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Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)
- SlightlyLeftPad 2mo agoWhere does Monsanto stand now? It’s been many years since HackerNews was AstroTurfed by them.
- theChaparral 2mo agoMonsanto was bought by Bayer who kept the products and killed off the name.
- downrightmike 2mo agoI just found out that farmers spray enough of the chems to kill all the plants off so they can be harvested at the same time. They aren't applying it just to grow, they then pump it full of them and then we eat that. No wonder why people are getting sick from it.
- seattle_spring 2mo agoSource?
- downrightmike 2mo agohttps://www.cornucopia.org/2017/10/glyphosate-used-kill-prepare-crops-harvest/ https://www.cornucopia.org/2017/10/glyphosate-used-kill-prep...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- SlightlyLeftPad 2mo agoNot sure why this was downvoted. AstroTurf? Anyway, this was really what I was looking for anyway. Thanks.
- KennyBlanken 2mo agoI can't wait for all the usual Monsanto fanboys to start popping up with comments that show how wildly ignorant they are, with comments like "we need this tech to feed everyone!" 1)Hunger is entirely artificial and is a problem of US farm bill policy and trade policy (not to mention using food to produce fuel that provides less energy than the energy required to grow it.) We pay farmers to grow and then till the food into the ground. Or to ship it to a warehouse where it rots. Massive amounts of food are thrown away by supermarkets. The list goes on. 2)European farmers, who cannot use Roundup or a large swath of other pesticides and herbicides, *have greater per-acre productivity.
- opo 2mo ago>2)European farmers, who cannot use Roundup or a large swath of other pesticides and herbicides, *have greater per-acre productivity. That depends on what crop you are talking about and the reasons have more nuance than you are implying. In terms of corn, the USA averages almost 50% higher productivity per acre (174 to 120 bushels). https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2020/11/the-changing-distribution-of-world-corn-production-in-the-21st-century.html https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2020/11/the-changing-distr... On the other hand, I have read that Europe has higher productivity per acre for wheat. On both of these crops, the differences at least partially are due to the climate differences between the two regions.
- lithocarpus 2mo agoNot to detract from your point that chemicals are not necessary for high food production. But just to point out that Europe does use glyphosate, on something like 1/3 of crops. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682 Antier et al. (2020) Glyphosate Use in the European Agricultural Sector and a Framework for Its Further Monitoring, Sustainability, 12(14), 5682.
- tptacek 2mo agoThese stories have all basically been debunked. Monsanto did sue farmers. But they did so in cases where they had evidence that those farmers were not only planting IP-encumbered seeds, but also spraying them with Roundup. You can't do that accidentally: if your seeds aren't genetically modified, Roundup kills your crop.
- free_bip 2mo agoThe entire concept of IP-encumbered seeds is cruel and dangerous.
- tptacek 2mo agoWhy, because without IP encumbrance farmers would be developing their own glyphosate-resistant shikimic acid pathway enzymes?
- defrost 2mo agoThey're certainly creating and spinning off their own not for profit Grains Research & Development Corporations funded by harvest profits to keep creating variations for ANOVA trials. Along with doing the same for billion dollar port and rail grain handling spin-offs. Maybe not the farmers you're thinking of, but farmers in the world are.
- derektank 2mo agoI do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp apples back in the 90s and 2010s and I struggle to see where any cruelty was involved.
- tptacek 2mo agoAnd this isn't even a cultivar. It's a commodity crop in which the only difference between ordinary seeds and Monsanto's seeds is that you could use Monsanto's Roundup pesticide on them without killing them. The seeds were literally just a utility for using a specific Monsanto herbicide system.
- nativeit 2mo agoThis brings back some memories. I was an admin for “Millions Against Monsanto”, a group on the still-nascent Facebook. I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense long enough to focus on the very real, and very alarming, actions of Monsanto. At this point in time it was still not considered “normal” to patent biological materials. I’m a bit more pragmatic, since I’ve grown past my college idealism, but I still don’t believe seeds should be considered patentable.
- bigbadfeline 2mo ago> I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense A textbook subversive operation.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoLook at life, or its systemic counterpart capitalism. Look at that attempt at an exponential. In that curve is all the cruelties, all the danger, all the colonialism, by eating other curves, all the failure because physics is linear on a sphere in the sun. Everytime somebody tries to emotionalize any discourse around any of these topics, look at the defining curve and think for yourself - "yeah, thats life, still preferable to death." - then go and solve that problem, or go an be absolved from that problem. Any vital system is expansive, the trees colonialize the grass by throwing shade. Equality - and thus peace can only be reached by having a equality of arms, by copying working mechanisms.
- tovej 2mo agoCapitalism is not the equivalent of life, it's the equivalent of cancer. It forces uncontrolled growth within the system.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoUncontrolled growth within a system- sounds like nature to me.
- mikem170 2mo agoIt's the lobbyists and regulatory capture and monopolies that make it cancereous.
- tovej 2mo agoYes, and the focus on growth in general. There is a sustainable amount of goods and services that need to be produced. Capitalism forced the economy to go beyond that many decades ago.
- tavavex 2mo agoNature has existed at a relative equilibrium for billions of years. It changed, but there was never a single thing that could take over the entire system. It took humans a few hundred years under the current system to start a mass extinction event and begin dismantling the ecosystem we rely on. And we are ready to go 10x further if it means someone somewhere else makes a few more dollars. Cancer is the most apt comparison, actually. At a system level we don't care for survival or long-term viability, only immediate replication and exploitation.
- internet_points 2mo agoSpeaking of poison, does washing fruit and vegs help? Or is it like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-second_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-second_rule
- orwin 2mo agodepends on the product and when its applied. for potatoes sprout inhibitors, the old product you definitely needed to remove the skin and every touched part. For the new stuff (i think its ethylène or something like that), washing it is enough (so you can now eat potato skin in europe). I would still wash my fruits just because of the transport though.