7 ms·

Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. T

Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds. While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration. And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example, almond farmers in California are far far more productive than pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard. If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and pecans could replace almonds for many applications. Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.

badcppdev 4y ago
Hybridisation sounds like a bug not a feature. You get a benefit but with quite an extreme tradeoff. To be clear I understand that hybrids are current best practice. But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture. BTW would you say that seed producers have no motivation to develop non-hybrids that will perform as well as hybrids?
- epistasis 4y ago
  > But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture. I disagree, open source ag is completely compatible with hybridization. And if open source couldn't somehow deal with the benefits of hybridization, then open source ag is not a route we should follow. Farming is a transformation of inputs into food. It's not about seeds and propagating seeds every season... that's just an attachment to a practice like being super attached to, say FTP as the only way to transfer files and deploy a website. Open Source Ag is completely compatible with maintaining two strains, crossing them, and then distributing those seeds. Having widely distributed access to these seeds, and information about them, gives the chance for more innovation in the crossing, too. The question is whether somebody can get compensated for the efforts in discovery...
  - lathyrus_long 4y ago
    It's not fundamentally incompatible, but non-proprietary hybrids are extremely rare. The effort to maintain the two parents and do the cross is much greater than that of saving seed from an open-pollinated variety, so very few growers will undertake that even given the chance. Even if multiple growers do, the smaller population of plants in each of the pure lines increases the chance of significant divergence between sites, at which point the multiple production sites implicitly become multiple different varieties. Anyone interested here might also wish to read Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". She's a Harvard-trained geneticist and amateur vegetable breeder, with special interest in open-pollinated varieties derived from proprietary F1 hybrids. Her book extensively discusses the underlying biology, the practical breeding process, and the legal situation of such work.
- hinkley 4y ago
  'hybrid vigor' is when you take two inbred genetic lines and cross them together to pick up some of the genes you accidentally deleted while selecting for something else. For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and went from there. One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is doing the same thing, though I think their methods are recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else. I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect resistant trees over time. In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration. There are three problems: - the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at the stranglehold large corporations have over politics - Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying their employees so much they have to apply for food stamps, and local politicians or unions are unable to do anything against it because Walmart can at any time decide to just close shop and leave an area completely without access to groceries (made possible in the first place because Walmart systematically undercut local stores on pricing). And people (i.e. voters) would not blame Walmart, but local politicians and unions. No one wants to add yet another mega-corporation to depend on for survival. - second, concentration of genomics. When everyone and their dog sans a couple eco activists and seedbanks raises the same variety of crop or the same breed of farm animal, pandemics have an incredibly easy game. The best warning sign what can happen in such monocultural environments are forests (where bark beetles and other pests run rampant and completely destroy them) or bananas (Gros Michel famously got wiped out by a fungus and Cavendish is at the cliff from another fungus). - third, the impact of pesticides as a whole. No matter what kind of pesticide, they all have serious side effects - most notably, they cause bees to die and as a result, all plants depending on bees for pollination can't reproduce any more. And ffs it's not just bees. All kinds of insects suffer, just compare your windshield after driving a car in the 90s and today through a rural area. And all these insects were part of the food chain for larger animals... leading to an ever growing loss of biodiversity further up the chain. > But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us. We don't need to go back that far in time. Like half the food produced is wasted instead of reaching a human's mouth - spoiled, rejected for missing quality benchmarks, never sold because stores require an overabundance of choice for the consumer, wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews... the list of causes for food waste is immense. Cut down on food waste, produce less food in total, and maybe avoid the need for intensive agriculture in the first place.
- epistasis 4y ago
andruby 4y ago
I didn't know about hybrid seeds: "In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is produced by deliberately cross-pollinated plants which are genetically diverse" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
- saalweachter 4y ago
  They're also a huge pain in the ass to produce, at least in my experience. Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by planting the two varieties in the same field, with one combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of variety B. Then you need to wait until variety A is grown and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn silk. This is usually done by hand, by a bunch of people walking through the field and cutting the stalk between the ears and the tassels. Once that is done, your variety A ears will be pollinated by variety B pollen, and all of those kernels will be hybrid. But your variety B ears be purebred B, not hybrid, so you now you need to harvest the field while keeping the two sets separate. This step isn't too bad, if you did a good job planting, you just need to first harvest the combine-wide strips of hybrid corn before going back to get the B corn. But yeah, you're looking at a lot of extra work -- and money, you need contract labor to detassel a field in the narrow window of opportunity -- to produce a hybrid seed for better yields next year, and most farmers don't find it a good use of time, which is why most farmers were buying most of their seed well before seed patents and GMO were a thing.
  - fencepost 4y ago
    I used to hear about "detasseling corn" as an utterly miserable short-term summer job option for high school students. Walking through cornfields in heavy clothes (to avoid getting cut up by the leaves) in summer in Iowa.
    - bequanna 4y ago
      Miserable indeed! I was in Southern MN and did this job for a few weeks in the summer. We started around 5:30am and worked 8-10 hrs per day, rain or shine. Why do this? At the time (early 2000s) it was an extremely well-paying, unskilled job at $15/hr!
