38 Quotes by Nina Fedoroff

If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population – maybe half.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can’t be eaten by people – and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that’s because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes.

We have domesticated crops over a very long period of time, like tens of thousands of years. And crops get – seeds get carried. Sometimes, if they’re very small seeds, they get scattered off trucks. Pollen travels.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they’re agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn – called Indian corn – that you buy in the fall.

I don’t know how you overcome the dearth of scientists in the government positions.

Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture – from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding.

We’ve gotten so good at growing food that we’ve gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we’d like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.

We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven. We’re going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops.