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This is an extremely hard problem. I've been following efforts to replace nitrogen for around forty years. It's part of a bigger trend of the seed industry gr

• mulmen 6y ago
  I find this post insightful generally but I don't think the last sentence was necessary. It is possible to be an organic advocate irrespective of "listening to the scientists" on this or any other topic. Constructing and attacking this straw man doesn't really add anything to your post.
  • eloff 6y ago
    I think it's true though. The opposition to GMO foods is typically reflexive and unthinking. It's not grounded in logic or science. That's not to say throw all caution to the wind, but I've yet to hear anyone make a sound argument in this case. And there are at least good arguments to be made on both sides referencing the existing literature.
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      You don't really have any idea where opposition to GMO foods originates. You guess that it is reflexive and unthinking because that is convenient for you to guess. There are strong arguments against, not necessarily GMO as a technology, but practically all existing commercial uses of it. Furthermore, each use of it is potentially an independent problem with its own dangers. Thus far the only beneficial use of it I have heard of is "yellow rice", which is not actually available, for purely capitalistic reasons.
      • bluGill 6y ago
        golden rice is not available because activists in courts have done everything they can to keep it unavailable. This isn't capitalism, other than capitalism will not throw good money after bad fighting things out in court.
        • ncmncm 6y ago
          That is of course untrue. What is true is that there is little profit to be made in distributing seeds that breed true.
          • bluGill 6y ago
            There are plenty of charities willing to do that.
      • eloff 6y ago
        I'm not guessing, I'm summarizing my personal experience with anti-GMO people. You're guessing about my experience and motives though. Also there's a lot more to GMO foods than yellow rice, so it seems you're proving my point quite nicely.
        • ncmncm 6y ago
          I am well aware that there are many other uses. That is the problem. Uses that are beneficial are the rare exception.
          • eloff 6y ago
            They're all beneficial or they wouldn't have gone to this stage. Maybe you don't think the benefits outweigh the risks, and that's a valid question. However, the concept obviously has tremendous potential. All the variety of life is after all genetics. Improvements in nitrogen uptake could save tremendous amounts of fertilizer and help the environment, for example.
    • pegasus 6y ago
      Sure. But a lot of pro-GMO thinking is also quite glib ("we've modified crops for thousands of years so what's the problem?"). I think mostly what's behind anti-GMO attitudes is the fear of unknown and unintended consequences. We've seen a lot of those ever since technology has been invented and they do seem to have proliferated in the last couple of centuries. So, it's not unjustified, especially when messing with extremely complex and barely understood systems. It's the same for weather engineering, for example. Parable of the sorcerer's apprentice and all that...
• nelaboras 6y ago
  It's not so straightforward. Those with financial interests in the matter manipulate opinion and pay for lopsided science. That's why many globally and especially in the US still 'doubt' climate change. The evidence today is overwhelming but 20 years ago was still more muddled as Shell & co were funding biased studies, while experts and environmentalists were screaming for action and simply ignored. And still today there are media (in the US) telling their audience that it's not real, pointing to some pseudoscience to make this claim. Science is messy, can be biased and we have to rely on third parties to communicate it. The same problem for nuclear: it's not self-contradictory to be eager for low-co2 energy and oppose nuclear due to its large-scale damage in case of an incident (and with Fukushima, 3Mile, Tchernobyl and various smaller incidents it's not like this is just theory). It's similar with GMO: there are some studies showing risks and various GMO plants have been stopped due to concerns they could be harmful. Roundup is not exaxtly harmless but rather leaves ecological deserts behind - even if you are in favour of GMOs (like golden rice) you might still oppose some of them (like roundup ready plants), specifically because of doubts about the corporate-funded science by the agri-businesses behind them. Or you might oppose them on economic/social grounds, e.g. the practice of sterilising seeds which already has driven many farmers in level 1 and 2 (aka developing) countries into economic disaster. Trust the science? Most environmentalists will agree. Trust the science funded by and the actual implementation by Monsanto? A much harder sell, akin to trusting BP's studies on climate and emissions.
  • ovi256 6y ago
    it's not self-contradictory to be eager for low-co2 energy and oppose nuclear due to its large-scale damage in case of an incident (and with Fukushima, 3Mile, Tchernobyl and various smaller incidents it's not like this is just theory) It is contradictory if one believes excess CO2 emissions cause global warming which may cause up to a billion people to become climate refugees in 2100 . A Chernobyl every year pales in comparison - the Chernobyl incident displaced 250-300k people. One every week for 50 years starts to come close.
    • wongarsu 6y ago
      Nuclear isn't out only option. Solar and wind are economically much more viable, and are safer (as in: they don't produce population displacing disasters, even if they might kill more people on average). Grid scale storage is becoming cheaper as well. Of course the belief that nuclear will be replaced by solar and wind is a bit naive: in the short term it's replaced by coal and gas, and only in the medium term can we hope for better
• ABCLAW 6y ago
  Not supporting Monsanto's business model isn't the same thing as not 'listen[ing] to scientists'. The issues with blanket application of Glysophate combined with roundup resistant crops are real; application volumes have ballooned and we still don't have a scientific consensus on it's effects on humans. Ignoring, in the immediate, the potential health effects of the molecule, it is also a driving force in the expansion of monoculture techniques rather than more sustainable polycultures. Monocultural key foodcrops are a long-tail risk to food security. The Irish potato famine, the lightning quick elimination of the Gros Michel clones, etc. I won't get into the myriad legal issues surrounding Roundup, terminator seeds, etc. but they aren't theoretical either. This isn't to say there's no benefit from Glyphosate application. It's to say opposition towards it is not driven by scientific illiteracy. Quite the opposite.
