 So, in the book, I critique both trade-off blind biotechnology, recognizing that some biotechnology does pay attention to trade-offs. And I also critique what I call mindless mimicry of nature, not paying attention to what aspects of nature are most likely to be good models for agriculture. But when I thought about my audience, I figured there would probably be a lot more people who would think that everything in nature was perfect and would need to be disabused of that notion, then there would be people who were gung-ho biotechnology people. So I said, how should I reach out to that audience, present things in a way that they will find interesting and that will help them understand some of these ideas. And so the opening paragraph in the first draft of the book was something like this. Scrawled across a stone wall in an ancient language that few outsiders can read was the following manifesto. Down with pesticides, down with monoculture, eat lower on the food chain. These slogans had almost obscured earlier slogans, workers unite, and down with the queen. And so then I actually took two or three pages before revealing that these slogans had been written by leaf-cutter ants who had been farming fungus gardens for 50 million years and who use an extreme version of monoculture, growing just one strain of one fungus, who use pesticides to control garden pests, and who don't eat low on the food chain, rather than eating the leaves themselves, they feed them to the fungus, which is inefficient, like animals are inefficient, and then they eat the fungus. And so I thought that would be a good example where here's a case, I'm saying we're looking for wisdom in nature, but there are times when we can be mislead if we copy nature blindly, we would look at the leaf-cutter ants and say, boy, pesticides, monoculture, and feedlot, that's the way to go, because that's what the ants have been doing for 50 million years, so it must be sustainable. I think we should take lessons from nature, and in fact the original title of my book, subtitle was, Where Does Nature Wisdom Lie? And that suggests that we should be looking to nature for ideas to improve agriculture. But when I say where does nature's wisdom lie, I'm also suggesting a lie, a falsehood, that sometimes we can misinterpret things in nature, and apply, copy aspects of nature that in fact have not been improved by natural processes over the millennia. What we want to do is copy or retain those aspects of nature that have been improved or over millions of years improved by criteria that are relevant to agriculture. What we want to avoid is copying aspects of nature that haven't been consistently improved, because those are cases where we may actually be able to design something better than what's found out in nature. I would argue that while natural selection has done a really good job improving trees, it hasn't done such a good job improving the overall organization of forests. So if we think about how we're going to use crop diversity to minimize risk, and we look to nature and we see that there's a very large number of plant species per square kilometer, but that the species that are there this year are the same as those that are there next year. If we were to blindly copy nature, we would say, okay, so we should grow mixtures of species, but we shouldn't do crop rotation, because crop rotation where you grow rice this year and corn next year, that's not something that's seen in nature. And yet because that aspect of nature hasn't been consistently improved, it's quite possible that crop rotation will be a better way of using diversity rather than mixing species together the way they are in nature. If you think about a gene that controls how much the roots of a plant spread and go into the soil under their neighboring plants, it's pretty easy to show mathematically that a gene that favors that kind of spread, stealing resources, soil resources from neighbors will have higher fitness and therefore those genes will become more common in the population. And yet the overall efficiency of a whole field of such plants with those greedy spreading roots is going to be less than if each plant stuck to its own area of soil and just use those resources as efficiently as possible. It means that because there's this conflict between the individual competitiveness of plants and the collective performance of plant communities and natural selection favors the individual competitiveness, it means that a big part of the job of the plant breeder is to reverse past evolution, reverse those selfish genes and breed for crops that cooperate to produce high yield with minimal resources. I think in many cases breeding for a more cooperative plant type for plants that work well together rather than having your rice plants fighting each other for resources it may actually not be that difficult to do. The reason is that natural selection was going in the other direction and so in reversing that and going for cooperation you're not trying to beat evolution at its own game, you're playing a different game. I think if they can do it that it probably will increase yield and it probably will increase water use efficiency. So I think if they manage to get C4 rice probably they will be able to get more yield with less water. I think it'll be a difficult thing to do and whether they can succeed I don't know but I think the approach they're taking is reasonable. Really my biggest concern is this tendency for all the money to go to biotechnology and for biotechnologists to sort of go off in a corner somewhere and not work with plant breeders, crop physiologists, soil scientists, entomologists, you know the whole rest of the agricultural research ecosystem. And so I think that's where the real problem lies. And so here at Erie my impression is that while you probably don't have perfect cooperation among people from different disciplines, it seems like it's a lot better than what I've seen at other places. And so I'm really excited about the things that I've learned here, really impressed by the things that I've seen and especially because of that cooperation among people from different disciplines. So one thing I would worry about is that if Erie produces this really wonderful variety that that could be grown over, you know, all of Asia essentially. And then if it turns out that that variety is susceptible to some disease all the rice production in Asia is at risk. That's essentially what happened with the southern corn leaf blight epidemic back in the 70s. So we made an interesting point here and that is that the consumer preferences for rice in Asia are really, really diverse in contrast to, you know, nobody wants to know what kind of wheat cultivar is in their bread. And so they argue that that's actually sort of a built in stabilizer or factor increasing diversity, because people are not going to grow the same variety of rice just because it wouldn't fit consumer tastes. I thought that was an interesting point. If you look at the total amount of grain produced on the planet and how much grain a person needs to eat to meet their protein and calorie needs, they're just about equal. So that means we've got just barely enough grain to feed everyone on a grain only diet. Now, some people, of course, are eating meat, which consumes, you know, more pounds of grain, you know, per pound of meat. And that's balanced by, you know, the production of bananas and, you know, fish and, you know, the other things. But we don't have a big food surplus. You know, the world, world stocks of grains are typically something like two months supply, you know, in all the warehouses and ships at ocean and that sort of thing. So, you know, according to the Bible, Joseph said they needed seven years of grain to be food secure. We've got two months of grain.