligence.
• Evolution was believed to have produced smarter humans capable of understanding
and manipulating nature.
• This intelligence supposedly led to the domestication of animals (like sheep) and
cultivation of crops (like wheat).
• People were thought to have willingly left the harsh, risky life of hunter-gatherers.
• They supposedly embraced a more comfortable and fulfilling life as settled farmers.
The narrative of the Agricultural Revolution as
human progress is questionable
• There’s no evidence humans became more intelligent over time.
• Foragers already had deep knowledge of nature, crucial for their survival.
• Farming brought harder, less fulfilling lives compared to foraging.
• Foragers had more varied, stimulating lives with less risk of starvation and disease.
• Though agriculture increased food supply, it didn’t improve diet or leisure time.
• Extra food led to population growth and privileged elites, not better living conditions.
• Farmers worked harder and ate worse than foragers.
Wheat domesticated Homo sapiens, rather
than vice versa
Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat.

• Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass.

• Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world.

• According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the
most successful plants in the history of the earth.

• Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the
size of Britain.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)

Yuval Noah Harari
 How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)
Wheat manipulated Homo sapiens to its advantage. Yuval Noah Harari

After about 10,000 years of comfortable hunting and gathering, humans began cultivating wheat.
Within a couple of millennia, they devoted their days to caring for wheat plants.

Wheat required a lot of effort to cultivate. It disliked rocks and pebbles, so humans cleared fields. It
also didn’t share space, water, or nutrients with other plants, leading to long days of weeding under the
sun.

Wheat faced various challenges, including worms, blight, rabbits, and locust swarms. Farmers built
fences and guarded their fields. They dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from wells to
water wheat. They even collected animal feces to nourish the ground.
The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks.

It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water
buckets.

Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price.

Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such
as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.

Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next
to their wheat fields.

This completely changed their way of life.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)

Yuval Noah Harari
We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.
The word ‘domesticate’ originates from the Latin ‘domus’, meaning ‘house’. Who lives in a house? Not wheat,
but humans.

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to trade a good life for a miserable one? It didn’t offer a better diet.

Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on various foods. Grains made up only a small part of our
diet before the Agricultural Revolution.

A cereal-based diet is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and bad for teeth and gums. Wheat didn’t
provide economic security. Peasants’ lives were less secure than hunter-gatherers. Foragers relied on dozens of
species to survive, weathering difficult years without preserved food.

If one species was reduced, they could gather and hunt more of others.

Farming societies have relied on a small variety of domesticated plants for most of their calorie intake until
recently. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, like wheat, potatoes, or rice.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)

Yuval Noah Harari
What then did wheat offer agriculturists?

It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo
sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory,
and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes.
Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars
in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success
of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.
If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without
money is bankrupt.
If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From
such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the
essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under
worse conditions.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)

Yuval Noah Harari
Summary

• Almost all the food we consume today, are agricultural products.

• Agriculture is not a natural process.
• During the crop domestication, all the crops, plants have changed
genetically and phenotypically from their ancestors. They cannot grow
or survive without human intervention.
• Most of the crops require some form of pesticides and fertilizers for
their optimum growth and it’s not necessarily bad for the human health.
• We may emphasize on regulation and quality control of the agricultural
produce.
 Gene : determines traits of an organism
BASE
PAIRS

Gene determines traits (characteristics) of an

organism e.g. height, colour, size etc
 Or
Plant with insect
resistance gene
Car with GPS

Just take the GPS and install in the

car of your choice!!!

Which is similar to GMO/ Genetic

Engineering!

Car without GPS

Plant
Phenotype
Strategies to develop stress tolerant and high yielding crop
varieties.

Plant breeding: is the process of altering traits of plants in order to get desirable
characteristics.
• It has been practiced for thousand of years and often leads to plant domestication.
• It involves combining parental plants to improve traits.

