First of all this is a computer simulation of plant evolution based solely on productivity, not plant health, ability to reproduce, disease resistance, etc. When you start messing with the genes, as Monsanto is today, you get unexpected results, as Monsanto is finding. You can design a more productive plant, but if it cannot survive against the environment, productivity is the least of your concerns.

My job has taken me to a hotel in far north Texas for the past several months. This is cotton country. The big news this year is that the "Round Up Ready" cotton has problems. Round Up Ready means that the genetics of the plant have been modified so you can spray Round Up on the entire field and the cotton will not die from it. Only the real weeds will die. That concept sounds pretty good at first. This year; however, they are finding that when you rotate out of cotton for a year, there will be volunteer RRR cotton plants growing in your rotation fields after the cotton crop is gone. It also turns out that you cannot kill the cotton without killing the rotation crop because the cotton is insensitive to RR. So the cotton continues to grow as a weed in the fields. You would think that this is not such a big deal for just a few cotton volunteers, but it is. Now you have cotton in the fields attracting the boll weevil moth. Since the rotation crop is not sprayed against boll weevils, the boll weevil population is rising completely unabated on these volunteer plants. For the first time in recent memory the boll weevil is once again a problem. I'm sure Monsanto is working on another product they can sell the farmers to handle this one.

gbig2, my sincere thanks for pointing me to the site. I have great faith that technology will bring about solutions to the problems facing a growing population on a planet of finite resources.

Seems like it could apply to turf, but mainly for crops. Imagine farmers not having to fertilize their crops, or at least fertilizing less.

Okay. I wasn't going to bring this up but ronalawn82 and I completely disagree. I have full faith that the solution to agricultural productivity lies in the system of agriculture that Mother Nature devised about 500 million years ago.

The original poster touched on one of my pet peeves when he said, imagine farmers not having to fertilize their crops. I know farmers who have not fertilized their crops in 15 years. Their fields are just about exactly twice as productive today as they were in the 1990s. Their crop is forage (grass) for livestock, but the people I know raise cattle. Not only did they stop fertilizing, they stopped the high tech hormones, high tech grass seeds, high tech medicines, high tech herbicides, and high tech insecticides. The result was that the grass productivity without all the high tech stuff doubled, and they no longer had to buy supplemental corn or hay. When a farmer when stops paying for an entire catalog of high tech products, suddenly they have a profit to report. These farmers live in drought prone Texas, but they do not irrigate their fields - ever. They bring water to troughs and provide seaweed for minerals; that's all. Their fields have grass, somewhere, all the time, rain or drought. With the doubling of grass productivity they have almost doubled their animal stocking rate with no repercussions.

Do you have to live in Texas to do this? No. One place much worse than the Texas environment is in the middle of Arizona's Sonoran desert on the sterilized tailings of a copper strip mine. Annual temperatures range from the 100s to the teens. Precipitation is under 15 inches per year. Here is a website link. Unfortunately the "after" pictures are horrible and the discussion is weak. They have downsized that website since they first posted it and left off a lot of good info. But the point is still made that you can start with sterile soil in a desert and make grassland out of it with no chemical fertilizer. The solution to local food shortages is political, not agricultural. And I believe that if the third world farmers were taught and allowed to use techniques that work without high technology, the rain forests would not be mowed down to make more crop land.

I do understand that a lot of progress has been made in trial-and-error cross breeding to improve the speed with which animals put on muscle and the productivity and quality of plant materials; however, these cross breeding experiments were carried out in the environment, not in the computer. When you plant thousands of crossbred seeds, you have the luxury of selecting the best survivors to continue the succession. That will still have to be done even with computer simulation. To quote someone else, "In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice there is."