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Fortifying Crops – Improving Nutrition
The world’s need for food, animal feed and modern textile fibers cannot be met in the longer term with products farmed in a conventional way. Plant biotechnology – an innovative field in which Bayer CropScience is a global player – offers a way of producing enough food, feed and fiber in the future too. To ensure progress and for the good of mankind. The potential inherent in this science is enormous:
- Plant biotechnology can help to increase yields.
This science can make plants more productive. This in turn makes arable land more productive – and makes an important contribution to using the resource soil sustainably.
- Plant biotechnology can help to protect harvests.
For example, scientists have developed a method of optimizing plants in such a way that certain pests do not infest them. They took their inspiration from nature, deriving important information from a bacterium (very vague – either less of more detail). Growing these plants results in more targeted use of pesticides – another contribution to sustainability.
- Plant biotechnology can help to make crops grow more productively on marginal land.
Heat, cold, drought – all over the world there are regions in which the climate is too inhospitable for crops to flourish. Land with a high salt content cannot be used to grow plants and also hinders agricultural production in other ways. Scientists hope to be able to breed plants in the future which are resistant to climatic stress and salt.
- Plant biotechnology can help to preserve the environment.
In many parts of the world, soil erosion is a serious threat to agriculture, and plowing the fields only makes the problem worse. Direct sowing, on the other hand, spares the soil; it also reduces soil loss and thus the negative impact on creatures living in the soil. In conjunction with herbicide-tolerant plants this method of farming maintains the fertility of agricultural land.
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