A B

A & B: Increasing crop productivity by plant breeding https://www.yara.co.uk/

Your Ancestors Didn’t Eat The Same Type Of Wheat That You Do
Organic or Natural Products!!!!
Selective Breeding Works Wonders
 Mutations, the ultimate source of supercrops

No regulation
2000 registered crop
varieties

Still-active Institute of mutation breeding in Japan, 88.8 terabecquerel Cobalt 60 source, 3608 feet radius
gama field and 28 foot high dike around the perimeter
Chromosome: Genes:
Genome

A/T/G/C  Letter in the

Alphabet where there are
only four letters

Codon/Triplet  Word  Code

for amino acid (eg. ATG
codes for methionine)

Gene  Sentence

Genome  Book or the

organism

This is just an analogy for

understanding.
 Conventional Breeding

Agrobacterium mediated transformation

Radiation Breeding

Conventional Organic/Natural Food, Acceptable GMO

Overview of Genetic
The Transformation via Agrobacterium
mode of action

Agrobacterium at
wound site Infects at
root crown or just
below the soil line.

opines

Agrobacterium in soil use

opines as nutrients.
Overview of Genetic Transformation via Agrobacterium
Tobacco Tissue culture

DLDH GENE

Figure 12: Tobacco tissue

culture
 Rice Tissue culture

Healthy seeds of rice

DLDH GENE
De-husked manually

Surface sterilization

Washed by 70% ethanol for 1-5 min

Washed ¾ times with water

50% bleach wash

Wash ¾ times more with water

Plating the seeds with 1:1 ratio of auxin and cytokinin

After 30 days

Callus formation Target Gene transfer via Agrobacteria

Callus subcultured

3 rounds of selection

Small microcalli

Shoting (cyt> aux)

Rooting(auxin> cyt)
Figure 13: Rice tissue
culture
Gene Gun
1 Phillips McDougall 2011 study for Crop Life International | 2 Estimated numbers from DuPont Pioneer based on studies from recent biotech applications. | 3 Country count cited from ISAAA.org
Nutritional enhancement: The contribution of biotechnology
• Micronutrient malnutrition is widespread especially in poor
populations across the globe, reducing productivity of adults and
leading to premature death in severe cases, particularly among
women and children.

• Around 49 nutrients are essential to meet the metabolic needs of

humans and deficiencies of various minerals and vitamins together
are often addressed as ‘Hidden Hunger’, which is considered one of
the most serious global challenges faced by mankind.

• Iron deficiency anemia, vitamin A deficiency and iodine deficiency

are recognized as three most common forms of micronutrient
malnutrition, followed by other micronutrients including zinc, folate,
calcium, proteins and other vitamins.
 Golden Rice

Golden Rice technology is based on the simple principle that

rice plants possess the whole machinery to synthesise β-
carotene, and while this machinery is fully active in leaves,
parts of it are turned off in the grain.

By adding only two genes, a plant phytoene synthase (psy)

and a bacterial phytoene desaturase (crt I), the pathway is
turned back on and β-carotene consequently accumulates in
the grain.
Filling a biosynthetic gap: Pathway elements in green are functional in wild-type rice
grains. Thus the GGPP precursor molecule is being synthesized and lycopene can be
cyclized. Elements in blue, including the blue box, are effectively absent. Introduction of
the enzymes phytoene-synthase and the bacterial desaturase CRTI fills the
biosynthetic gap created by the absence of the blue elements.
World Health Organization reported that about 250 million preschool children are affected by VAD, and
that providing those children with vitamin A could prevent about a third of all under-five deaths, which
amounts to up to 2.7 million children that could be saved from dying unnecessarily.
Golden Rice can be the solution!

6 μg/g 37 μg/g

http://www.goldenrice.org/
How natural BT works?

BT SPORES

Normal gut bacteria

BT crystalline Toxin 200px.

