Support GMO foods

[Loren Pechtel]

If you force food companies to label GMOs, then the CYA effect will result in the same situation we have with peanuts - everything not explicitly manufactured for the specialist 'no-nuts' or 'no-GMO' market will be labelled 'may contain...', and the information provided to the consumer will be no better than it is with only those specialist products bearing a label.

So long as the label can say "this product may contain GMOs" it's a trivial issue. Anyone who doesn't track simply marks their products thus, end of issue. Our anti-GMOs at least don't want this answer, they want explicit tracking.

 

[bilby]

If you force food companies to label GMOs, then the CYA effect will result in the same situation we have with peanuts - everything not explicitly manufactured for the specialist 'no-nuts' or 'no-GMO' market will be labelled 'may contain...', and the information provided to the consumer will be no better than it is with only those specialist products bearing a label.

So long as the label can say "this product may contain GMOs" it's a trivial issue. Anyone who doesn't track simply marks their products thus, end of issue. Our anti-GMOs at least don't want this answer, they want explicit tracking.

And I want them to follow Vani Hari's lead and declare, “There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.”; It would resolve the whole issue in about half a week (or about five minutes if they expand 'ingest' to include 'inhale'). But none of us should expect to get everything we want in life.

 

[Togo]

If you force food companies to label GMOs, then the CYA effect will result in the same situation we have with peanuts - everything not explicitly manufactured for the specialist 'no-nuts' or 'no-GMO' market will be labelled 'may contain...', and the information provided to the consumer will be no better than it is with only those specialist products bearing a label.

So long as the label can say "this product may contain GMOs" it's a trivial issue. Anyone who doesn't track simply marks their products thus, end of issue. Our anti-GMOs at least don't want this answer, they want explicit tracking.

I'm happy to have a label 'this product may contain GMOs'. That's exactly what was implemented in Europe, which is what is being blamed in the OP for the collapse of the GMO market there. It's also what the GMO lobby explicitly tried to ban at the WTO, because such a label allows customers to distinguish between tracked and untracked products.

As such, I think Loren has this backwards.

A great deal of European food has tracking requirements anyway, requiring that it be possible to trace the food back to the original producer.

 

[Jarhyn]

So long as the label can say "this product may contain GMOs" it's a trivial issue. Anyone who doesn't track simply marks their products thus, end of issue. Our anti-GMOs at least don't want this answer, they want explicit tracking.

I'm happy to have a label 'this product may contain GMOs'. That's exactly what was implemented in Europe, which is what is being blamed in the OP for the collapse of the GMO market there. It's also what the GMO lobby explicitly tried to ban at the WTO, because such a label allows customers to distinguish between tracked and untracked products.

As such, I think Loren has this backwards.

A great deal of European food has tracking requirements anyway, requiring that it be possible to trace the food back to the original producer.

Yes. And as you noticed, all Crops touched by any Transgenic method, regardless of effect or trait, is unable to be marketed in the majority of Europe either because of some ban or because of logistic problems or because the label has created strong public negative sentiment. It entirely validates my points about such bullshit being an attempt to officially or defacfo ban transgenic technologies. Not just specific applications, but literally every last such technology. Because Luddites.

So thanks for proving my point: these labels are not an attempt to make food safer in reality through science, they are an attempt to use pathos to circumvent logos, to do to GMOs using an exformation campaign what simple fact and science could never accomplish.

I keep saying it, and it's not ever going to get less true, talking about GMO, except in defense of the process against Luddites, is fundamentally dishonest or fundamentally ignorant, or fundamentally insane. There is no other thing it can be. If you want to attack a specific strain, that's OK, but do it using fact, knowledge and science. And don't generalize it to transgenic sciences as a whole.

 

[tupac chopra]

del

 

[tupac chopra]

I keep saying it, and it's not ever going to get less true, talking about GMO, except in defense of the process against Luddites, is fundamentally dishonest or fundamentally ignorant, or fundamentally insane. There is no other thing it can be. If you want to attack a specific strain, that's OK, but do it using fact, knowledge and science. And don't generalize it to transgenic sciences as a whole.

So let me get this right. When you are promoting these untested products its ok to generalise. But if you aren't promoting them it's not?

Even though at least one scientsist who worked on GMO for 20 years thought that it was the process of making them that was the problem.

I think the American way is probably to put anyone who criticises them in jail, don't you agree?

 

[arkirk]

I'm happy to have a label 'this product may contain GMOs'. That's exactly what was implemented in Europe, which is what is being blamed in the OP for the collapse of the GMO market there. It's also what the GMO lobby explicitly tried to ban at the WTO, because such a label allows customers to distinguish between tracked and untracked products.

As such, I think Loren has this backwards.

A great deal of European food has tracking requirements anyway, requiring that it be possible to trace the food back to the original producer.

Yes. And as you noticed, all Crops touched by any Transgenic method, regardless of effect or trait, is unable to be marketed in the majority of Europe either because of some ban or because of logistic problems or because the label has created strong public negative sentiment. It entirely validates my points about such bullshit being an attempt to officially or defacfo ban transgenic technologies. Not just specific applications, but literally every last such technology. Because Luddites.