pydry 4y ago
>The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point. They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*) roundup. The "objectors are ignorant anti science types" with the subtle mislead renders it an extraordinarily effective talking point. * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/roundup-ingredient-probably-carcinogenic-humans https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/roundup-ingredient-proba...
- bluGill 4y ago
  > (carcinogenic) roundup Citation needed. Roundup has been studied a lot. Very few of those studies find it is carcinogenic - enough that meta analysis finds it is not.
  - adamthedog 4y ago
    There is a little evidence (10.1186/s12940-021-00729-8) that a very particular form of non-Hodjkins lymphoma is associated with glyphospate exposure (occupationally!), but ultimately... it's hard to say. There's evidence of genotoxicity in human cell lines (10.1007/s13205-018-1464-z), but at possibly an unrealistic dose of glyphosphate-based herbicides. They are also demonstrably endocrine disruptors (10.1016/j.tox.2009.06.006), though again true in vivo exposure levels to glyphosphate is not well established it seems, so these studies are ultimately novel. However, it's clear that they should be given more care than they are now. Hell, it took me like.. two months? to get a pesticide applicator certification and now I can roundup the hell out of anyone's crops, and I barely know anything about the stuff.
- epistasis 4y ago
  I don't understand, is the talking point what you quotes from me, or their taking point about GMOs? Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.
Scoundreller 4y ago
> returned from ag use for ecological restoration. We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value. Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs). Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.
- epistasis 4y ago
  We do that, and actually pay farmers to keep land fallow in some cases. We must have this high leve of productivity before it's even a possibility, but once it's a possibility we can expand its use. The current economic system is changeable, one ag technology allows us to.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    One of the goals of regenerative agriculture is to get most of the benefits of fallow land while still using the land. From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because the crops need to be collected in the few days when they are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous machines. The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        We are collecting and redistributing grain at a discount and using it for anything we can think of. Highly processed food, grain alcohol, “corn fed beef” which is likely a dietary disaster for humans. Remember, ethanol in gasoline is predominantly about lifting demand for corn in order to court votes from the upper Midwest. We don’t actually need to use corn for fuel. You can feed pigs on grain and nuts that fell before or after harvest. Ten pigs are pretty big harvesting machine. Birds as well. Mark Shepard is claiming about twice the yield per acre of conventional farms. He’s doing this by getting less than half a yield of four+ crops on the same land. The trick to being Mark Shepard is putting enough time and energy into your job to understand a dozen crops instead of hyper specializing in two, as if your neighbors aren’t doing the exact some thing. Now at the end of the day, we still need some staple crops around. That we can stockpile grain for three years and canned food for 18-36 months helps level out boom and bust cycles in agriculture. Good year? Rent warehouse space. Bad year? Let the warehouse lapse, or do invasive maintenance.
gtvwill 4y ago
Fixed water requirements from tree crop farming in states where water is a concern is the dumbest agri business ever. Tbh most of America's farming sucks, bulk corporate welfare keeps most of it propped up and is used to buffer against the efficiency of global markets and y'all do some incredibly dumb stuff like but farms in water restricted areas. Lol nearly all your beefs feedlot... You do well to feed the masses, but the countries process of getting there is like it's stuck in 1950s. Lol go watch some of ya broadacre boys and they still monocrop tilling thousands of acres by throwing fertilizer at it. Bumpkin stuff, hardly advanced.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  And if you could do it better you wouldn't be here throwing shade about stuff you only barely understand, you'd be out in a field somewhere dunking on the local farmer's co-op. If you think modern ag is a bunch of ass-backward hicks then explain why some comment section hero hasn't already revolutionized the business. We'll wait.
foreverobama 4y ago
[dead]
skratlo 4y ago
> few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected or even patented Government and legislative failure. Just protect the seeds by disallowing any protection/patenting, for the public good, that's why we pay taxes.
- gleenn 4y ago
  It goes beyond country boundaries. There was an interesting case where China stole I think it was specialized corn to begin producing their own instead of spending large sums by buying the product or IP.
  - eclipticplane 4y ago
    Another interesting case was PepsiCo suing farmers in India over a variety of potato. A few years later, PepsiCo withdrew their suit... only to have a group of farmers continue to press the claim and have the courts rule that PepsiCo couldn't patent a seed. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-patent-pepsicos-lays-potatoes-2021-12-03/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-pa...
breput 4y ago
There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest. Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output. And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money. Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU
- brnt 4y ago
  Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory, not the farming. Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.
  - breput 4y ago
    EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us, albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes. If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
      I don’t think brnt’s comment contradicts yours. They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that. The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts. Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a horrible comeback when the original comment’s “evidence” is as a YouTube video.
thatcat 4y ago
Hybrids aren't stable genetics. You cross two S1 parents and get an F1 hybrid with inconsistent traits but hybrid vigor. What would the point be in owning ip of a hybrid? Sure you can select a good one and propagate it and have copies of that one, but then you lose hybrid vigor because they're clones. Ossi is for breeders not farmers.
skzv 4y ago
> which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration. I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
brnt 4y ago
> The general public does not understand agriculture well, Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming. It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too. Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.
- biorach 4y ago
  > Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. That's wildly inaccurate