 Convenstional
Bt cotton cotton
 10,000 Years of crop evolution

•Agriculture is one of mankind’s major technical innovations

•Change from hunter-gatherer lead to the development of civilization: about
10,000 years ago
•Development of farming and pastoral societies
•Mendelian Genetics – the Green Revolution
•DNA – the Gene Revolution
• GM crops (Another revolution in waiting???)
 Oral medicines/enzymes great!!! plant produce??? God
Forbid NO NO NO!!!!!

GMO Trait Uses Original Benefit

Source
Human Insulin Insulin Harvested from Chemically indistinguishable from human
dependent dogs and pigs insulin. Much safer, no allergic reactions, no
diabetes vegan issues
Taxol Cancer Pacific yew Preserves yew trees, Excellent platform for
treatment tree drug discovery for chemotherapy
Vitamins Diet Many Cheaper, easy purification
supplement
fortifying
cereals
Chymosin (a Making cheese Calf stomach More predictable and controlled cheese, no
protease from lining vegan issues
rennet) 1st GM
enzyme
approved for
Mutants vs Transgenics
Are Mutants tested for safety??
Transgenic modification in the lab is the least
invasive technology genetically, it is the most
well understood, yet it is the one most
shunned by those that oppose biotech.
 THE RULES, 1989
Notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 (EPA 1986)

1. Rules for the Manufacture, Use/Import/Export and Storage of Hazardous Micro Organisms/ Genetically
Engineered Organisms or Cells, 1989 commonly referred to as the ‘Rules 1989’.
2. These rules are applicable to Genetically Engineered organisms/hazardous micro-organisms and cells
generated by the utilization of such gene-technologies and to substances and products of which such organisms
and cells form part.

Competent Authorities under Rules, 1989

REGULATORY PATHWAY FOR GENETICALLY ENGINEERED AND/OR
GENOME EDITED PLANTS
Commercially Approved NBT Products
gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)
compared to regular
tomatoes. GABA is an amino acid
that can help lower blood pressure
and promote relaxation.
 Change is life yet its Scary

It could be
I wont eat anything harmful
The Technologicalthat’s
Underpinnings
geneticallyof Genome Engineering
modified
Molecular Farming/Pharming
What is Molecular Pharming?

The manufacturing of valuable pharmaceutical

or industrial recombinant proteins using plant-
based production systems
Can plants replace plants?
Green Chemical
 INTRODUCTION

❖ Pharming, a portmanteau of "farming" and "pharmaceutical", refers to the use of genetic

engineering to insert genes that code for useful pharmaceuticals into host animals or plants that
would otherwise not express those genes or express them in low level, thus creating a genetically
modified organism.
❖ Whereas, Molecular farming is a new technology that uses plants to produce large quantities of
pharmaceutical substances such as vaccines and antibodies.
❖ It relies on the same method used to produce genetically modified (GM) crops – the artificial
introduction of genes into plants.
❖ Thus, Plant molecular farming describes the production of recombinant proteins and other
secondary metabolites in plants.
❖ It depends on a genetic transformation of plants that can be accomplished by the methods of
stable gene transfer, such as gene transfer to nuclei and chloroplasts, and unstable transfer
methods like viral vectors/Agroinfiltration/Gene Gun.
 Molecular Farming Strategy

❖ Clone a gene of interest

❖ Transform the host platform species
❖ Grow the host species, recover biomass
❖ Process biomass
❖ Purify product of interest
❖ Deliver product of interest Candidate gene

