A variety of corn has evolved a way to make its own nitrogen (2018)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
It's the science of GMO's. We've replaced some insecticides by letting the plants produce their own. We've eliminated some herbicides (weed sprays) by producing resistance in the plant to first Roundup and later other herbicides. It's truly one of the scientific miracles of the past thirty years.
Yet it has had strong opposition by the very people, organic advocates, that it benefits the most. This saddens me greatly. The very people who run around advocating 'listen to the scientists' on some issues, then selectively don't listen to them on others.
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.
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.
> According to the court documents, Monsanto started the aptly-named ‘Let Nothing Go’ campaign, which plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Roundup litigation believe is part of the agrochemical giant’s tort defense strategy to work furiously outside the courtroom producing carefully-timed “literature” and regulatory decisions that could sway the court.
> The ‘Let Nothing Go’ campaign is designed to leave nothing posted on the internet about Monsanto, its products and GMOs, unanswered. This even applies to social media comments.
> “Through a series of third parties, it employs individuals who appear to have no connection to the industry, who in turn post positive comments on news articles and Facebook posts, defending Monsanto, its chemicals, and GMOs,” according to a motion in the Roundup MDL. But the idea that Monsanto paid internet trolls to disagree with negative comments about the company on social media is just the tip of the iceberg.
[2] https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/blog/2017/may/monsanto-paid-i...
> An academic involved in writing research funded by Monsanto, John Acquavella, a former Monsanto employee, appeared to express discomfort with the process, writing in a 2015 email to a Monsanto executive, “I can’t be part of deceptive authorship on a presentation or publication.” He also said of the way the company was trying to present the authorship: “We call that ghost writing and it is unethical.”
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-o...
Or financial disincentives. Like an outright tax or removal of existing subsidies.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-un...
Monsanto is dead. Its assets were sold off to other players in the industry.
Further, the patents that brought disdain to the Monsanto of the past expired years ago. The business model that centred around those specific patents has not been a business model for quite some time. Even before those patents expired, it was not their business model anymore as the technology moved forward and those patents were no longer all that relevant.
> it is also a driving force in the expansion of monoculture techniques rather than more sustainable polycultures.
Yet, when I travel through the rural parts of the world, I see endless rows of rusted out row crop equipment that are older than the invention of Glyphosate itself. I am not convinced your timeline really fits.
> Monocultural key foodcrops are a long-tail risk to food security. The Irish potato famine
Another good example. The famine took place 129 years before Glyphosate was sold for agriculture use. Not to mention that it took another 22 years after that before the first roundup resistant crop made it to market.
If the critics never accept scientific evidence that there's no harm, they get to keep being critics. Just by using weasel words like that.
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.
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)
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
An exclusive solar and wind power grid is not more economical viable than an exclusive nuclear power grid, as is daily proven be the absent of such grids being developed. A power grid that combines solar, wind and fossil fuels are more economical viable than a power grid made by nuclear plants, and thus this combination is today out competing nuclear by a wide margin. Grid scale storage technology may in the future make solar, wind and storage a more economical viable solution than nuclear but no such power grid exist to date.
The economic viability of any energy source is depending on how the composition of the energy grid. Economic comparison between two sources is generally meaningless without the context of the grid, especially supply and demand.
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...
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.
Also there's a lot more to GMO foods than yellow rice, so it seems you're proving my point quite nicely.
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.
What is true is that there is little profit to be made in distributing seeds that breed true.
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.
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.
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.
Genes do spread without procreation. This is a certainty at this point.
Organic stuff is normally grown on industrial scale monocrop farms, with pesticides. Yes, really. All sorts of toxic pesticides are on the list of chemicals permitted for organic labeled foods. Many of them are worse. Go read the list if you doubt this. Simply put, "organic" is a marketing ploy, and the certification is a racket.
Its been mentioned in this thread but Roundup is actually safe compared a whole host of chemicals we were spraying in the <1970s. There is currently not a world where crop production doesn't use herbicides (but it is coming thanks to drones and autonomous robots that can manually remove weeds)
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.
(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.
This article for example, points into a saner direction: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/06/enough...
The wikipedia page on aerial roots [0] needs some love. There's also another similar article about this corn [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_root
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/amaizeba...
We killed them all (well, most) and now grow corn which we use most to finish off cattle, which is also a ruminant.
Maybe a better solution would be to feed the ruminants off the land now used by the corn? Imagine what that might do.
Btw this is how lagumes fix nitrogen. This nothing new but since it is already in maze it can probably be crossbred into production corn lines without that toxic GMO label.
http://fertsmart.dairyingfortomorrow.com.au/wp-content/uploa...
(Image hotlinked from https://fertsmart.dairyingfortomorrow.com.au/dairy-soils-and...)
People in the past would select which seeds and plants to cross breed by hand.
You could imagine an automated system which could cross breed 1 billion (1e9) plants at once by using cameras and ML techniques looking for good traits on each plant, using just 3% of US farmland. It doesn't need perfection - a 10% error rate simply requires 10% more plants, so it's a perfect application of ML.
The same plants you're using for breeding can still be producing sellable corn, so the cost of this selective breeding program on a per-plant basis is nearly zero.
It's not cheaper or faster.
And of course, now there's a massive debate whether this is GMO or not.
Vitamins are a good example, we need them, but we don't produce them (except for D, but there are practical problems producing that in the environments and latitudes in which humans now live).
Making nitrogen would be an impressive achievement for anybody, never mind a plant. Probably easiest is to make a lot of hydrocarbons with deuterium substituted for the regular hydrogen, and pack that around a source of free neutrons. The neutrons would lose energy to the deuteriums, and end up slow enough to be absorbed by the carbon nuclei, which would become nitrogen after a few steps. Also the deuterium would become tritium and then helium. Plants probably could concentrate deuterium. Where plants would get free neutrons is a poser; some plants will concentrate radionuclides from soil...
But of course there's already plenty of nitrogen in the air.
Haha, that would be something!
Literality has nothing to do with it. Obviously they meant "fix". It would have been equally easy to say "fix".
Mistaking a riff on nucleosynthesis for not understanding that they were just being sloppy means some other thing.
Yes it certainly could have been expressed better/differently, and it can be seen as sloppy. Those Are valid perspectives.