badcppdev 4y ago

Hybridisation sounds like a bug not a feature. You get a benefit but with quite an extreme tradeoff. To be clear I understand that hybrids are current best practice. But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture. BTW would you say that seed producers have no motivation to develop non-hybrids that will perform as well as hybrids?

epistasis 4y ago
> But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture. I disagree, open source ag is completely compatible with hybridization. And if open source couldn't somehow deal with the benefits of hybridization, then open source ag is not a route we should follow. Farming is a transformation of inputs into food. It's not about seeds and propagating seeds every season... that's just an attachment to a practice like being super attached to, say FTP as the only way to transfer files and deploy a website. Open Source Ag is completely compatible with maintaining two strains, crossing them, and then distributing those seeds. Having widely distributed access to these seeds, and information about them, gives the chance for more innovation in the crossing, too. The question is whether somebody can get compensated for the efforts in discovery...
- lathyrus_long 4y ago
  It's not fundamentally incompatible, but non-proprietary hybrids are extremely rare. The effort to maintain the two parents and do the cross is much greater than that of saving seed from an open-pollinated variety, so very few growers will undertake that even given the chance. Even if multiple growers do, the smaller population of plants in each of the pure lines increases the chance of significant divergence between sites, at which point the multiple production sites implicitly become multiple different varieties. Anyone interested here might also wish to read Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". She's a Harvard-trained geneticist and amateur vegetable breeder, with special interest in open-pollinated varieties derived from proprietary F1 hybrids. Her book extensively discusses the underlying biology, the practical breeding process, and the legal situation of such work.
hinkley 4y ago
'hybrid vigor' is when you take two inbred genetic lines and cross them together to pick up some of the genes you accidentally deleted while selecting for something else. For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and went from there. One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is doing the same thing, though I think their methods are recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else. I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect resistant trees over time. In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration. There are three problems: - the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at the stranglehold large corporations have over politics - Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying their employees so much they have to apply for food stamps, and local politicians or unions are unable to do anything against it because Walmart can at any time decide to just close shop and leave an area completely without access to groceries (made possible in the first place because Walmart systematically undercut local stores on pricing). And people (i.e. voters) would not blame Walmart, but local politicians and unions. No one wants to add yet another mega-corporation to depend on for survival. - second, concentration of genomics. When everyone and their dog sans a couple eco activists and seedbanks raises the same variety of crop or the same breed of farm animal, pandemics have an incredibly easy game. The best warning sign what can happen in such monocultural environments are forests (where bark beetles and other pests run rampant and completely destroy them) or bananas (Gros Michel famously got wiped out by a fungus and Cavendish is at the cliff from another fungus). - third, the impact of pesticides as a whole. No matter what kind of pesticide, they all have serious side effects - most notably, they cause bees to die and as a result, all plants depending on bees for pollination can't reproduce any more. And ffs it's not just bees. All kinds of insects suffer, just compare your windshield after driving a car in the 90s and today through a rural area. And all these insects were part of the food chain for larger animals... leading to an ever growing loss of biodiversity further up the chain. > But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us. We don't need to go back that far in time. Like half the food produced is wasted instead of reaching a human's mouth - spoiled, rejected for missing quality benchmarks, never sold because stores require an overabundance of choice for the consumer, wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews... the list of causes for food waste is immense. Cut down on food waste, produce less food in total, and maybe avoid the need for intensive agriculture in the first place.

