9 ms·

Organic isn't the answer, it's trying to address some legitimate concerns, but it's a movement full of scientific woo-woo that's been legislated. For instance,

by avar 10y ago

Organic isn't the answer, it's trying to address some legitimate concerns, but it's a movement full of scientific woo-woo that's been legislated. For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding. This article is one example of this, the author decries traditional corn fields, and as a counterexample wants us to believe that some hilly permaculture farm in Austria which just from the looks of it obviously has to be harvested & maintained by hand would be a viable replacement. Organic is largely just a western luxury product supported by people with no concern about producing food at true scale, and how we can satisfy the global food supply without impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms. There's no panacea when it comes to farming, but GMOs seem to be the best shot we have.

geon 10y ago
"just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants" Are you referring to UV/cosmic radiation?
- KaiserPro 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening and http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-from-the-atom/ http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-f...
loup-vaillant 10y ago
The reason why GMO is bad is probably not because of the "Modified" part. It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. Also, that freedom thing: GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer.
- 7sigma 10y ago
  "It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use" Actually, GMOs need less pesticides than non GMO crop. Some of them produce their own pesticide (BT corn and BT cotton). "Pesticides are bad." Thats kind of the point, they are bad to pests that try to eat the crop "GMO are generally sterile" You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile, the just lose vigour after a few generations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid ", so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer." Most farmers in the developed world buy new seed every year because of the hybrid thing, and do so because its convenient. At the end of the day its a choice the farmer makes: they could re use their own seeds and hybridise them, but for most its not worth the hassle.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > > "GMO are generally sterile" > You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile Monsanto did have the (terribly named) "terminator gene". They said this was to protect the environment from spilled seed.
    - 7sigma 10y ago
      Terminator gene was never commercialised
  - lolive 10y ago
    What happens when you eat this BT corn?
    - XorNot 10y ago
      The extremely acidic and enzyme rich system in your stomach demolishes the chemical structure, DNA, and proteins into constituant amino acids.
      - tomp 10y ago
        You say this as if there was no organic poison that could kill you if you eat it...
- randomdata 10y ago
  Farmer here. > It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. The use of roundup on crops predates the roundup ready gene by a couple of decades. What certain GMO traits allows is reducing the pesticides down to pretty much only roundup, instead of the cocktail – including roundup – that ends up on the non-GMO crops. Other GMO traits help eliminate the need for certain pesticides completely. If pesticides are bad, GMOs pave the path to reducing and maybe one day eliminating them. > GMO are generally sterile There was a theoretical terminator gene in the news, but it has never been made available on the market. The law dissuades replanting patented seeds, if that is what you had in mind? It's not the big deal that you might think it is though. There are a number of reasons why we would not opt to replant the seeds even without GMOs being a thing. > Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer. Why single out Monsanto? There are many different companies that have GMO varieties on the market. In fact, the original roundup ready patent that started this whole hubbub has already expired. You are free to replant it now.
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    > The law dissuades of from replanting patented seeds, if that is what you had in mind? That works too, though I also thought of F1 hybrids (made so second generation crops are crap), an idea GMO can copy. Here in France, there's a law forbidding to grow any food outside a pre-approved list of crops —most of which seems to be F1 hybrids. Fortunately it doesn't appear to be enforced right now, so some farmers grow old local species anyway. > Why single out Monsanto? They're a symbol, often recognised as "most evil". I'm sure others have similar practices, I'm just not aware of them.