Based in Minnesota, the McKnight Foundation is the sponsor of Food’s Frontier by journalist Richard Manning.
The basic premise of the book: the agricultural revolution of pesticides and fertilizers has actually set humanity up for a big fall. We have become dependent on them (I’m not sure if he covers this idea, but since most fertilizers are based on petroleum products we may be more screwed than we realize) and the only way out of a scenario where billions starve will be learning about more traditional crops and methods which are more sustainable. Sounds like a safe bet to me.
Incidentally Manning was also the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. In that book he advocated returning to our hunter-gatherer roots… Yyyyyeeeeeahhhh…
The part that interests me most:
“The Midwest is strewn with rural ghost towns whose small farmers were driven away by huge agricultural firms farming thousands of acres of a single crop. And the oversupply of grain has promoted widespread usage of high-fructose corn syrup in processed foods, contributing to the epidemic of obesity,” Manning said. The McKnight project researching an ancient Aztec polycropping system, still used by Mexican peasants, called milpa, could provide a solution for reversing monoculture in the U.S.
I love exploring new crops. Of course this ties in directly with my current interest in desert reclamation.
More related to consumer protection and sustainable agriculture:
The second green revolution is a revolution not only in biological science, but also in information distribution among scientists, farmers, and consumers. Food’s Frontier documents the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation’s Collaborative Crop Research Program, which has funded research and training in agricultural science in nine developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Each project is headed by scientists from the developing country, who identify the agricultural problem they want to tackle and put together interdisciplinary teams of scientists such as biologists, economists, and anthropologists. Each team collaborates with counterparts in U.S. universities.
“We’re realizing that economic and cultural factors are as important as biology, soil and climate in developing a secure global food supply,” Manning said. “Certainly, you have to understand the biology behind the interaction of, say, a chickpea and a pod borer if you want to reduce the damage the pest does to the plant. But you also need to figure out how to help Ugandan farmers learn about a method of planting that protects sweet potato from weevils, or how to convince Mexican wholesalers that there’s a potentially strong market in the United States for blue corn.”
Web link of note: McKnight Foundation
(At http://www.mcknight.org/)