Beyond The Green Revolution; How Humanity Needs Cutting-Edge Technology To Save Itself

By Chandre Dharmawardana –FEBRUARY 26, 2019

Dr. Chandre Dharmawardana

Some technicians dressed like surgeons in an operating theatre are working in a vast tower sealed from the environment. It is full of hydroponic shelves, lights, pumps and small robots  controlled by  clusters of computers. This is  ultra high-tech  agriculture (UHTA). We are in a modern agro-factory tower that has replaced the farm with its soil, pests, pesticides, droughts and floods. Inspired by space agro-technology, it has no soil. It  uses  95% LESS WATER than conventional high-intensity agriculture (HIA) popularized by the “Green Revolution”.

This is not science fiction (see figure). Such commercial UHT plants supply the markets since 2004 in New Jersy, USA. Similar agro-plants are being set up right inside city centers, within minutes to local markets, cutting transportation and warehousing.  

When low-intensity agriculture (LIA), e.g.,organic agriculture (OA) or traditional agriculture  had reached the end of their tether, and when the world was at the brink of huge famines, HIA with its green revolution rescued the world. Now the green revolution itself is old technology, and a new UHT revolution is dawning, not only to feed the humans, but also to rescue the threat to the environment caused by the phenomenal  human assault on the ecosystem.

AVERTING THE HUMAN-MADE MASS EXTINCTION.

In a previous article (Colombo Telegraph) we examined how a menaced humanity facing a threatened environment foolishly turns to ludicrous remedies based on going back to an imagined “glorious past of plenty” using traditional farming or organic agriculture. In reality, such technologies failed to feed the masses even in ancient times, when the populations were small. In Sri lanka, even if all the tea, rubber and coconut could be converted to paddy, the OA harvests would still leave 75% starving. 

Populations in developing countries increased by a factor of five since WWII, vastly encroaching  wilderness habitat and  triggering a man-made mass extinction of species, further aggravated by agrochemical overuse. In this they merely joined the developed countries that pushed the industrial revolution using the wealth created  by slavery that set up  vast monoculture of crops that assaulted  the ecosystem.

In Sri Lanka, some 600K hectares are under tea, about 600K under paddy, and another 600K are used for rubber and coconut taken together. Forest cover had taken devastating hits with each giant irrigation and ‘colonization’ scheme starting from GalOya. The destruction of  Sri Lankan wild elephants by their loss of  habitat due to these ‘colonization schemes’ is merely the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, Europe is reeling from a rapid and disastrous loss of wild bees and other pollinating insects mainly due to habitat loss and possibly to to increased use of neo-nicotinoids.   

Given the magnitude of the problem, it is imperative to reclaim the wilderness habitat for Nature. The HIA-green-revolution  enabled us to use 1/5th the land and water for feeding compared to traditional agriculture (enabling us to feed fives times many mouths).  The new UHTA is already capable of reducing  the needed land extend to a mere 1/500 of HIA, and 1/2500 of organic agriculture.  All the 600,000 hectare of paddy can be eventually reduced to 1200 hectares of  grow towers. All the tea plantations can be replaced by  a few hundred grow towers clustered around an airport for direct export.  

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