I'm on holiday in Canada, southern Ontario to be precise. I took this photograph of a Syngenta seed variety demonstration plot just outside a small town called Mitchell on Highway 8 from Goderich to Stratford. This is farming country: field after field of corn, interspersed with other cereal and legume crops, on a large scale. Hybrid crops, mechanically planted, uniform spacing, well-fertilised soil and, every 5 km or so, massive grain silos to store the 100-day harvest. It is a picture of efficiency and orderliness.The contrast with smallholder African agriculture could not be greater. Fragmented plots of land, no mechanisation, haphazard intercropping, home-saved seed and minimal use of other farming inputs.... These are just some of the challenges of creating a green revolution in Africa.
Whether we like or not, farming is a high-input high-output business. Maybe there's room for low-input farming for niche markets serving the chattering classes in wealthy countries. Certainly there is no shortage of organically-certified expensive food products in towns like Stratford (Ontario), home to an internationally-renowned summer theatre festival and also, incongruously, to the Ontario Pork Congress (for further details of this remarkable event, see www.porkcongress.on.ca/). But on a large scale? Impossible.
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