Katie Driver is a Northern California farmer and technical service manager at UPL. Katie and her husband farm on his sixth-generation family farm and hope to pass this legacy onto their own children. “With the challenges farming brings, why do we stay in it? To put it simply - we love it. There is nothing else that we would rather do and those who came before us and started our family farm have worked too hard for us to quit.”

Susanne Wasson discusses farming, legacy, and traditions in this article. As she says, “One of the most important aspects of farming is the care and thought farmers put into their land, so that they may pass it onto the next generation. Experiencing my family’s hard work to steward healthy and productive land for the future fueled my appetite for crop production and the science, technology, and innovations behind it.”

As the impacts of climate change intensify over coming years, food security will undoubtedly be impacted. Dr. Manojit Bas concludes his story, discusses the global pandemic and political concerns in relation to food insecurity.

In this first part of a 2-part series, Dr. Manojit Basu shares his family farm story and experiences, from farm to agricultural sciences. It’s staggering to think that globally, on average between 10 and 28 percent of crop production is lost to pests. Without pesticides, which are a collective term for controlling insects, disease, or weeds, we would have even more loss. Read his first hand accounts ad scientific research findings.