  • quixoticelixer- 6y ago
    > Monocultural key foodcrops are a long-tail risk to food security. Not really, there are many different varieties of corn, many different crops (wheat, rycorn, soy etc). And the problem you speak of actually hasn't much to do with monoculture
  • rmason 6y ago
    I was in the fertilizer business for twenty plus years. I went from Roundup's original introduction in the seventies to the beginnings of Roundup Ready seed. I kept a book in my office (as an EPA requirement) that allowed any employee or customer to view the safety of each chemical. Roundup was way safer to humans than the cocktail of other herbicides that it replaced. It felt like considerable progress at the time although we all knew it would lead to Roundup resistant weeds in time. From the beginning there was a small but loud opposition to GMO seeds. Some scientist, usually in Europe, would produce a report that Roundup causes cancer or such. Six different Midwestern universities would try to duplicate the research, fail and then publish exactly where the original researcher made a mistake. I don't claim to be a scientist but as an interested observer I think that's how the scientific process should work. Now they've switched battlefields to the courts and gained several early victories. I predict they will be overturned on appeal. I agree with you on monocultural crops. I think rotation should be encouraged but I'm not exactly sure how to do it. What I don't want to see is the government telling farmers what they can plant. They could provide financial incentives however if they can convince the taxpayers it's worth the price.
• etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  I think GMO's are disliked not just because of gene editing, but the decidedly non-organic way that GMO's are typically grown. My understanding is that GMOs are typically used on industrial scale monocrop farms, with pesticides. So it gets tarnished by association.
  • candiodari 6y ago
    I find that when you do find one of these people there is no depth to their thinking. They don't even know what GMO is, or why it's done, or why it's not so different from every other crop that was selectively bred for sometimes thousands of years. And even when you do find someone who does they are making arguments like "the modified genes will break loose" ... which is absurd ... and that was a very smart individual, perhaps not where it comes to biology, but it's not like this requires much debt. (GMO is about transplanting genes, so any gene used has already "broken loose" before it is ever transplanted into any GMO crop). "It's not natural". There is nothing behind that.
    • pegasus 6y ago
      The same accusation of shallowness can be leveled at the opposite camp. Including your comment. Yes, GMO is a refinement of crop modification techniques humans have employed throughout history. So the argument is that since those were "good", this can't be otherwise. But it's not that simple, a lot of the consequences of these modifications are at a closer inspection not that beningn. For example, the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural ones came with severe detrimental impact on the health of those populations. There is such a thing as something being more or less natural, that's why we have this concept. It's just that it's not easy at all to formalize. Maybe even impossible. But it won't go away, because it actually correlates to an essential aspect of reality.
    • wongarsu 6y ago
      >GMO is about transplanting genes, so any gene used has already "broken loose" before it is ever transplanted into any GMO crop you can however transplant genes across species, which just doesn't happen in nature. The fear that these improved crops would outcompete native grasses outside the farm wouldn't be unjustified if it weren't for Monsanto doing everything they can to prevent farmers from replanting their harvest.
• legulere 6y ago
  I don’t see how burning huge rainforest areas for monoculture corn plantations that now produce part of the insecticides that you use on their own and that you use tons of herbicides on to keep everything else out is in any way leading to more sustainability.
  • evgen 6y ago
    If you are going to create a strawman at least get it right. The rainforests are being burned to grow soybeans, not corn.
    • pegasus 6y ago
      Is it a strawman though? It's all tied together, the fixation with using our technological prowess to increase yield at all costs leads to these types of solutions: monocultures, GMO crops, weather engineering. Even though our understanding of the "solutions" is many times ridiculously poor. But it seems to work... somehow... for now. And by "work", what's meant is that it maximizes a metric which is ultimally chosen to maximize the wealth of an economic agent. It's what got us into this climatic bind. We need to take a step back and look at the root of the problem. This article for example, points into a saner direction: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/06/enough-with-local-and-organic-well-begin-to-eat-well-when-we-farm-well https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/06/enough...
    • kickout 6y ago
      Yes. Correct. Thank you @evgen. Brazil == soybeans mostly. Those slashed rainforest acres are being chopped with safrinha corn in mind. Those statements by the parent are an easy filter to someone not knowledgeable
• teunispeters 6y ago
  Insecticides and herbicides are famously trouble for stomach bacteria, among many other things. And yet that's getting ignored here... Making the plants produce them directly just makes the plants a lot less safe for human consumption. (I've a bunch of related allergies and intolerances and am tired of the IBS and pain related) I'm otherwise a fan of GMO.
• marcosdumay 6y ago
  > We've replaced some insecticides by letting the plants produce their own. So, you traded insecticide application to it being pre-aplied into the plants. That isn't reducing the amount of them out there. Yes, there are some gains, like in there being no environmental contamination due to the application. There are also some losses, like in there being long-term environmental application due to contaminated bio-matter. > We've eliminated some herbicides (weed sprays) by producing resistance in the plant to first Roundup and later other herbicides. No we didn't. We traded larger amounts of less effective herbicides into lower amounts of incredibly effective ones. On both cases, there are plenty of details, gains and loses that could be weighted in a public argument and settled down into policy. But the fact is that Monsanto didn't want public arguments, so they got their goals written into laws by the dirtiest possible procedures (really, on my country the entire legislative process was completely illegal) and got the public argument shut down with claims of it being "anti-science" or similar things. Those are not markers of socially positive actors.