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I know is possible to use genetic engineering to 'knock-out' a species by introducing some genes that cripple the females but allow the males to carry the bad gene forward through the rest of the population.

Making species extinct on purpose sounds bad, but hear me out. What if we do the knock-out technique on the most economically destructive pests so that we no longer need broad insecticides? We should probably only do this to pests that exclusively feed on crops and not generalists. But there are a ton of specialized pests that feed on human agriculture.

For instance, if you make the corn borer moth extinct in the wild, would you still need to spray cornfields? Or what about the Colorado Potato Beetle, the Boll Weevil, etc?

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I don't hate the idea of eradicating invasive pest species, but I do worry that the intervention might not work as intended.

I think the beauty of it is that we can keep an isolated unmodified population in a remote location and re-introduce them if need be. Not full extinction, just extinct-in-the-wild.

>Not full extinction, just extinct-in-the-wild

Or just "extinct where we grow crop X"

With how many insects there are of any species, there are bound to be many that have the genes to evade your genetic modification.

Outdoor farming is still incredibly resource intensive. As we move into an age where unsalted water becomes more precious and rare we should focus on hydroponic growing tech to preserve water. It is indoors so it wouldn’t require pesticides.

Pesticides are still widely used indoors. Pests will get introduced even with strong precautions (air showers at the entrances, etc.). At that point, if they're able to multiply then they will, potentially even faster than outdoors since there are no natural predators. There also tends to be less airflow, which encourages pests like spider mites.

Of course the greenhouse has advantages too--you can deliberately introduce beneficial (predatory) insects and they can't fly away, and if you do end up using pesticides then there's no risk to wild pollinators. For example, the EU banned certain neonics outdoors but still permits indoor use. It's more just different than strictly easier or harder.

Israeli farmers have shown that crops can be grown outdoors in a water efficient manner.

How have they done that? Encapsulating the soil with a barrier layer?

The Israelis invented modern drip irrigation and use it extensively. They also make good use of low-quality water, like treated wastewater and not-totally-desalinated seawater, by developing salt-tolerant varieties and carefully optimizing plant nutrition under their constraints.

Of course they do lots of hydroponics too, for the usual hydroponic crops (tomatoes, cucumbers, etc.). The science in hydroponics and science in sophisticated soil culture aren't really that different--you'll see mostly the same chemical fertilizers, the same EC and pH measurements in the field, the same lab analyses by ICP, etc.

Some water still drains to the aquifer and is "wasted". It needs to be though, or else unwanted ions (from impure source water or fertilizer, including but not limited to Na+ and Cl-) would accumulate and kill the plant. Israel has a significant problem with salinization of their soils and groundwater, and lots of interesting work modeling that.

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