That's not all our crops can do. We are also learning how to transform plants into factories. We can now raise plants that will create enzymes that would otherwise be created in chemical factories.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We can grow crops less expensively because molecular manufacturing technology is inherently low cost.
The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.
Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures.
Now listen, the one thing about agriculture is we've lost our manufacturing, we've lost a great deal of jobs overseas, lots of our industry. The last thing in the world we need to do is lose the ability to produce our food.
It's become more readily apparent that we need to be growing our own food and growing more things organically.
I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.
We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops.
The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.
By increasing the use of renewable fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel, and providing the Department of Energy with a budget to create more energy efficiency options, agriculture can be the backbone of our energy supply as well.
Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.