Image taken of prepared slide through microscope.

Team members of the RIPE project transplanting seedlings for the 2016 field trials. RIPE is engineering crops that more efficiently turn the sun's energy into food. This project could increase yields by as much as 60% to help smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia feed their communities and provide for their families.

Words by Michael Vance and R. A. Jones, art by Rob Davis

RIPE field trials at the IGB BioEnergy Farm

Garnet Hertz in the Tissue Culture Lab at UCI as part of the Symbiotica BioTech Art Workshop. Photo by Tad Hirsch.

RIPE field trials at the IGB BioEnergy Farm

Garnet Hertz in the Tissue Culture Lab at UCI as part of the Symbiotica BioTech Art Workshop. Photo by Tad Hirsch.

Greenpeace activists demonstrate using placards and toy dolls at Bangkok's Victory Monument, calling on Thai citizens to avoid food contaminated with GMOs (genetic modified organisms). Bangkok, Thailand.

Activists dressed as chicken walking towards camera holding flags: "GMO inside"

This is the upside of annihilating ourselves in planetary apocalypse: no slum tourism by douches from the future.  Huzzah.

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Schizmatic - A Webcomic Of Intelligent Weirdness

Young woman holding anti-Monsanto sign above her head, young son marching beside her, other protesters in the background.

Planting peas on the ACE premesis with Gary Cass and Oron Catts pictured. This included digging a rabbit fence, planting the (non-genetically-modified) peas, and watering them. I donated a bottle of coyote urine to the cause.

Team members of the RIPE project transplanting seedlings for the 2016 field trials. RIPE is engineering crops that more efficiently turn the sun's energy into food. This project could increase yields by as much as 60% to help smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia feed their communities and provide for their families.

For the workshop, we were set free to take four swabs of surfaces that we would later grow in a petri dish. I swabbed "splotches of my past", located around the ACE Base: Margaret's vomit-stain, a slick residue of drained tuna-water, and a spit-spooge-splotch on the front door.

RIPE field trials at the IGB BioEnergy Farm

IGB growth chamber close-ups.

IGB growth chamber close-ups.

The work of CIAT's Agrobiodiversity Research Area.

Credit: ©2017 CIAT/Neil Palmer

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postdoc Johannes Kromdijk, plant biology professor Stephen Long, postdoc Katarzyna Glowacka in RIPE program greenhouse.

RIPE field trials at the IGB BioEnergy Farm

Oron Catts' History of Tissue Culture presentation.

Art by Rob Davis