epistasis 4y ago

andruby 4y ago

I didn't know about hybrid seeds: "In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is produced by deliberately cross-pollinated plants which are genetically diverse" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed

saalweachter 4y ago
They're also a huge pain in the ass to produce, at least in my experience. Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by planting the two varieties in the same field, with one combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of variety B. Then you need to wait until variety A is grown and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn silk. This is usually done by hand, by a bunch of people walking through the field and cutting the stalk between the ears and the tassels. Once that is done, your variety A ears will be pollinated by variety B pollen, and all of those kernels will be hybrid. But your variety B ears be purebred B, not hybrid, so you now you need to harvest the field while keeping the two sets separate. This step isn't too bad, if you did a good job planting, you just need to first harvest the combine-wide strips of hybrid corn before going back to get the B corn. But yeah, you're looking at a lot of extra work -- and money, you need contract labor to detassel a field in the narrow window of opportunity -- to produce a hybrid seed for better yields next year, and most farmers don't find it a good use of time, which is why most farmers were buying most of their seed well before seed patents and GMO were a thing.
- fencepost 4y ago
  I used to hear about "detasseling corn" as an utterly miserable short-term summer job option for high school students. Walking through cornfields in heavy clothes (to avoid getting cut up by the leaves) in summer in Iowa.
  - bequanna 4y ago
    Miserable indeed! I was in Southern MN and did this job for a few weeks in the summer. We started around 5:30am and worked 8-10 hrs per day, rain or shine. Why do this? At the time (early 2000s) it was an extremely well-paying, unskilled job at $15/hr!

pydry 4y ago

>The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point. They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*) roundup. The "objectors are ignorant anti science types" with the subtle mislead renders it an extraordinarily effective talking point. * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/roundup-ingredient-probably-carcinogenic-humans https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/roundup-ingredient-proba...

bluGill 4y ago
> (carcinogenic) roundup Citation needed. Roundup has been studied a lot. Very few of those studies find it is carcinogenic - enough that meta analysis finds it is not.
- adamthedog 4y ago
  There is a little evidence (10.1186/s12940-021-00729-8) that a very particular form of non-Hodjkins lymphoma is associated with glyphospate exposure (occupationally!), but ultimately... it's hard to say. There's evidence of genotoxicity in human cell lines (10.1007/s13205-018-1464-z), but at possibly an unrealistic dose of glyphosphate-based herbicides. They are also demonstrably endocrine disruptors (10.1016/j.tox.2009.06.006), though again true in vivo exposure levels to glyphosphate is not well established it seems, so these studies are ultimately novel. However, it's clear that they should be given more care than they are now. Hell, it took me like.. two months? to get a pesticide applicator certification and now I can roundup the hell out of anyone's crops, and I barely know anything about the stuff.
epistasis 4y ago
I don't understand, is the talking point what you quotes from me, or their taking point about GMOs? Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.

