The fact is that humans have been breeding plants and animals to increase efficiency and palatability for thousands of years, and GMO is the next technological step.
Basically, if you’re fine with your kids ingesting higher levels of pesticides, then go for it!
Your position is a major environmental disaster.
We might both agree that pesticide usage alone should have a negative coefficient on whatever global fitness function we consider, but that a usage of zero pesticide is still sub-optimal.
Dust from harvest causes allergies, but don't blame it on chemicals. Well other than everything is a chemical.
I imagine it has something to do with erosion, but I'd like to know more, and you seem to have a position on the topic.
For the soil itself, it brings up subsoil which has microorganisms that work better in low air enviornment (because that is what they are from) and move the near surface microorganisms down below where they don't get the air they need. It also breaks up organic matter making them break down faster (into CO2 if there is O2 available, and the turning just added a bunch). Also all those broken roots no longer hold the soil in place. so the soil will erode much faster.
Erosion is part of it, but even if the soil wouldn't erode the loss of organic matter is still a big deal.
GMO, with its large increase in potential interventions, is quite revolutionary.
Cross breeding occurs slowly and is a long-used process. The long-used means there is ample evidence suggesting cross-breeding results in safe food.
The fact that cross breeding happens slowly gives any safety issues a long time to reveal themselves before it becomes wide-spread. Thus it makes sense that cross-breeding yields fewer unkown issues by the time its widespread. Essentially, early warning are built in, even for latent issues.
These principles then provide the wise sounding argument that our Motivated Reasoning brain center needed.
As an aside, I admire the HN crowd reasoning capacity, but it always amazes me that almost no one is upfront and say we as a society love the taste of beef and are willing to risk environmental and possibly health issues for it. It would be a much more productive discussion if we were honest about it instead of discussing whether we need bigger cows.
Personally I'm reasonably confident that any significant adverse health effect would have been found by experiments by now, so Bayesian reasoning tells me any unknowns that are still unknown are probably negligible.
Because trusting a company (like Monsanto for instance) to play nice with their patents as it relates to our food supply is a non-starter.
Monsanto is infamous for contaminating non-GMO crops on neighbour farms then suing the neighbour for growing the GMO variety, and for "drift" of their special herbicide which happens to destroy neighbour farm crops - for which the only solution is, you guessed it, buy Monsanto GMO varieties to grow instead of the non-GMO varieties you wanted to grow.
1. in the context of this discussion (ie. GMO cows) this is basically a non-issue. GMO sperm isn't going to "drift" from one pasture to another.
2. Can you substantiate that claim? The Wikipedia article lists a bunch of cases where the farmers were intentionally trying to breed monsanto seeds, which is different than the narrative you presented, which imply farmers being sued for accidental contamination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#As_plaint...
There used to be range wars over "strange breeds" much less gene-edited breeds where I grew up, where the cows still largely wander federal land and get rounded up seasonally.
On the second claim, it's briefly described in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Dicamba). The second claim isn't about GMO spreading directly, but rather about how you may have no choice but to grow the GMO variety (and pay for it, and lose revenue if you were growing something more profitable) when in the neighbourhood of other farms growing it, which has a similar practical effect on individual farmers regarding "you’re still free to go back to non-GMO varieties".
Lengthier article here (https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-ins...) "‘Buy it or else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s moves to force dicamba on farmers" [...] [...] "His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds" [...] "As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds."
>Lengthier article here (https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-ins...) "‘Buy it or else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s moves to force dicamba on farmers" [...] [...] "His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds" [...] "As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds."
I agree that this situation is bad and monsanto was in the wrong. However, I don't agree with the characterization of this as a GMO problem. The problem as I see it is that one party (the farmer spraying dicamba) is harming another party (the farmer that's not using monsanto seeds). In other words, a tort. This is something that the legal system protects against, and the article mentions that the injured farmer has won a lawsuit, so it seems like everything's working as intended. Blaming it on GMO doesn't really make sense. If GMOs weren't involved, and the pesticides merely poisoned the drinking water, that wouldn't magically make the situation okay.
As far as I'm aware this angle is FUD.
If we want to apply the same standard to pesticides I'm not sure any high ground exists. That said, whatever effect they have on mortality appears to be miniscule given the trends over the last century.
If we consider this in the context of GMO it sure seems like FUD to me.
2. The benefits are clear: GMO foods are more cost effective, hence why farmers choose them over conventional
That's fine. You're free to buy the conventional version if that's the case. However, market pressures will likely bring down the price, which mean some of the profit/savings are passed onto you.