M. S. Swaminathan Quotes

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.

As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands.

There's almost no food that isn't genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution. Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.

Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it's a gradual process.

In essence, the science of agronomy is inseparable from biology.

Washington state's 2nd Congressional District is a major producer of small fruit crops such as raspberries and strawberries. This research center is doing important work to help farmers enhance the quality, yield and marketability of their small fruit crops.

The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.

When you do cross-breeding of plants, you're doing this blind experiment where you're just mixing DNA of different types of cells and just seeing what comes out of it.

A theoretical grounding in agronomy must, therefore, include knowledge of biological laws.

It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.

And the more profoundly the science of biology reveals the laws of the life and development of living bodies, the more effective is the science of agronomy.

Corn is the leading food and feed crop of the United States in geographic range of production, acreage, and quantity of product. The vital importance of a large acreage of this crop, properly cared for, therefore, is obvious.

The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.

We're close to losing our essential diversity. Look at our wheat crops - we rely on a handful of grain crops and plants that we've refined and bred over hundreds of years.

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.

You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed

Unless there is one master gene for yield, which I'm guessing there is not, engineering for yield will be very complex. It may happen eventually, but through the coming decades, we must assume that gene engineering will not be the answer to the world's food problems.

The thing that has not had enough attention is really thinking about how to use modern breeding techniques to really look at the germplasm pools and find ways to actually improve yields and to improve the heat and drought tolerance of these crops.

There would be no advantage to be gained by sowing a field of wheat if the harvest did not return more than was sown.

Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.

If a queen bee were crossed with a Friesian bull, would not the land flow with milk and honey?

We're trying to bring improved seeds to rural villages to increase yields. We're also trying to improve the roads to make it easier for people to get their produce to the market.

Close contact between science and the practice of collective farms and State farms creates inexhaustible opportunities for the development of theoretical knowledge, enabling us to learn ever more and more about the nature of living bodies and the soil.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

All the food we eat - every grain of rice and kernel of corn - has been genetically modified. None of it was here before mankind learned to cultivate crops. The question isn't whether our food has been modified, but how.