Global food production and climate change among other concerns are
societal issues that require major research input from crop science.
While suggestions are abundant on how crop science can help to resolve
these issues, many of the suggestions come from people who are not
actually familiar with the challenges and requirements to modify crop
plants grown under field conditions to achieve the necessary
improvements. Efforts to alter a gene or even several genes have very
rarely proven successful in having impact on crop production under
realistic field conditions. This lack of success has not been addressed
head on. This book serves as a reminder to crop scientists and others
that open, clear-minded assessments of the entirety of evidence
concerning a hypothesis is required before making claims of possible
increases in crop performance. This attitude of skepticism is not a
negative attitude but rather an employment of the cornerstone of
scientific investigation based on formation and evaluation of
hypotheses. Skeptical analyses are to be presented in the book on some
of the common suggestions for improving crop plants. The six specific
topics to be addressed are photosynthesis, seed number, nitrogen use
efficiency, water use efficiency, crop water loss, and unconfirmed field
observations. Each of the topics in this book, will first be reviewed to
present the origins of the popular assumptions about how specific plant
modification will result in improved crop performance. The review of the
background information will be followed by an examination of the
evidence, logic, and predicted outcomes for the assumed benefits of the
modifications. Finally, each chapter will offer novel, alternate
approaches to plant modification that have documented support for
positively impacting crop performance. The book will not be written in
specialized, detail language but offer access for those with a wide
range of interests in options for increasing crop production in the
future. The goal of the book is to provide information that is useful to
those with interests ranging from climatologist to food-oriented
sociologists. Of course, the topics covered will be of direct interest
to those studying plant sciences, particularly crop scientists. The hope
is to challenge a reader to re-examine some of her/his assumptions about
crop improvement and approach the topic with a renewed practice of
skepticism in formulating and evaluating hypotheses.
