5 ms·

There's nothing wrong with hybrids for commercial agriculture - we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them. They're tougher, grow faster, and y

by tsotha 15y ago

There's nothing wrong with hybrids for commercial agriculture - we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them. They're tougher, grow faster, and yields are better. There are seed banks where natural varieties are saved, and you can bet Companies like Monsanto have a seed library that covers just about everything on the planet you can grow from a seed (or a bulb or a cutting or whatever). But for home gardening I stick to heirloom varieties as myself. They're harder to grow, but it's not like you're using commercial farming techniques. If you get a good variety you can trade with your friends. It's a pain to dry seeds, though, and sometimes you go through all the trouble and for whatever reason they won't sprout when you plant them.

IsTom 15y ago
we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them We'd just eat more potatoes compared to wheat/fruits.
gouranga 15y ago
We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide. To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections. We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.
- JumpCrisscross 15y ago
  >We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus). As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational. [1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-grw85.aspx http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I'm not really against hybrids, but I'm also not sure how much of this is a hard resource limit versus a current economic one. In the latter case, there's considerable headroom for production to ramp up if economic realities made it viable to do so (e.g. if domestic food prices returned closer to 1980s levels). There's a lot of former cropland that's currently fallow in the U.S. because we don't actually need it; prices for staple crops have been driven so low by oversupply that it's just not commercially viable to farm a large portion of formerly farmed land.
    - JumpCrisscross 15y ago
      Considering first the US alone: given surplus production and low utilization of potential resources means efficient use of existing resources. This is empirically validated by US farm output growing 1.63% annually from 1948 to 2009; input use over the same time grew only 0.11% [1]. Using less land for farming is logistically and ecologically sound. Expanding to the world, why are low income countries, in aggregate, exporting agricultural products (but not raw foods) while the local population starves [2]? I do not understand the nuances of the global grocery supply chain to answer this definitively but my background in finance intuits me to believe it is a distribution rather than agriculture problem - witness how "it costs more to truck a container from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, than to ship the same container from China to Djibouti" [3]. [1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/ http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/ [2] http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2008/01/02/000158349_20080102095804/Rendered/PDF/wps4457.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServ... (See Annex Table 1 and Annex Table 2, pages 25-28) [3] http://www.economist.com/node/21553050 http://www.economist.com/node/21553050
  - makmanalp 15y ago
    I'd like to point out that it's also a false dichotomy that we have to switch back to "archaic" modes "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" or embrace GMO. We can still use modern machinery, we can still use our knowledge of alternative pesticides (such as introducing a natural predator of a certain pest), we can still use proper irrigation and crop rotation, we can still use proper greenhouses. Even without modern "industrial" methods, farming has come a long way in the past 150 years compared to it's multi-thousand year history. edit: I'd also like to point out that cross-breeding seeds with desirable properties (as farmers have done for thousands of years) is also "genetic modification" in some sense, but at a slower and controlled pace, with a large timeframe to observe potential unwanted side effects.

by tsotha 15y ago

IsTom 15y ago

we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them We'd just eat more potatoes compared to wheat/fruits.

gouranga 15y ago

We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide. To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections. We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.

JumpCrisscross 15y ago
>We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus). As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational. [1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-grw85.aspx http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...
- _delirium 15y ago
  I'm not really against hybrids, but I'm also not sure how much of this is a hard resource limit versus a current economic one. In the latter case, there's considerable headroom for production to ramp up if economic realities made it viable to do so (e.g. if domestic food prices returned closer to 1980s levels). There's a lot of former cropland that's currently fallow in the U.S. because we don't actually need it; prices for staple crops have been driven so low by oversupply that it's just not commercially viable to farm a large portion of formerly farmed land.
  - JumpCrisscross 15y ago
    Considering first the US alone: given surplus production and low utilization of potential resources means efficient use of existing resources. This is empirically validated by US farm output growing 1.63% annually from 1948 to 2009; input use over the same time grew only 0.11% [1]. Using less land for farming is logistically and ecologically sound. Expanding to the world, why are low income countries, in aggregate, exporting agricultural products (but not raw foods) while the local population starves [2]? I do not understand the nuances of the global grocery supply chain to answer this definitively but my background in finance intuits me to believe it is a distribution rather than agriculture problem - witness how "it costs more to truck a container from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, than to ship the same container from China to Djibouti" [3]. [1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/ http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/ [2] http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2008/01/02/000158349_20080102095804/Rendered/PDF/wps4457.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServ... (See Annex Table 1 and Annex Table 2, pages 25-28) [3] http://www.economist.com/node/21553050 http://www.economist.com/node/21553050
- makmanalp 15y ago
  I'd like to point out that it's also a false dichotomy that we have to switch back to "archaic" modes "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" or embrace GMO. We can still use modern machinery, we can still use our knowledge of alternative pesticides (such as introducing a natural predator of a certain pest), we can still use proper irrigation and crop rotation, we can still use proper greenhouses. Even without modern "industrial" methods, farming has come a long way in the past 150 years compared to it's multi-thousand year history. edit: I'd also like to point out that cross-breeding seeds with desirable properties (as farmers have done for thousands of years) is also "genetic modification" in some sense, but at a slower and controlled pace, with a large timeframe to observe potential unwanted side effects.