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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Start by picking GMOs instead of the woo-woo that is organic farming. See e.g. a German-funded meta-analysis[1] that found that:

"[...] the adoption of herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, maize, and cotton, and insect-resistant (IR) maize and cotton has resulted in a 22% increase in average yields, a 37% overall decrease in pesticide use, and a 68% increase in farmer profits.".

1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impact-meta-analysis

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To accurately assess the long-term cost/benefit of GMOs vs organic farming, one would need to understand the long-term externalized costs of each.

We understand the long-term impact of organic farming. We do not understand the long-term impact of many GMOs.

It is a meta study, but in this field I would take a hard look at the selected studies before I trust those results (I did not take a hard look, so I can't say). A 37% decrease of something that ruins drinking water is surely better than nothing, but only an incremental improvement. It can easily be offset by agriculture growth within the next decades.

> insect-resistant (IR) [...] decrease in pesticide use

So the pesticides do not count if you let the plants produce them themselves?

Also I find it kind of hard to believe that making plants herbicide resistant and spraying them with herbicides reduces the amount of pesticides used.

It's actually quite easy to believe because the mechanics makes sense: instead of a number of different herbicides to attack a large number of different weeds, herbicide resistant crop breeds allow you to use just one herbicide, with a much smaller total amount.

> 37% overall decrease in pesticide use

What's "pesticide use"? If I use 1L of super-strong broad-spectrum pesticide instead of 10L of super-weak narrow-spectrum pesticide, is that really an improvement?

That's not how it works. Instead of 1L of strong broad-spectrum herbicide you use 1L of strong narrow herbicide for weed A, 1L of strong narrow herbicide for weeds B & C, etc. None of the narrow herbicides are weak, they are just more specific in their target because you need something that kills the weeds dead but does not kill the plant you want to stick around and grow.

How do these impact the insect world?

That’s a nice meta study, but not a single one of those crops is grown in Germany.

yes, but for those yields, you need to increase the use of herbicides.

Which has unintended consequences.

GMOs are currently faster horses.

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