The green revolution which so dramatically raised the productivity of farms in the past few decades and thwarted the Malthusian hopes of many anti-humanists is based on three broad classes of technology: agricultural machinery, agricultural chemicals and improved cultivars of crop plants.

The improvements to crop plants increased their yields - often by selecting for shorter plants that put more energy into seed than stems and leaves - but also better adapted them to the agronomic system. They were bred for uniformity in height and maturity dates so that they were easier to harvest with less waste. They were bred for the ability to utilize the increased fertility of soils amended by agrochemicals. They were bred, or genetically modified, to resist pests and tolerate herbicides.

Many of these improved cultivars were hybrids, the progeny of dissimilar cultivars that were not as desirable but when crossed with one another produced highly desirable seed. It is only the 'first cross', the first generation of plants produced from that mating of dissimilar parents, that have desirable characteristics. Subsequent re-crossing of those plants have variable results with a few of their progeny having desirable traits but some having only the desirable traits of one original parent or the other, some having the undesirable traits of both original parents, and some having traits from strange local genomes that wafted in on the wind or the bodies of pollinating insects.

Crops grown from the second and subsequent generations of hybrids are disappointing and produce neither the yields or agronomic characteristics of the original hybrids. To grow hybrids year after year new seed must be produced by crossing the original parents. This requires that some fields be used to grow pure stands of each of the parents though they have little value as crops, it is their seed to continue their line that has value. It also requires that some fields be used to grow the originals but rather than pure stands they are cross pollinated to produce the seed that will be grown the next season as crops.

A farmer wishing to grow hybrids would need four fields and expend great effort to make sure that each was pollinated correctly. This can sometimes be done by having isolated fields far from possible contaminating influences but this doesn't work for controlled crosses since many crops self pollinate. Often hand pollination is required to produce target crosses. This is far too much trouble and far too difficult for most farmers. Some farmers specialize and grow only seed for sale to other farmers. Seed companies make their living selling seeds rather than food crops. In developed agricultural societies there are many seed companies offering varied cultivars from which a farmer can purchase seed.

The years of effort and creative ingenuity invested in developing these special cultivars by seed companies are protected by intellectual property laws. The production of seed with novel characteristics often uses sophisticated technologies as well as careful agronomy. For many decades novel cultivars were created by forced mutation of seed using various mutagens such as chemicals, radiation and heat. Sorting useful mutations from harmful ones and isolating a new race was tedious and time consuming, the work of years, and was only worth doing if the new creations could be protected from competitors exploiting their work without having expended the creative effort. Today some of the cultivars are produced by the more controlled methods of genetic engineering and all efforts are improved by new genetic profiling technologies.

Not only must great effort be spent to create useful cultivars, great effort must be spent to forever maintain the race, to make sure that each cultivar is bred to the proper other. It would be so much simpler if sex wasn't necessary, if desirable cultivars could just be cloned repeatedly. This is possible for some plants. Some can be grown from cuttings, a common practice for many orchard plants. Some reproduce by budding off daughter plants by a variety of methods. A very few plants produce asexual seeds. These aren't self pollinated seeds, they are not pollinated at all, instead using a class of methods collectively called apomixis (as opposed to amphimixis) whereby viable seed is produced internally.

Few crop plants are apomictic but it would certainly be useful if they were. Some crop plants have distant cousins that are apomictic and efforts have been made for years to cross crop plants with these distant relatives and through controlled selection over a period of many years develop an apomictic race that has useful characteristics as a crop plant. More recent efforts are being made to use the techniques of genetic engineering to hasten the process by identifying the relevant genes and inserting them into the genomes of crop plants. It's a difficult task since a number of genes are involved.

Apomictic cultivars would be a very great benefit to farmers in developing countries. It would allow them to have the benefits of improved cultivars without the prior development of a seed industry since they could set aside a portion of each year's crop for use as next year's seed. They would only have to acquire improved seed once, not every year. The cost of such seeds would be lower since no special efforts would be needed to isolate fields or hand pollinate. Several organizations, notably the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center ( CIMMYT) have research projects to develop apomictic cultivars for use in food insecure developing countries.

There are some concerns that wide adoption of apomictic cultivars in agriculture would pose environmental threats. There is concern that the highly desirable uniformity of crops year after year would reduce diversity, and concern about the use of genetic engineering techniques though the same results will be achieved by traditional breeding techniques in time.

Concerns about diversity are legitimate. The fact that apomictic plants don't out cross with native land races would help preserve existing diversity, avoid contaminating that gene pool, but would also slow evolution and perhaps have a future consequence when predators and diseases adapt to them and overcome their natural defenses. Sexual reproduction allows plants to evolve new defenses. See Bananas, Sex and the Red Queen for more on this issue.

There are 3 main apomictic methods that have been identified. One of them, "facultative" apomixis, occurs in some plants and combines asexual reproduction with sexual reproduction. A small percentage of seed each year is pollinated rather than produced apomicticly. Research is focused most intensely on facultative apomixis since it is seen as a useful compromise that has the benefits of clonal reproduction for the vast majority of seeds but also allows the slow evolution of the race through sexual means.

The need for greatly expanded food production in coming decades as human population grows to 9 billion can only be met by improving the agricultural practices of the developing countries where population growth will occur. The development of improved apomictic cultivars will make this easier and cheaper. There are interesting parallels to the issues facing publishers of creative content - software and entertainment - since consumers of agronomic intellectual property will have the ability to make exact copies of the material and avoid repeated payments of royalties. Organizations such as CIMMYT seek to make such seed available without intellectual property restrictions. Seed companies may change from being manufacturers of commodities (in a sense) to being designers that market high value specialty intellectual products to premium markets. Only one copy, one seed, of a new variety would ever have to be produced by the creator of the new cultivar.