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      > made so second generation crops are crap To be clear, they're not specifically made so that second generation crops are crap. That's just the natural process of nature. If you selected the two most ideal humans to breed, by the time their children have children, it's easy to see that there is no guarantee that the original traits in the parents that were selected for are carried down the line. The best traits are soon lost. It's much the same story here. > I'm just not aware of them. That surprises me. Bayer, BASF, DOW? I would have figured these are household names, and in some cases are much larger businesses than Monsanto.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  > GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto It's incredible how these myths are able to multiply. I suppose it's because they grow organically? To the point: No, GMOs are not generally sterile. Also "conventional" seeds or mostly bought from a seed company, because that is most efficient. And, the subject of seed IPRs is not related to GMO technology at all; it has been there in the U.S. since 1930's and throughout the developed world by 1990's.
charlesdm 10y ago
For mass producing food, GMOs can be good. They increase yield. Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world? You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life. Given the amount of lobbying multinational companies are able to do and the fact most politicians can be bought for a relative pittance, you have to be a fool to believe you aren't being exposed to harmful pesticides year round. Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion. If the alternative is losing a billion dollar a year business, how much would a multinational company be willing to pay to politicians and scientists (above or under the table) to make sure a certain substance doesn't get banned? A lot, I would reckon. Tens of millions easily, hundreds if required.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world? This is equivalent to asking if we actually need for food to be cheap / cheaper. I'd say "yes". Unfortunately, food waste is simply a side effect of it being easily and cheaply available. You can't eliminate food waste - you can't create a perfectly efficient system in a real world - but if you want a shot at reducing it, ban catering companies. (More generally, if you want people to stop doing stupid things with product X, the market solution would be to increase the price of product X to such a level that almost no one would dare waste it; in case of necessities like food or water, I'd really prefer the regulatory solution of taxing/fining the stupid thing itself.) > You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life. For the very same reason I'll pick industrial, preferably GMO food, any day of the week. As you wrote, pesticides are bad and unhealthy. They're also - from what I hear - happily used by organic farming industry as a replacement for the 'bad', 'unnatural' methods of conventional agriculture. So this way, organic food gets exposed to poisons more. > Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion. Oh yeah, I remember it turning out to be mostly harmless and a much better alternative to what your typical organic farm would use. Saying "it's bad" is easy, but what's often missing is the "compared to what?" part.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bad_user 10y ago
The current definition of what "organic farming" is has been obviously corrupted by the current farming industry. In the end it's just a label. But the question remains: how can we do sustainable farming, without polluting the soil and the water and without poisoning humans? If we can't find a way to make that work, then we are all heading towards an apocalypse, because what we are doing currently isn't sustainable. And no, GMOs are not an answer because efficiency is not our current problem. Pesticides are only needed because of mono-cultures, a problem that is only relevant in the context of current industrial farming practices. Even more aggravating is that we live in the information age, we can now build the proper tools to do industrial-scale farming without making use of mono-cultures or pesticides. We can have robots to do all the hard work, we can use AI for rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc. And GMOs would not help much, because you're not addressing the problem of raising mono-cultures and for example it will not lead to much healthier soils and would do nothing to help the bees. Sadly, even though mother nature is proving how extremely dumb and primitive we are, we are still not learning ;-)
- latch 10y ago
  Reducing the consumption of meat seems like a step in the right direction. It's a huge drain on water, land, energy and calories. At the very least, people should be paying for the real cost. Taking it further, instead of subsidizing these industries, I wouldn't mind seeing a beef-tax.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    Lets not forget that CAFOs producing cheap beef, pork and chicken are only possible because of cheap corn, which is unhealthy for humans, since cattle aren't evolved to survive on a corn diet, being like a human being fed only candy, hence they also need to be fed with antibiotics, to prevent liver infections. Corn that is subsidized by the government with your taxes. And where corn grows, nothing else does ;-)
