What Emerging Trends Will Most Shape the Future of Food Production?

“In order to keep growing populations well fed, we need to produce a lot more food, in increasingly challenging conditions. We’re going to see a transition to alternative crop varieties that are more climate and disease resistant, with gene-editing playing a huge role in that.

“Climate change is increasingly disturbing agricultural production, especially in the developing world. Rice is close to 25 percent of global calorie consumption, but cultivation is under threat: a one degree increase in nighttime temperature contributes to roughly an 8 percent decrease in yields. Another thing people don't always associate with climate change is disease. Diseases that were manageable five or ten years ago are becoming devastating, due to changes in rainfall or temperature making conditions better for fungal growth, for example.

Why Gene Editing is the Next Food Revolution

BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

TUCKED INTO A suburban Long Island neighborhood, a 12-acre plot may be growing the future.

Under a blistering July sun, Zachary Lippman bends over a row of foot-high plum tomato plants to reveal budding yellow flowers that will each produce a tomato and ripen over the summer. Out here, on the grounds of a former dairy farm, it has all the appearance of age-old tradition.

But inside a nearby lab, Lippman advanced the selective breeding process with a little nip and tuck of the plant’s own DNA, and now the “edited” plant is about to bear fruit in the field.

“There’s a long way to go, but what we have able to do in the last four or five years is unbelievable,” says Lippman, a professor of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “It’s science fiction.”

He created the plants using gene editing, a technology—based on a natural process—that allows researchers to cut out certain bits of DNA in order to control traits. The cell’s genetic structure then repairs itself automatically, minus the targeted gene. His tomatoes are now programmed to produce double the number of branches and, as a result, twice the tomatoes.

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USDA report highlights results of pesticide residue tests in food

he USDA has published the 2022 Pesticide Data Program Annual Summary, which shows that over 99% of the samples tested had pesticide residues below benchmark levels established by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a news release.

The tests were conducted on 10,665 samples from 23 commodities including fresh and processed fruits and vegetables, dairy, nuts and grains, the release said. The Pesticide Data Program is a national pesticide residue monitoring program that tests a variety of domestic and imported foods, with a focus on foods that are consumed by infants and children.

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