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Comment by gouranga | Hacker News Reader

Lets also not forget that the heritage varieties by nature are not hybrid seeds which means that seed can be kept from the plants and planted the following year.

If you take most commercial seed stock it's hybridised resulting in the seed stock being tied to suppliers and not being replantable.

without trying to sound like a paranoid nutbag from abovetopsecret.com, the latter is a serious risk to the food chain. The moment someone allows hybrids to be patented, we all starve. Monsanto are actively working on this.

I've been growing about 200kg a year of non hybrid heritage vegetables for about 10 years in the London suburbs. Totally different to the crap they sell in the supermarkets.

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There's nothing wrong with hybrids for commercial agriculture - we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them. They're tougher, grow faster, and yields are better. There are seed banks where natural varieties are saved, and you can bet Companies like Monsanto have a seed library that covers just about everything on the planet you can grow from a seed (or a bulb or a cutting or whatever).

But for home gardening I stick to heirloom varieties as myself. They're harder to grow, but it's not like you're using commercial farming techniques. If you get a good variety you can trade with your friends.

It's a pain to dry seeds, though, and sometimes you go through all the trouble and for whatever reason they won't sprout when you plant them.

We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide.

To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections.

We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.

>We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all

Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus).

As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational.

[1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...

I'm not really against hybrids, but I'm also not sure how much of this is a hard resource limit versus a current economic one. In the latter case, there's considerable headroom for production to ramp up if economic realities made it viable to do so (e.g. if domestic food prices returned closer to 1980s levels). There's a lot of former cropland that's currently fallow in the U.S. because we don't actually need it; prices for staple crops have been driven so low by oversupply that it's just not commercially viable to farm a large portion of formerly farmed land.

Considering first the US alone: given surplus production and low utilization of potential resources means efficient use of existing resources. This is empirically validated by US farm output growing 1.63% annually from 1948 to 2009; input use over the same time grew only 0.11% [1]. Using less land for farming is logistically and ecologically sound.

Expanding to the world, why are low income countries, in aggregate, exporting agricultural products (but not raw foods) while the local population starves [2]? I do not understand the nuances of the global grocery supply chain to answer this definitively but my background in finance intuits me to believe it is a distribution rather than agriculture problem - witness how "it costs more to truck a container from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, than to ship the same container from China to Djibouti" [3].

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/

[2] http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServ... (See Annex Table 1 and Annex Table 2, pages 25-28)

[3] http://www.economist.com/node/21553050

I'd like to point out that it's also a false dichotomy that we have to switch back to "archaic" modes "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" or embrace GMO. We can still use modern machinery, we can still use our knowledge of alternative pesticides (such as introducing a natural predator of a certain pest), we can still use proper irrigation and crop rotation, we can still use proper greenhouses. Even without modern "industrial" methods, farming has come a long way in the past 150 years compared to it's multi-thousand year history.

edit: I'd also like to point out that cross-breeding seeds with desirable properties (as farmers have done for thousands of years) is also "genetic modification" in some sense, but at a slower and controlled pace, with a large timeframe to observe potential unwanted side effects.

Yes, artificially introducing predators has worked so well in the past (see: Hawaii, Guam, etc.). I'll take my Roundup, thanks.

GMO will feed the world and I welcome them with open arms.

That's as much a straw man as Monsanto is to GMO. Just because some attempts failed doesn't mean it doesn't work.

And besides, that's not even the only way to control pests. Neither do we have to not use pesticides, anyway. That is just one example of how farming tech has improved.

Idiot.

Roundup is a herbicide. There some problems with it:

1. Some plant life has developed natural resistance to it so it's not going to last forever. At that point, the non-roundup supported ecosystem will be dead so there will suddenly be a fallout from using it.

2. The surfactant it's mixed with is toxic to humans and wildlife so you're going to kill everything with the run off and poison the water supplies all over the place.

It's a shitty solution to the problem.

GMO will feed idiots for a profit for a few years and kill the rest of us.

Genetically manipulating our food sources has precisely no effect on the outcome other than the patent encumber the food we eat.

There is no evidence whatsoever on this planet to the contrary. I've dug through EVERY damn academic paper in the last 15 years and found nothing independent, unbiased and not in the pockets of corporations with self-interest at heart. Take the Cornell paper - half the academic staff have part time positions with Monsanto...

To be honest, 99%+ of the crap I've read are like Microsoft writing white papers comparing SQL Server to MySQL.

Find me a paper that isn't sponsored by industry shills or academic shills funded by industry that says otherwise.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a topic of faith, not science.

Technology can and should aid us, but education is far more important.

As for 9 out of 10, I'd rather they were growing food than shoveling high fructose corn syrup into fat Americans in fast food chains...

Here's a simple test to see if genetic modification does anything: buy seeds for one crop (e.g. soybeans) in both "Roundup-ready" and non-modified varieties. Plant both varieties and let them grow. Spray Roundup on both; see which one dies.

It works for that, but Roundup is poisonous to wildlife and plants are developing a resistance to it.

How's your GMO now the rivers are poisoned and superweeds are everywhere?

we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them

We'd just eat more potatoes compared to wheat/fruits.

I'm not sure I'd say that most commercial seed stock is hybridised. I'm in the UK too and in my experience most varieties you can buy are still the kind where you can harvest seeds and plant again the following year.

That said, I ignore the hybrid F1 varieties too. Mainly because I enjoy harvesting my own seeds and selecting the best (or weirdest mutations) each year that are best adapted to conditions where I live. Hybrids can be pretty expensive too and you generally only get a few seeds.

Try http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ - great people and very cheap and generous.

Thanks for reminding me about them! I ordered a catalogue from them a couple of years ago but never got around to ordering anything. I'll definitely take another look.

Good stuff - I recommend their 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' beans, 'Frise Vert Fonce' Parsley and 'Reine des Glaces' lettuce (which is the most awesome thing I've grown in quantity - I spilled some seed in my lawn and loads popped up so I left them as well!).

Any advice on getting started? How do you bootstrap (get seeds etc.)?

Amazon has a large selection of Heirloom seeds, but there are many other niche clubs out there that trade the seeds globally. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

You search for societies aimed at sharing seeds. There are weird EU laws around selling seeds - any seed has to be on a list and many heritage seeds are not. Thus, people do not sell seeds, but sell access to a club through which you'll get seeds.

(http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/members/seed_saving/introduc...)

(http://www.ukabc.org/seedawrd.htm)

(http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/articles/psss-want-to-buy...)

I did some voluntary work on an allotment, and I met some of the old geezers working on nearby plots and we'd share potatoes and tomatoes. It was great fun, and we got some great food from it.

This book on tomatoes has gotten pretty good reviews: Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato

There are a bunch of sites where you can get 300+ different tomotato species, and there are also some websites that list all the various seed companies from around the world.

Also, the NYT just had a favorable interview with the author of Heart Of Dankness, a new book about growers who travel to exotic countries to find new landrace strains of marijuana and then breed them to compete in the cannabis cup. That requires a much larger commitment to the craft that just growing tomatoes though.

There are quite a few forums out there that do seed swaps/parcels for established members. You can often get rare varieties for very little cost, while passing some of your own collection on for others to grow. It is probably something to try later on, but worth joining gardening forums that do it (so that you can have enough posts) to take part.

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