  - riprowan 10y ago
    I think you overgeneralize industrial meat production to all forms of ranching. There are huge areas of the USA that are not amenable to farming but which can be ranched. Raising cattle on these lands does not necessarily consume any water, food, or arable land that would be productively used otherwise. This form of ranching serves many purposes, one of which is to simulate the effect of millions of grazing animals roaming free over the prairies as they did for millennia until about 150 years ago. Another is to eliminate the need for antibiotics, which are not required when grazing animals are not confined and fed a corn diet, and when sick animals are much more easily culled. There is such a thing as sustainable ranching, just as there is such a thing as sustainable farming. The trick is to incentivize the right kind of ranching. Unfortunately, your suggestion would probably produce more unsustainable ranching, as it would lower margins across the board such that only the industrialists could turn a profit.
KaiserPro 10y ago
most subsistence farmers will never be able to use GMOs. It requires capital outlay that is just not possible. > For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad No, I think modern GMOs are going in the wrong direction. Modern wheat varieties have shrunk from being ~1.2 meters to not very high, through the use of selection, as has herbicide/pesticide tolerance. GMOs just make it faster. All of this means that you don't have to look after the soil. Which is great, but then you have to irrigate it. but then that become expensive. Then you have to fertilise it, and that become increasingly expensive. > some hilly permaculture farm in Austria I can't see a combine getting up there, can you? > impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms. Thats what subsistence farming does. They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed. Ofcourse weeding is greatly simplified if you grow your seeds in rows. We've known that since jethro tull's days. GMOs are basically a sticky plaster. Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? perhaps, just perhaps removing the spongy organic layer of soil that trapped the water might be the answer. increasing drainage so that floods dont happen, might also be a cause. Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.
- avar 10y ago
  > GMOs just make it faster. No, GMOs will inherently change the game in the long term. We'll be able to truly engineer life to be an optimal food supply, e.g. there's no inherent reason there can't be a plant that can sit in your window, withstand freezing temperatures, and grow both tomatoes, avocados and bananas. Some versions of this are already happening with GMO food, they're surgically introducing features to these plants that wouldn't be doable with just mutation farming. > I can't see a combine getting up there, can you? No, but that was my point. The author of the article is railing against industrialized farming and then producing a counterexample of some farm in Austria that clearly isn't and can't be mechanized easily. That's clearly not something you can use as a rebuke to current industrialized farming, one feeds the world, another is a backyard hobby project. > They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed[...] Yes, and the solution to this is to enrich their societies, starting with the introduction of modern farming practices. No need to start doing something revolutionary we haven't tried in the west, just introduce them to mechanized farming. > Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? [...] Even if we perfectly manage everything else GMOs would still be a great tool to expand the use of our land for farming. E.g. you could grow some cactus in the middle of the Sahara that was easily edible. > Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required. And I suggest that if you're trying to make some point here about some hidden knowledge I'm obviously missing and could only acquire through hands-on experience you just come out and point that out, rather than effectively make an ad-hominem argument by proxy.
stefantalpalaru 10y ago
> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding. Radiation induces single-nucleotide mutations that need to get past some cellular defence mechanisms before becoming viable. Those are much easier to test and debug than shooting DNA-covered heavy metal particles with a gene gun into target cells so random genetic material can be inserted at random places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun
specialist 10y ago
Herbicide resistent (Roundup Ready!) plants are bad. Patenting life is bad. Using your patents to then economically enslave the developing world is bad. If you call all that GMO, then GMO is bad. Objectively, empirically, morally, ethically. Bad. I know, facts are second millennium woo woo. Sorry, I just haven't been able to let go. Must make me bad too.

