How has the science evolved on GMOs? I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient to some sort of vendor lock-in to a giant agribusiness, but what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant?
Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process.
This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved.
Edit: there's a very good critical essay from Lewontin on the politics of hybrid corn: https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-o...
This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer.
It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3883649/
Only you know how far this rabbit hole goes
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00451...
Note that the original Roundup Ready patents expired in 2014, so you can buy generic glyphosate tolerant GMO seeds https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/generi...
Last time I looked, Monsanto was not using terminator genes and promising they would never use terminator genes while the green press was running stories that were precision-engineered to give you the impression that Monsanto was using terminator genes.
Has that changed? Did Monsanto start actually using terminator genes? Or is the story still, uhh... "speculative"?
[0] https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyp...
I would be extremely interested in the research that validates that because it is not consistent with my experience.
280 million pounds of glyphosate used per year
One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic.
I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic)
There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong.
As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.
I'm glad we are using it and not older chemicals, but unless you are actually in the habit of eating it recreationally, maybe don't use that example.
Can you get pure glyphosphate? Yes, but it requires a license. It comes in about a 50/50 mixture with water usually.
It is much too difficult to distribute the pure substance in such small quantities so it is diluted with water to varying degrees (down to a few percent concentration) for safety, accuracy, and to avoid burning plants with unavoidable variations in application.
A small amount of a attractant is also added so the chemical better applies to leaves and doesn't just bead up and drip off onto the soil.
https://labelsds.com/images/user_uploads/Roundup%20Pro%20Con...
Apparently there's blends intended for use in water that are more or less just diluted with water, but they aren't the usual mix either.
https://alligare.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/glyphosate-5...
The point of the example is that it is not acutely toxic unless you ingest a sizable amount while dealing with concentrations only available to certified farmers. The lethal amounts come up to around how much you would apply to half an acre of cropland.
Glyphosphate is also biodegradable.
It's actually not glyphosate that can be harmful to aquatic animals. It's the accompanying surfactants, added to help glyphosate to enter the plants. You put too much of any kind of surfactant (basically, a soap. A chemical that lowers the surface tension of water) to a small volume of water, and it will be harmful to aquatic life.
You know why we use selective herbicides?
Because they improve yield.
Farmers are practical people.
If farmers don't want to grow GMO/glyphosate resistant crops they have options, I personally grow mostly non-GMO crops and make plenty of money doing it. Basic economics applies to GMOs like like it applies to microchips or flip-flops and the capital owners (in this case land owners) have agency in this process.
Italy did something similar to target the cheap (high yield) canadian grain imports, but using labelling instead of an outright ban on glyphosate.
There are no varieties of Wheat, Oats, or Barley registered in Canada that a resistant to glyphosate.
You want wheat (and other grains) to be dry before harvest. Harvesting when wet increases losses due mold growth. Wet stems cause sticking and blocking in the harvest machinery. In many countries it's common to apply a defoliant: You kill or half-kill the foliage of the crop plants, and wait a small number of days, so grains and stems get drier before the harvest.
This use of glyphosate has nothing to do GMOs (there is no GMO wheat in markets anywhere). In a small number of countries, it's forbidden to use chemicals (plant poisons) to force desiccation.
I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.
Roundup is a lot cheaper than Axial Extreme + MCPA or Velocity M3 or Tandem or Rexade.. and, TBH, Roundup isn't tha good at killing a lot of the weeds that those other products kill very well. It's just not as simple as you might think.
There are several varieties of insect-resistance traits, multiple brands of herbicide resistance (off the top of my head there’s Roundup Ready and Liberty Link), drought resistance, and several more. I was last deeply interested around 2008 so my knowledge is stale.
I found this USDA data sheet that lists a bunch of varieties for corn; others exist for the other GMO crops: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/BECornCro...
Watching the path-dependent nature of technology is fascinating. It seems Monsanto has largely given up on GMOs, due to public backlash, just as crispr and the like are set to make the whole endeavor a lot more precise. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-techno...
The hot new thing these days (as I understand it, I am not a farmer) is precision ag - better use of maps, sensors, drones, robotics, etc to make better use of resources and better target chemical application. Bayer’s marketing site is probably a good place to get the farmer’s perspective: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/d...
The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work.
GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident.
The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!
This is mostly done with breeding and hybridization as opposed to genetic engineering, though there have been some transgenics where anti-pest genes from other organisms have been spliced into corn.
There have been more herbicide resistance genetics recently.
To put it mildly, Monsanto has been very aggressive at enforcing their patents.
So the vendor lock-in is that... it's a better product? If that's what your idea of "vendor lock-in" is I can totally get behind that.
Frankly, I don’t know how common this is with corn, or are the farmers all buying hybrid seeds each year anyway.
Farmers can plant roundup-ready corn without paying any royalties to Monsanto, and keep + redistribute the seeds as they wish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Plant_Variety_Office
Edit: there's some infornation here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_co...