Scoundreller 4y ago

> returned from ag use for ecological restoration. We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value. Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs). Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.

epistasis 4y ago
We do that, and actually pay farmers to keep land fallow in some cases. We must have this high leve of productivity before it's even a possibility, but once it's a possibility we can expand its use. The current economic system is changeable, one ag technology allows us to.
- hinkley 4y ago
  One of the goals of regenerative agriculture is to get most of the benefits of fallow land while still using the land. From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because the crops need to be collected in the few days when they are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous machines. The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      We are collecting and redistributing grain at a discount and using it for anything we can think of. Highly processed food, grain alcohol, “corn fed beef” which is likely a dietary disaster for humans. Remember, ethanol in gasoline is predominantly about lifting demand for corn in order to court votes from the upper Midwest. We don’t actually need to use corn for fuel. You can feed pigs on grain and nuts that fell before or after harvest. Ten pigs are pretty big harvesting machine. Birds as well. Mark Shepard is claiming about twice the yield per acre of conventional farms. He’s doing this by getting less than half a yield of four+ crops on the same land. The trick to being Mark Shepard is putting enough time and energy into your job to understand a dozen crops instead of hyper specializing in two, as if your neighbors aren’t doing the exact some thing. Now at the end of the day, we still need some staple crops around. That we can stockpile grain for three years and canned food for 18-36 months helps level out boom and bust cycles in agriculture. Good year? Rent warehouse space. Bad year? Let the warehouse lapse, or do invasive maintenance.

gtvwill 4y ago

Fixed water requirements from tree crop farming in states where water is a concern is the dumbest agri business ever. Tbh most of America's farming sucks, bulk corporate welfare keeps most of it propped up and is used to buffer against the efficiency of global markets and y'all do some incredibly dumb stuff like but farms in water restricted areas. Lol nearly all your beefs feedlot... You do well to feed the masses, but the countries process of getting there is like it's stuck in 1950s. Lol go watch some of ya broadacre boys and they still monocrop tilling thousands of acres by throwing fertilizer at it. Bumpkin stuff, hardly advanced.

forgetfreeman 4y ago
And if you could do it better you wouldn't be here throwing shade about stuff you only barely understand, you'd be out in a field somewhere dunking on the local farmer's co-op. If you think modern ag is a bunch of ass-backward hicks then explain why some comment section hero hasn't already revolutionized the business. We'll wait.

foreverobama 4y ago

[dead]

skratlo 4y ago

> few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected or even patented Government and legislative failure. Just protect the seeds by disallowing any protection/patenting, for the public good, that's why we pay taxes.

gleenn 4y ago
It goes beyond country boundaries. There was an interesting case where China stole I think it was specialized corn to begin producing their own instead of spending large sums by buying the product or IP.
- eclipticplane 4y ago
  Another interesting case was PepsiCo suing farmers in India over a variety of potato. A few years later, PepsiCo withdrew their suit... only to have a group of farmers continue to press the claim and have the courts rule that PepsiCo couldn't patent a seed. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-patent-pepsicos-lays-potatoes-2021-12-03/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/india-revokes-pa...

breput 4y ago

There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest. Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output. And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money. Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU

brnt 4y ago
Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory, not the farming. Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.
- breput 4y ago
  EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us, albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes. If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    I don’t think brnt’s comment contradicts yours. They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that. The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts. Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a horrible comeback when the original comment’s “evidence” is as a YouTube video.

thatcat 4y ago

Hybrids aren't stable genetics. You cross two S1 parents and get an F1 hybrid with inconsistent traits but hybrid vigor. What would the point be in owning ip of a hybrid? Sure you can select a good one and propagate it and have copies of that one, but then you lose hybrid vigor because they're clones. Ossi is for breeders not farmers.

skzv 4y ago

> which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration. I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

brnt 4y ago

> The general public does not understand agriculture well, Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming. It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too. Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.

biorach 4y ago
> Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. That's wildly inaccurate