Future of Agriculture

In Unit 4 of our Food for Thought we briefly learned about decay and rebirth which talks about what our future may look like. The process for creating this project was simple. In my group we decided to make a path that split. The reason we wanted the road to split was because we don't know what will happen in the future so we wanted people to choose what they wanted. I took inspiration from a piece of artwork created by the Beehive Collectives. The poster I looked at was called,”True Cost of Coal.” The inspiration i took was by seeing how they traveled through the poster and told a story about past, present, and future. I think what was challenging for our group was to represent the future. We found it difficult because we did not take this unit we just briefly talked about it.I think that the future of food is still undecided. We have an opportunity to fix everything we have caused, but if we do not try to change then we will stay a course on the path we are on currently.

GS. Food For Thought. 2014

N.O.A and KIS. Future. 2014

N.O.A & KIS
Food Poster
18in by 24in
Big Paper, Color Pencils and pencil
May 2014

The unit that we picked was unit 4, Birth, where we had to predict how the future of agriculture will look like. The class didn't do the unit so the prediction came from what we know already. We had to predict if the world is going to get better or worse. What my partner and I decided to do was to create two paths, one organic and the other GMO. GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organisms. Most of our food today is GM and the way they do that is by injecting a certain gene that has a desirable trait. On the poster we created there will be two futures. How humans act in the present will determine which future we will have. We used 3 words that represent the future, and the words are organic, GM and polyculture. On one side we have organic and polyculture, and on the other side, there's GM and monoculture. Polyculture means the farm has a variety of plants. For the organic side we used as an example one of our FE partner’s farms, Marc. We tried to incorporate most of the things he had in his farm onto the paper, such as his polyculture plants and his free range animals. For the GM side we incorporated lots of things that we learned in our other class. For example, we included crops being covered in chemicals. We also incorporated GM crops along the road as a fence so people don't know what is going on. Something that both futures require is recycling. Recycling plays a big part in the future because if there is lots of garbage on the land then we don't have space to grow crops, and if there is garbage on the water then the water will be polluted. There won't be water for the crops to grow or for us to drink and survive.

Anti GMO

For our unit 3 called Evolving in the Food course we studied plant genetics and genetic engineering. For plants genetics we used Gregor's Mendel (the father of genetics) method of the punnett squares to know the probability of the traits that the offspring will receive from the parents. For genetic engineering we talked about GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) crops, and finding out that the reason why farmers produce food all year even in winter was because the modify the foods genes by adding another organisms gene onto it. After studying GMO our last project was to have a debate on pro GMO and anti-GMO. I chose to argue against GMO so that makes me an anti-GMO, the reason why I chose anti-GMO because because GMO is not natural organism produced from nature and nature process on growing organic food. It also mixes everything and creates bigger problems like or health especially kids. GMO creates new allergies that kids get for the use of different chemicals on our food. If we didn't use GMO than we wouldn't have health problems and the food would have its natural value than none of this would happen. During this project I learned what GMO's are and how they work. I am proud of the debate