Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food [Kindle Edition] Author: Pamela C. Ronald | Language: English | ISBN:
B003AJS26M | Format: PDF, EPUB
Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food
Download electronic versions of selected books Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link By the year 2050, Earth's population will double. If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, and the public will lose billions of dollars as a consequence of environmental degradation. Clearly, there must be a better way to meet the need for increased food production.
Written as part memoir, part instruction, and part contemplation, Tomorrow's Table argues that a judicious blend of two important strands of agriculture--genetic engineering and organic farming--is key to helping feed the world's growing population in an ecologically balanced manner. Pamela Ronald, a geneticist, and her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, take the reader inside their lives for roughly a year, allowing us to look over their shoulders so that we can see what geneticists and organic farmers actually do. The reader sees the problems that farmers face, trying to provide larger yields without resorting to expensive or environmentally hazardous chemicals, a problem that will loom larger and larger as the century progresses. They learn how organic farmers and geneticists address these problems.
This book is for consumers, farmers, and policy decision makers who want to make food choices and policy that will support ecologically responsible farming practices. It is also for anyone who wants accurate information about organic farming, genetic engineering, and their potential impacts on human health and the environment. Books with free ebook downloads available Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 910 KB
- Print Length: 226 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0195393570
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 19, 2008)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B003AJS26M
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #215,856 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Agricultural Sciences > Crop Science
- #15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Agricultural Sciences > Crop Science
- #34 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Botany
I was given this book by a friend who is an organic "true believer" and when he handed me a book I sort of expect a re-hashing of the usual pro-organics arguments I've heard many times over the years. Instead I was pleasantly surprised.
The book is straight forward, well-reasoned, and accessible. I have a background in agriculture and molecular biology, and so at times I found the science a tad too simplistic to strongly hold my interest, but I suspect that for the average reader, it strikes a nice balance between addressing the subject fully and excessive complexity and jargon. The case they build is in my view quite compelling, and I hope this book serves to open many minds.
When I was starting out in plant science, I remember a professor telling me that when the first transgenics were being developed, he really thought the organics crowd would be the biggest supporters. "We'd just come up with a solution to their biggest problems, but instead they decided we were the enemy". Although I think that organics are, ultimately, a positive development in agriculture, they are like most "movements" a mixture of real reasons and irrational, emotional impulses. Although organic agriculture has been an important step towards a sustainable future, it has brought with it a fair amount of baggage, based on not on science or reason, but on a nostalgic idealization of traditional agriculture--even though such agriculture was often neither natural nor sustainable nor especially desirable, even then. The fear of genetic engineering seems to me to come from that deeply conservative undercurrent in an otherwise progressive movement.
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