PDF file: Annual Report 2002/2003 - Scottish Crop Research Institute

Director’s Report
business enterprise. Farms as basic units of commercial
agricultural and horticultural operation encompass
mixed farms that tend to be small-to-medium
sized; large, mainly cash-grain crop farms; large stock
farms; plantations; and the small to very-small farms
in the LDCs. Larger farms are almost invariably the
more efficient in all respects. Industries upstream and
downstream of agriculture, and the retail sector have
also consolidated. (h) The pattern of agriculture dictates
the landscape, most cultures are rural-based, and
the rural condition and modus operandi can assume a
greater political importance than its population would
imply.
Universal environmental awareness has led to R&D in
minimal, no-till, and mulch-tillage agriculture in
order to maintain soil structure and limit the consequences
of tillage, namely soil erosion, oxidative processes,
greenhouse-gas emissions and loss of water by
evaporation. Other sustainability issues are balancing
inputs and outputs with improved knowledge of crop
nutrient needs; the use of animal and green manures,
composts, peat, sewage sludges, abattoir wastes, and
lime; above-ground and below-ground region-specific
biodiversity; the design and establishment of refugia
and dispersal corridors (mainly wide headlands and
wide and tall hedgerows) for native flora and fauna;
curtailing agricultural emissions (greenhouse gases,
pollutants, pharmaceuticals etc.); and improved water
management (protected and semi-protected cropping,
irrigation, hydroponics, avoidance of flooding and silt
damage, avoidance of salinity problems etc.). More
refined weather and market forecasts, and monitoring
(often remote) of the weather, crop performance, and
pest and disease incidence have given rise to effective
decision-support systems as an essential modern farming
tool. Inadequate attention has given in recent
times to crop rotation – the successive cultivation of
different crops in a specified order on the same field.
In central Africa, 36-year rotations have been reported
with a crop of finger millet rotating with a 35-year
growth of woody shrubs and trees. In principle, similar
systems prevail in the rest of the world where longlasting
perennial plantation crops (e.g. raspberries) are
rotated with conventional annual or biennial arable
crops. Short-term planning in the allocation of
research funding has by-passed long-term studies
using modern technologies on the impacts of specific
crops and their rotations on soil fertility and soil
structure.
In concert with modern mathematics, chemistry,
physics, computing and information technology, supply-chain
management, food and industrial product
processing, and satellites, transgenic technology with
its hugely innovative potential to address hitherto
intractable environmental, human and plant health,
quality, and production efficiency issues, is but the
latest scientific advance in the progress of global agriculture,
horticulture, managed forestry, and the
human condition. According to J. S. McLaren of
StrathKirn Inc., the next phase of agriculture will be
the age of the biorefiner, involving bioprospecting,
biomimetics, biocatalysis, biomaterials, and the design
and exploitation of organic compounds and products
derived from them, and biologically derived energy.
This view supported by the recent investment decisions
of many major corporations. Many rapidly
developing LDCs such as India and China regard
modern agriculture as the key to their future economic
success, reform, and sustainability.
Types of Agriculture In the MDCs, organic, conventional,
and ‘biotech’ (GMO-based) farming is practiced
to varying degrees; in the LDCs, there also
remains subsistence or peasant agriculture that confines
its practitioners to grinding poverty and little
dignity. Organic agriculture in the MDCs operates
with a focus on soil fertility, ecological principles, crop
rotation, and a belief in the rectitude, sustainability,
and biodiversity-enhancing characteristics of its
approach and the validity of its rules which preclude
synthetic fertilisers, synthetic pesticides and GM
crops. Criticisms of the organic model include (a) its
inability to validate claims as to the health-enhancing
qualities of organic foods, (b) its low productivity
compared with conventional and biotech agriculture,
(c) dependence on the use of poisonous copper salts,
(d) acceptance of blemished produce and the risk of
mycotoxins and other antinutritionals as well as
reduced vitamin C levels, (e) reliance on faecal fertilisation
with consequential concerns about contamination
of organic produce by food-poisoning
micro-organisms and the eggs of parasitic nematodes
as well as concerns about the pollution of water courses,
(f) organic farms and holdings acting as repositories
of pests and diseases, (g) reliance on tilling leading
to damage of soil structure and the release of greenhouse
gases, (h) marketing based on (or associated
with) criticism of and sometimes scaremongering
about conventional and biotech agriculture, (i) reluctance
to adopt and suspicion of new scientific and
technological advances, although modern breeding
systems not involving transgenic organisms, and
molecular diagnostics are accepted, (i) the inability of
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