More than 1,000 people are employed on the islands of Oahu, Maui, Kauai and Molokai, in which some people work directly with planting, growing and producing hundreds of thousands of individual varieties of seed crops such as corn, soybeans, sunflowers and cotton. Others collect notes in the fields on crop variety performance and analyze those results. Using state-of-the art laboratory technology, others test and characterize potentially new varieties of seed.

All work is focused on enabling plant breeders to improve yield, drought tolerance, disease resistance and quality of crops grown by farmers around the world.

What is plant breeding?
Plant breeding, using conventional or biotechnology practice, is the art and science of improving the genetic constitution of plants. The basic plant breeding technique of making selections from an array of plant varieties has been around since humanity began cultivating plants for food, fiber, fuel, fragrance and other needs.

Luther Burbank, generally considered the father of modren plant breeding, started improving more than 800 new strains of fruits, vegetables, flowers and grasses in 1870. One of his earliest creations was the Burbank potato, a disease-resistant crop which was heavily planted in Ireland after the potato blight caused famine.

Today's plant breeders continue to use many of Burbank's techniques and also incorporate learnings from other scientific disciplines including plant pathology, entomology, molecular biology, cytology, phsyiology, agronomy and statistics. The need for new plant varieties continues as humanity's needs and environmental conditions change. Plant breeders--professionals and hobbyists--work on virtually every crop and ornamental plant in production and select the tools of conventional and biotechnology breeding practices.

What is a hybrid, and what is an inbred parent line?
Most crop plants have a male and femal parent. Each parent is of the same species but has different genetic qualities that may be passed to the next generation of plants. A hybrid is a plant variety that combines the best genetic characteristics of its two parent lines and in fact out performs either parent line.

Prior to the discovery of hybrid performance more than a hundred years ago, most plant varieties were either open-pollinated varieties, inbred lines or clones. Open-pollenated crops like corn, are produced without controlling the source of the the male parentage. Open-pollinated varieties tend to be highly variable and usually not top performers. Inbred lines are developed by repeated pollination using the pollen and egg from the same plant. When this process is repeated over several generations, the strain becomes geneticially uniform and shows the same genetic characteristics generation after generation.

With naturally inbred crops like soybeans, the inbred varieties perform well. In other crops such as corn, the superior varieties are found via hybrid production. Hybrid seed corn became widely available and popular to growers around 1930.

What is biotechnology?
It's a term commonly used to refer to crops whose genetic makeup has been altered to give a plant a desirable trait. Some people call them genetically engineered crops or genetically modified organisims, which are referred to as GMOs.

The traits most frequently introduced into biotech crops help reduce or eliminate the application of pesticides, prevent soil erosion by enabling or reducing no-till farming techniques, and increase food production by improving yields.

Is this a new technology?
No, farmers have been using plant breeding and genetic modification techniques for thousands of years to improve plants and will continue to do so in the future. While plant science is a relatively modern discipline, its fundemental techniques have been applied throughout human history. Early farmers, like those in Egypt and the Americas, saved seeds from plants that produced the best crops and planted them the next year to grow even better crops.

So, farmers long ago noted that they could improve each succeeding year's harvest by using seed from only the best plants of the current crop. Plants that, for example, gave the highest yeild, stayed the healthiest during periods of draught or disease, or were easiest to harvest tended to produce future generations with these same characteristics.
Through several years of careful seed selection, farmers could maintain and strengthen such desirable traits. This was an early example of using genetics to improve crop production---even though the science behind it wasn't understood at all.

Interested in more information about teosinte and modern corn?

If agricultural biotech is so beneficial, why is there some resistance to it?
Agricultural biotech is a complex issue about our food. Some of the resistance stems from inaccurate or incomplete information. Some comes from individuals's personal belief about how things ought to be. Biotech is widely supported by farmers around the world, as well as numerous agricultural councils, government agencies, universities and international scientific and medical organizations.

Where are biotech crops grown?
In 2006, according to the ISAAA, biotech crops were grown on more than 252 million acres in 22 countries, of which 10.3 million farmers from these countries planted biotech crops in 2006. This is an increase from 8.5 million farmers in 2005.

Of the 10.3 million, 90% or 9.3 million (up significantly from 7.7 million in 2005) were small, resource-poor farmers from developing countries whose increased income from biotech crops contributed to their poverty alleviation. Of the 9.3 million small farmers, most of whom were Bt cotton farmers, 6.8 million were in China, 2.3 million in India, 100,000 in the Philippines, several thousand in South Africa, with the balance in the other seven developing countries which grew biotech crops in 2006. This initial modest contribution of biotech crops to the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by 50% by 2015 is an important development, which has enormous potential in the second decade of commercialization from 2006 to 2015. and increase of 11% from 2004. Over 60 countries are conducting crop biotechnology research, more than half of them in the developing world. Biotech seeds are used to grow more than half of the soybeans, 30% of the cotton and 15% of corn and canola in the world.

Are most of the fruits and vegetables I eat biotech plants?
No. The most commonly grown biotech crops today are corn, soybeans, cotton and canola. Many of the crops are processed into oils commonly used in a wide variety of food products, or into animal feed. In Hawaii, some growers raise a variety of papaya that was developed with the help of biotechnology after the papaya ringspot virus threatened to devastate the Hawaiian papaya industry.

Are biotech food safe to eat?
Yes. Biotech crops are among the most extensively tested, well charaterized, and regulated food, feed and fiber products ever developed. All commerical biotech crops have been thoroughly assessed for human and animal health and environmental safety according to well-established, internationally accepted, scientific standards and guidelines by the
U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and, where the plant provides protection from pests, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA).

In fact, the FDA and other government regulatory agencies have adopted the concept of "substantial equivalnce" for biotech foods, which was introduced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1993. That means that biotech foods are as safe to eat as an existing food with the same compositional and nutritional characteristics and a history of safe use.

The international scientific community, including the UK Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the European Commisison and the American Medical Association have all examined the health and environmental safety of biotech crops and have concluded that biotech crops pose no more risk than crops produced through traditional crop breeding methods.

After nearly two decades of extensive governmental, academic and industry oversight, not a single instance of actual harm to health, safety, or environment has ever been confirmed for any biotech crop placed on the market. To date, several billion meals have been consumed by people around the world with no confirmed cases of food safety issues.

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