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Comment by justaman | Hacker News Reader

No thanks. If this becomes a reality(unlikely) and I live that long, I'll be moving somewhere far from where its happening. I currently in a small community. We get our eggs and ground beef from a local family farm.

Most of the articles like these are written by people entirely out of touch with life outside of a city. This author has lived in NY city their entire life.

Farming and agriculture are entirely sustainable practices even with climate change looming. It is only the methods we use that need to change. Overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, over-farming/tilling, and stupid crop rotations are to blame. The best way to get an insect resistant form of corn? Breed corn. Don't modify its genetics in a lab with the end goal of finding a strain that requires a petrochemical bath to survive.

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There's a reason GMOs have become so popular: their yield was much greater than traditional crops. If a few decades of GMO has created greater yields than hundreds of years of breeding corn, what makes you think the issue is GMO? Because it sounds bad?

Large-scale farming is a scientifical process, yields are closely tracked and experimental farms are used to test hypotheses. Even with all of this, there simply isn't enough agricultural land to support a typical USA meat-based diet for everyone on earth.

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

> The best way to get an insect resistant form of corn? Breed corn. Don't modify its genetics in a lab

What an incredibly ignorant statement. "The best way to modify the DNA of corn? Badly. Don't try to do it well." Modifying its genetics in a lab is thousands of times more efficient than selective breeding, and we're getting better at it all the time. Why on Earth would you suggest that using an incredibly blunt instrument that takes hundreds of years is better than being fast, precise, and scientific?

This is a very typical attitude of the anti-GMO crowd: "no modifying genetics unless it's done very badly!" It makes no sense at all.

One reason I’m not interested in hyper efficient GMOs is that I don’t trust the incentives of the people making them.

They don’t want me to be healthy, they want to grow food as cheaply as possible and for me to buy and become addicted to their product. I’m not particularly interested in increasing Monsanto’s efficiency.

Sounds like your problem is capitalism and not the underlying technology. Which brings me to a related question: does the meat/dairy industry have my health as their priority?

How can you trust the incentives of any private enterprise? Unfortunately we can't all go back to subsistence agriculture. And sadly food is not seen as a right worth guaranteeing to "first world" citizens, even children, which rules out the state.

And what makes traditional breeding methods any less susceptible to these goals? Or how far back in history of cultivars we need to go?

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