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We don't actually know if profits in real farms rise as much as agricultural tech sellers say they do. Bayer and Monsanto could just have really good sales team

We don't actually know if profits in real farms rise as much as agricultural tech sellers say they do. Bayer and Monsanto could just have really good sales teams. (They obviously do). Like with medicine, we'd expect the effects measured in lab of new pesticides on yields to be larger than their real impact in the wild. It just receives considerably less scrutiny than medicine, so really, it's hard to cut through all the bullshit. Despite what anyone's feel good story may bring up in rebuttal, there really isn't that much talent going into the buy-side of agricultural technology. So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are), and that the real math shows a slight benefit, but not one that outweighs environmental costs?

gph 8y ago
>So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are) Maybe some of the more recent techniques of industrial monoculture are oversold, but the steady rise of yields since the 1940s [1] make me feel like you're talking up a much bigger game than is actually the case. Perhaps the cost of some of Monsantos latest GMOs and pesticides isn't worth it. But throwing out the entire industrial monoculture paradigm is absolutely not cost effective. If it was more farmers would have figured it out by now. They aren't that dumb. [1] https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/CornYieldTrend_US.gif https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/Co...