Plough or Not to Plough

A couple of years ago, fresh from college and struggling to venture into science writing, I attended a seminar on crop biotechnology in Nairobi, Kenya. I vividly recall one guy from a multinational biotech company extol participants who included resource poor farmers, agricultural extension officers, the media, members of parliament and representatives of non-profit organizations, to consider integrating conservation tillage (CT) into Kenyas agricultural policies.

Conservation tillage, he explained, preserves soil nutrients and reduces soil erosion. As soon as he mentioned this, one participant shot up, seeking to know how weed control would be done. Use herbicides, the guy snapped.

This ignited a highly explosive debate about the pros and cons of conservation tillage that almost derailed the seminar. In a country where farmers are religiously allegiant to traditional farming methods, conservation tillage proved hard to sell.

Some in the seminar even dismissed conservation tillage as a ruse to promote the economic interests of multinational biotech companies. I, too, couldnt resist dismissing proponents of CT as apologists for the biotech...