Structure of Plant Introductio Transgenic Plant

gene Expression n in the
Vector plant
Plantation

Extraction
Metabolites and Harvest
Purification
 Products on the market

Therapeutic
Nutraceuticals human
products

Molecular
pharming
products

Vaccines
Antibodies
 Real examples - Plant-based Vaccines

Imagine if instead of using this… You could use this…

Expressi
Pathogen or Clinic
Antigen Plant on Reference
disease al trial
system
Plant-based human
Enterotoxigeni Potato and Transgeni Phase Tacket et al.,
vaccines in clinical c E.coli
LTB
Maize c I 1998, 2004
trials Capsid Transgeni Phase Tacket et al.,
Norovirus Potato
protein c I 2000
• Safety – Don´t carry an Kapusta et
Viral major
alive pathogen (only the Hepatite B
surface
Lettuce Transgeni Phase al., 1999 and
virus and Potato c I Thanavala
capsid protein) protein
et al., 2005
Glycoprotein
• Storage and delivery – and Viral Phase Yusibov et
Rabies virus Spinach
Can be stored at room nucleoprotei vector I al., 2002
n
temperature and orally
Influenza virus Nicotina
delivered, which is very (H5N1; 2009 benthamian Launch Phase Cummings
important for HA
pandemic) a vector I et al, 2014
developing countries
Nochi et al.,
Transgeni Phase 2009 and
Cholera CTB Rice
c I Yuki et al.,
 Real examples - Therapeutic Human
Proteins
Gaucher's disease or Gaucher disease is a genetic disorder in which Taliglucerase alfa (recombinant glucocerebrosidase) is an enzyme
glucocerebroside (a sphingolipid, also known as glucosylceramide) replacement therapy (ERT) approved for treatment of adult and paediatric
accumulates in cells and certain organs. The disorder is characterized patients with Type 1 Gaucher disease (GD) in several countries and the first
by bruising, fatigue, anemia, low blood platelet count and enlargement plant cell–expressed recombinant therapeutic protein approved by the US Food
of the liver and spleen, and is caused by a hereditary deficiency of the and Drug Administration for humans.
enzyme glucocerebrosidase (also known as glucosylceramidase),
which acts on glucocerebroside. When the enzyme is defective,
glucocerebroside accumulates, particularly in white blood cells and
especially in macrophages (mononuclear leukocytes).
Glucocerebroside can collect in the spleen, liver, kidneys, lungs, brain,
and bone marrow.

Taliglucerase alfa

▪ First plant-made pharmaceutical drug to be

approved by the FDA

▪ Treats Type I Gaucher disease

▪ Produced on carrot cell suspension cultures

▪ Opens a precedent that may revive the

investors interest for molecular farming biotech
companies
Vertical Farming: The Future?
Vertical Farming
Farming is being brought into the cities.
Why farms needs be brought in cities?
• Current world population is 7.7 billion, in 2050 it will be 9 billion
• Not enough farmland to feed everyone.
• Huge loss due to transportation, storage.
• Farming: Less respectful, and not a white-collar job for urban people (unfortunately).

Benefits!!!
• Less input, more output
• No pests, less bacterial and fungal
• No pesticides needed.
• Healthier food.
Hydroponics
AeroFarms
Aquaponics – An Ecosystem that
Promotes Plants and Fish Farming
Together
Aerofarms (New Jersey)
•Formar warehouses, nightclubs,
paint ball centers.
•Parent company of IKEA
•500 million dollars
•1 million anural turn over
•Seed to harvest in 15 days.
•Supplying food to Singapore
airlines
A Swedish food tech company called Plantagon
Sky greens

The Singapore-based company Sky Greens has developed a revolutionary vertical farming
system which is also the world’s first low carbon, hydraulic driven farm. The vegetables are
planted on shelves that keep on rotating throughout the day.

The plants at the bottom receive water, while the ones at the top get sunlight and the
process continues. This approach minimizes the use of water, land, and energy over the
conventional farming techniques.
 Square Roots

Based in Brooklyn, New

York, Square Roots has developed
and installs “modules” —
hydroponic farms in reclaimed
shipping containers that can grow
certain non-GMO vegetables
around the clock and without
pesticides. Today they are
producing mint, basil, other herbs
and leafy greens.
Persona Urban Farm, Tokyo, Japan
by Kono Designs, NY
TriBeCa
A farm in Manhattan,
underneath two
Michelin-starred
restaurant Atera.
• Animal welfare
• Food Safety
• Sustainable
production of
meat