by avar 10y ago

geon 10y ago

"just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants" Are you referring to UV/cosmic radiation?

KaiserPro 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening and http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-from-the-atom/ http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-f...

loup-vaillant 10y ago

The reason why GMO is bad is probably not because of the "Modified" part. It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. Also, that freedom thing: GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer.

7sigma 10y ago
"It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use" Actually, GMOs need less pesticides than non GMO crop. Some of them produce their own pesticide (BT corn and BT cotton). "Pesticides are bad." Thats kind of the point, they are bad to pests that try to eat the crop "GMO are generally sterile" You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile, the just lose vigour after a few generations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid ", so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer." Most farmers in the developed world buy new seed every year because of the hybrid thing, and do so because its convenient. At the end of the day its a choice the farmer makes: they could re use their own seeds and hybridise them, but for most its not worth the hassle.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > > "GMO are generally sterile" > You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile Monsanto did have the (terribly named) "terminator gene". They said this was to protect the environment from spilled seed.
  - 7sigma 10y ago
    Terminator gene was never commercialised
- lolive 10y ago
  What happens when you eat this BT corn?
  - XorNot 10y ago
    The extremely acidic and enzyme rich system in your stomach demolishes the chemical structure, DNA, and proteins into constituant amino acids.
    - tomp 10y ago
      You say this as if there was no organic poison that could kill you if you eat it...
randomdata 10y ago
Farmer here. > It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. The use of roundup on crops predates the roundup ready gene by a couple of decades. What certain GMO traits allows is reducing the pesticides down to pretty much only roundup, instead of the cocktail – including roundup – that ends up on the non-GMO crops. Other GMO traits help eliminate the need for certain pesticides completely. If pesticides are bad, GMOs pave the path to reducing and maybe one day eliminating them. > GMO are generally sterile There was a theoretical terminator gene in the news, but it has never been made available on the market. The law dissuades replanting patented seeds, if that is what you had in mind? It's not the big deal that you might think it is though. There are a number of reasons why we would not opt to replant the seeds even without GMOs being a thing. > Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer. Why single out Monsanto? There are many different companies that have GMO varieties on the market. In fact, the original roundup ready patent that started this whole hubbub has already expired. You are free to replant it now.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  > The law dissuades of from replanting patented seeds, if that is what you had in mind? That works too, though I also thought of F1 hybrids (made so second generation crops are crap), an idea GMO can copy. Here in France, there's a law forbidding to grow any food outside a pre-approved list of crops —most of which seems to be F1 hybrids. Fortunately it doesn't appear to be enforced right now, so some farmers grow old local species anyway. > Why single out Monsanto? They're a symbol, often recognised as "most evil". I'm sure others have similar practices, I'm just not aware of them.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    > made so second generation crops are crap To be clear, they're not specifically made so that second generation crops are crap. That's just the natural process of nature. If you selected the two most ideal humans to breed, by the time their children have children, it's easy to see that there is no guarantee that the original traits in the parents that were selected for are carried down the line. The best traits are soon lost. It's much the same story here. > I'm just not aware of them. That surprises me. Bayer, BASF, DOW? I would have figured these are household names, and in some cases are much larger businesses than Monsanto.
ptaipale 10y ago
> GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto It's incredible how these myths are able to multiply. I suppose it's because they grow organically? To the point: No, GMOs are not generally sterile. Also "conventional" seeds or mostly bought from a seed company, because that is most efficient. And, the subject of seed IPRs is not related to GMO technology at all; it has been there in the U.S. since 1930's and throughout the developed world by 1990's.

charlesdm 10y ago

For mass producing food, GMOs can be good. They increase yield. Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world? You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life. Given the amount of lobbying multinational companies are able to do and the fact most politicians can be bought for a relative pittance, you have to be a fool to believe you aren't being exposed to harmful pesticides year round. Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion. If the alternative is losing a billion dollar a year business, how much would a multinational company be willing to pay to politicians and scientists (above or under the table) to make sure a certain substance doesn't get banned? A lot, I would reckon. Tens of millions easily, hundreds if required.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world? This is equivalent to asking if we actually need for food to be cheap / cheaper. I'd say "yes". Unfortunately, food waste is simply a side effect of it being easily and cheaply available. You can't eliminate food waste - you can't create a perfectly efficient system in a real world - but if you want a shot at reducing it, ban catering companies. (More generally, if you want people to stop doing stupid things with product X, the market solution would be to increase the price of product X to such a level that almost no one would dare waste it; in case of necessities like food or water, I'd really prefer the regulatory solution of taxing/fining the stupid thing itself.) > You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life. For the very same reason I'll pick industrial, preferably GMO food, any day of the week. As you wrote, pesticides are bad and unhealthy. They're also - from what I hear - happily used by organic farming industry as a replacement for the 'bad', 'unnatural' methods of conventional agriculture. So this way, organic food gets exposed to poisons more. > Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion. Oh yeah, I remember it turning out to be mostly harmless and a much better alternative to what your typical organic farm would use. Saying "it's bad" is easy, but what's often missing is the "compared to what?" part.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bad_user 10y ago

The current definition of what "organic farming" is has been obviously corrupted by the current farming industry. In the end it's just a label. But the question remains: how can we do sustainable farming, without polluting the soil and the water and without poisoning humans? If we can't find a way to make that work, then we are all heading towards an apocalypse, because what we are doing currently isn't sustainable. And no, GMOs are not an answer because efficiency is not our current problem. Pesticides are only needed because of mono-cultures, a problem that is only relevant in the context of current industrial farming practices. Even more aggravating is that we live in the information age, we can now build the proper tools to do industrial-scale farming without making use of mono-cultures or pesticides. We can have robots to do all the hard work, we can use AI for rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc. And GMOs would not help much, because you're not addressing the problem of raising mono-cultures and for example it will not lead to much healthier soils and would do nothing to help the bees. Sadly, even though mother nature is proving how extremely dumb and primitive we are, we are still not learning ;-)

