A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
His custom crop boosted yields at a time when the temperature was predictable, and the crop could thrive in the easy narrow conditions they were designed for.
Unfortunately with climate change, the hardier seeds which produce lower yields but can weather more turbulent climates are harder to find because they were pushed out of production by the popularity of his invention.
In India, Punjab Haryana side (north west near pakistan border) were traditionally the bread baskets. But after a crop failures and droughts in 1960s and in 70s, they were experimented here and they were successful - a gree revolution for 10 or so years. But these varieties were very water intensive, and seeing the yields, most farmers just continously year on year did atleast 2 ccrops a year (a winter one (wheat) and a summer (rice)). This made the lands a lot less productive and many parts of the land since then have nearly become barren. 2 crops per year were normal, but it usually was never this intensivem and natural processes to restore the land (artificial or natural fertilisers, or burning parts of previes crops, or tilling) were just not effective. This lead to reduction in output, and today, a lot of youth just can not do farming, either because they do not want to (they have seen/heard of hard times from parents, or just do not have good land left to farming. This is also one of the reasons why a lot of punjabi-haryanvi diaspora is now outside India - many students just did not see a future here, and if their parents had some money from the good times, they sent their children abroad (us and canada makorly).
The intention to improve crop yield was right, but the implementation went wrong, and consequences were not great. We did not have a major famine since. Many other states took the job of producing these crops (either they partially adopted the newer seeds, or just had external investments, and used older stuff in a less intensive manner), but atleast the punjab side region lost a lot.
edit - after reading again, I forgot to add that a big part of the problem was also fertilisers. with the hyv (high yield variety) seeds, fertilisers and pesticides adoption also became the norm, and this made the yield more to very high levels for 10-15 years (uptil early 90s). but with time, land became less productive, and the amount (and hence cost) of fertilisers kept on in increasing, and this is a major part of why it was not as economicaaly viable to do farming anymore.
well written
I mean, he did get a Nobel Prize
Comedy is the subversion of the expected.
Sure, thank you, my autocritic was more directed at the form than the substance(, although a bit too "old-school" perhaps), but if you missed that then it's probably 'more alright'/'less amateurish' than i first thought :)
