Scientists and Agriculture

These are pea plants from last year. Ignore the weeds and look at the leaves.
You'd think one of the top science journals in America would get things right, but in the past few issues it has made some references to agriculture that get on my nerves. 

1. In a recent news article about the publication of the cow genome, the author stated, "The barnyard door is now open." What's wrong with that? Most barnyards have fences with gates, not walls with doors. Barns have doors; barn-yards have gates. Small difference, but either the author grew up in a country with enough wealth to wall in its barnyards or he writes about agriculture without thinking about common farm vocabulary.

2. Same journal (remaining nameless as I may want to try to publish in it someday), issue at my house today had a computer rendition of a pea plant on the cover, looking at computer pictures of microbes. Cool picture, but the vine is almost leafless, and the leaves on it are totally wrong for the pea plants I have seen. They should be shorter and wider, not long and thin, and should be paired at the base. Neat picture in terms of artistic license, but bad in terms of scientific accuracy.

Which is the complaint I have against the modern scientific approach to agriculture. It approaches farmers with big-city contempt, and treats them like poor, ignorant peasants who just need to buy the latest scientific gizmo to be successful. It often treats the soil as a passive medium of known chemical composition (though they're just beginning to catalog the microbes in it), in which seeds tested in another climate under ideal conditions SHOULD be able to grow. Apply X herbicide, Y insecticide, Z fertilizer to this super-duper recombinant seed, and you'll get wonderful yields anywhere. Maybe.

The soil contains a whole miniature ecosystem, even in my backyard. All sorts of microbes, slugs, ants, worms, spiders, cockroaches, grubs, pill bugs, and other things I don't even know to mention cavort back there in the dirt. The soil is not a passive medium, and the farmer  (unless made so by his government) is not a helpless peasant. If scientists approached farmers as colleagues instead of consumers of designer products, maybe they'd get the vocabulary right. And they'd know what a pea plant looks like.