latch 10y ago
Reducing the consumption of meat seems like a step in the right direction. It's a huge drain on water, land, energy and calories. At the very least, people should be paying for the real cost. Taking it further, instead of subsidizing these industries, I wouldn't mind seeing a beef-tax.
- bad_user 10y ago
  Lets not forget that CAFOs producing cheap beef, pork and chicken are only possible because of cheap corn, which is unhealthy for humans, since cattle aren't evolved to survive on a corn diet, being like a human being fed only candy, hence they also need to be fed with antibiotics, to prevent liver infections. Corn that is subsidized by the government with your taxes. And where corn grows, nothing else does ;-)
- riprowan 10y ago
  I think you overgeneralize industrial meat production to all forms of ranching. There are huge areas of the USA that are not amenable to farming but which can be ranched. Raising cattle on these lands does not necessarily consume any water, food, or arable land that would be productively used otherwise. This form of ranching serves many purposes, one of which is to simulate the effect of millions of grazing animals roaming free over the prairies as they did for millennia until about 150 years ago. Another is to eliminate the need for antibiotics, which are not required when grazing animals are not confined and fed a corn diet, and when sick animals are much more easily culled. There is such a thing as sustainable ranching, just as there is such a thing as sustainable farming. The trick is to incentivize the right kind of ranching. Unfortunately, your suggestion would probably produce more unsustainable ranching, as it would lower margins across the board such that only the industrialists could turn a profit.

KaiserPro 10y ago

most subsistence farmers will never be able to use GMOs. It requires capital outlay that is just not possible. > For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad No, I think modern GMOs are going in the wrong direction. Modern wheat varieties have shrunk from being ~1.2 meters to not very high, through the use of selection, as has herbicide/pesticide tolerance. GMOs just make it faster. All of this means that you don't have to look after the soil. Which is great, but then you have to irrigate it. but then that become expensive. Then you have to fertilise it, and that become increasingly expensive. > some hilly permaculture farm in Austria I can't see a combine getting up there, can you? > impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms. Thats what subsistence farming does. They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed. Ofcourse weeding is greatly simplified if you grow your seeds in rows. We've known that since jethro tull's days. GMOs are basically a sticky plaster. Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? perhaps, just perhaps removing the spongy organic layer of soil that trapped the water might be the answer. increasing drainage so that floods dont happen, might also be a cause. Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.

avar 10y ago
> GMOs just make it faster. No, GMOs will inherently change the game in the long term. We'll be able to truly engineer life to be an optimal food supply, e.g. there's no inherent reason there can't be a plant that can sit in your window, withstand freezing temperatures, and grow both tomatoes, avocados and bananas. Some versions of this are already happening with GMO food, they're surgically introducing features to these plants that wouldn't be doable with just mutation farming. > I can't see a combine getting up there, can you? No, but that was my point. The author of the article is railing against industrialized farming and then producing a counterexample of some farm in Austria that clearly isn't and can't be mechanized easily. That's clearly not something you can use as a rebuke to current industrialized farming, one feeds the world, another is a backyard hobby project. > They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed[...] Yes, and the solution to this is to enrich their societies, starting with the introduction of modern farming practices. No need to start doing something revolutionary we haven't tried in the west, just introduce them to mechanized farming. > Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? [...] Even if we perfectly manage everything else GMOs would still be a great tool to expand the use of our land for farming. E.g. you could grow some cactus in the middle of the Sahara that was easily edible. > Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required. And I suggest that if you're trying to make some point here about some hidden knowledge I'm obviously missing and could only acquire through hands-on experience you just come out and point that out, rather than effectively make an ad-hominem argument by proxy.

stefantalpalaru 10y ago

> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding. Radiation induces single-nucleotide mutations that need to get past some cellular defence mechanisms before becoming viable. Those are much easier to test and debug than shooting DNA-covered heavy metal particles with a gene gun into target cells so random genetic material can be inserted at random places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_gun

specialist 10y ago

Herbicide resistent (Roundup Ready!) plants are bad. Patenting life is bad. Using your patents to then economically enslave the developing world is bad. If you call all that GMO, then GMO is bad. Objectively, empirically, morally, ethically. Bad. I know, facts are second millennium woo woo. Sorry, I just haven't been able to let go. Must make me bad too.