[Commentary] A Morning at the Farmer's Market

Photo by Peter Wendt on Unsplash

I have a lot of respect for Bill Nye. When you're a public figure, you are often judged on how "right" you are. When you are in that position, you often feel pressure to stay the course and defend the indefensible to avoid giving the "other side" a victory.

But when he switched positions on genetically modified organisms, he showed he was far more interested in science than politics. Indeed, GMOs are just an extension of what farmers have done for millenia.

Most Americans will encounter GMOs through Monsanto, a large corporation who has a lot of marketshare and has largely paved the way for GMOs. And that may be affecting the perception of GMOs in general. Monsanto may be known for their bad publicity of suing smaller farmers for patent violations. The association of big corporations and suing small farmers with GMO make a lot of people nervous.

But that's different from the science itself. In fact, GMOs may actually be good for the environment. If your GMOs can be designed to alleviate the need for pesticides or restore the soil, you can improve your local conditions while also maximizing yield.

Adding iodine to table salt improved IQ scores by a full standard deviation when it was introduced. The new cosmic crisp apple tastes just like a regular apple, but has a shelf life of over a year.

Patents don't last forever, and there is a growing urban farming movement. As these GMO techniques become more accessible, expect to see DIY farmers prioritize not just basic crops, but those they can build themselves. Cloud computing and AI can help manipulate the underlying DNA sequences based on expected outcomes.

Imagine a world in which we don't just grow bland ordinary carrots, but each farmer is able to provide a distinct vegetable unique to them based on their own desires. Fortified rice can deliver vitamin A cheaply. Plants can be modified to leech out plastic and harmful pollutants from our air and land.

The microbiome! How often have we heard this in recent years? With all kinds of small organisms living in our gut, we have just begun to discover how to tackle a number of diseases. I'm excited to learn how to optimize my body's health just with small dietary tweaks.

I predict in a few decades we'll hear the same excitement around micronutrients. To truly optimize our microbiome we'll need to focus on having the right amount of not just vitamin A but zinc, selenium and plenty of things we've not heard of yet. By embedding these directly in our food, we'll be able to feed not just ourselves, but deliver an effective solution to the rest of the world.

After all, these things will be not need to be produced and shipped from pharmaceutical corporations. They'll literally grow out of the ground.