• Question: I'm interested in your intercropping data. Those yields sound fantastic. So why don't we farm like that more often? I assume we lose some of the crop due to difficulties in harvesting?...Or do you think there are other reasons?

    Asked by ellie_russell to Andy, Cathie, Jules, Les, Ricarda on 25 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by adam_stapleton.
    • Photo: Andy Stirling

      Andy Stirling answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      I’m sure other colleagues on the panel can answer this more specifically than me.

      But I just wanted to chip in, that this is great query. It focuses on one of the many kinds of innovative ways of farming, that show enormous potential for further development. But this kind of practice could easily be suppressed by a concentration on conventional GM designed for intensive industrial cultivation of monocultures. There are many reasons why these different alternatives are prevented from flourishing. But an undue focus on conventional GM is one ot them.

    • Photo: Les Firbank

      Les Firbank answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      One of the problems about intercropping is that it takes a lot of labour, and a lot of thought. In Britain, not many people want to be farmers, and most people want to buy cheap food. Intercropping is hard to do on a large scale, with large tractors, and so you will find it on allotments and market gardens rather than on the big farms. Andy talks about ‘intensive cultivation of monocultures’ as though it’s a bad thing. It has given many of us (but not all of us) cheap, abundant and safe food, and allowed many farmers’ children to get more interesting and better paid jobs. This is what happened to me: my father was a small farmer, we only once took a family holiday, we had to be at home to milk the cows every morning and every night. Now I have a much more interesting job. Tonight, I’m typing this up at a field research station in Finland, discussing how to improve our ways of measuring and forecasting global environmental change.

    • Photo: Julian Little

      Julian Little answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi Ellie, not too much to add to Les’ comments on this but would like to pick up on Andy’s suggestion that the focus on GM tends to over-shadow other innovations such as intercropping.

      In reality, the use of GM in agriculture has never been a silver bullet to all the latter’s problems – it should be seen as one of many tools that farmers can access to help them produce safe, high quality affordable food. So why not intercrop with a GM crop – there is a lot of evidence now that GM crops that are resistant to insect attack have a halo effect on nearby non-GM crops, reducing the numbers of destructive insects and increasing the numbers of predatory insects that might control – take a look at the BBC’s coverage of a recent article in Nature – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18424557 .

      Likewise Sir Gordon Conway, International Development Professor at Imperial college, London has suggested that much of the non-political issues with growing food in many African countries might be alleviated by growing GM seeds organically – especially since they tend not to have access to fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation water.

      So I never think of GM as a “solve-all” – we need to use ALL the possible tools in the toolbox to solve the big problems out there. As an industry, we are certainly not ignoring either the alternatives nor the possible combinations that are out there.

Comments

  • Photo: petermelchett

    petermelchett commented on :

    Ellie – there are lots of ways we could make modern low input farming more productive, and in countries where GM has not dominated the debate about the future of farming, as it sadly has here, lots of interesting things are being tried. For example, agro-forestry allows you to grow rows of apple trees, with space in between for arable crops like wheat and barley. Despite what Les says, these systems can be designed for large-scale farms and farm machinery, and they have three clear advantages. First, because trees access nutrients at deeper levels in the soil than crops, you make better use of available nutrients. Second, because the space between the trees is all used for crops, the apple trees are using far less land than they would in an orchard. Third, the trees provide shelter for crops, and a habitat for wildlife – wonderful compared to an intensive farm with huge fields. Research into these systems and many others have been neglected in the UK as we have been obsessed with GM, and many other countries are getting ahead of us – at least we can learn from their work.