So thanks for proving my point: these labels are not an attempt to make food safer in reality through science, they are an attempt to use pathos to circumvent logos, to do to GMOs using an exformation campaign what simple fact and science could never accomplish.

I keep saying it, and it's not ever going to get less true, talking about GMO, except in defense of the process against Luddites, is fundamentally dishonest or fundamentally ignorant, or fundamentally insane. There is no other thing it can be. If you want to attack a specific strain, that's OK, but do it using fact, knowledge and science. And don't generalize it to transgenic sciences as a whole.

You too...into ad hom? What you are not getting is that these processes are for the express purpose of increasing the size of massive monocultures by industrial means. That, in itself, is a problem. I have already covered that in this thread and you and other "we don't need no stinkin' labels" advocates have not addressed it. The GMO people and the industrial agriculture corporations are putting all of our eggs in one Titanic basket. Like the Titanic, whose passengers were sorely impressed with the elegance and grace of that mighty ship, it does not pay to jump on board without a little more knowledge of possible consequences. Before the ship left port, they knew they didn't have enough lifeboats for everybody on board. They felt this was not important because this ship couldn't sink. Welcome aboard, Jarhyn!

Agriculture is perhaps the most significant human effect on the planet. Your turning it over to a few wide eyed developers of monoculture crops is indeed an uninformed and foolhardy choice. Monoculture requires the extermination of species of animal and plant life that might compete with and perhaps diminish crop yields. The expense is one of diversity. The expense is one of annihilation and conversion of ecosystems. GMO and gene implant technology can be used in a myriad of other applications, but it is foolhardy to further push the envelope of its application in such a manner as to irreversibly co-opt the existing wild and domesticated stocks. This is true of industrial agriculture in general and anything that pushes the balance any further in that direction is truly foolhardy.

Transgenic science is a nascent field....a mere babe in the woods. You can't seem to understand that. I believe that as a bare minimum of protection, we should have labels that tell us what we are eating. We should have laws that allow us to research the safety of these products in independent laboratories and if the industry objects...then let the government do it and not abdicate its duty to the public. You guys who want this stuff in your own bodies without even knowing it is there...try some other form of gambling that actually might have a payoff. You can live just fine without GMO...possibly with...but then, we really don't know!

 

[Axulus]

Yes. And as you noticed, all Crops touched by any Transgenic method, regardless of effect or trait, is unable to be marketed in the majority of Europe either because of some ban or because of logistic problems or because the label has created strong public negative sentiment. It entirely validates my points about such bullshit being an attempt to officially or defacfo ban transgenic technologies. Not just specific applications, but literally every last such technology. Because Luddites.

So thanks for proving my point: these labels are not an attempt to make food safer in reality through science, they are an attempt to use pathos to circumvent logos, to do to GMOs using an exformation campaign what simple fact and science could never accomplish.

I keep saying it, and it's not ever going to get less true, talking about GMO, except in defense of the process against Luddites, is fundamentally dishonest or fundamentally ignorant, or fundamentally insane. There is no other thing it can be. If you want to attack a specific strain, that's OK, but do it using fact, knowledge and science. And don't generalize it to transgenic sciences as a whole.

You too...into ad hom? What you are not getting is that these processes are for the express purpose of increasing the size of massive monocultures by industrial means. That, in itself, is a problem. I have already covered that in this thread and you and other "we don't need no stinkin' labels" advocates have not addressed it. The GMO people and the industrial agriculture corporations are putting all of our eggs in one Titanic basket. Like the Titanic, whose passengers were sorely impressed with the elegance and grace of that mighty ship, it does not pay to jump on board without a little more knowledge of possible consequences. Before the ship left port, they knew they didn't have enough lifeboats for everybody on board. They felt this was not important because this ship couldn't sink. Welcome aboard, Jarhyn!

Agriculture is perhaps the most significant human effect on the planet. Your turning it over to a few wide eyed developers of monoculture crops is indeed an uninformed and foolhardy choice. Monoculture requires the extermination of species of animal and plant life that might compete with and perhaps diminish crop yields. The expense is one of diversity. The expense is one of annihilation and conversion of ecosystems. GMO and gene implant technology can be used in a myriad of other applications, but it is foolhardy to further push the envelope of its application in such a manner as to irreversibly co-opt the existing wild and domesticated stocks. This is true of industrial agriculture in general and anything that pushes the balance any further in that direction is truly foolhardy.

Transgenic science is a nascent field....a mere babe in the woods. You can't seem to understand that. I believe that as a bare minimum of protection, we should have labels that tell us what we are eating. We should have laws that allow us to research the safety of these products in independent laboratories and if the industry objects...then let the government do it and not abdicate its duty to the public. You guys who want this stuff in your own bodies without even knowing it is there...try some other form of gambling that actually might have a payoff. You can live just fine without GMO...possibly with...but then, we really don't know!

Monoculture isn't something inherent to GMOs. Farmers will use the best seeds they have available to them for the crop they want to grow. If there is a beneficial trait that can be added to seeds using a GMO technique, then such a trait can be added to _multiple varieties_ of seeds of any given crop.

If you eliminate GMOs, you still have the same seeds being used minus the GMO trait.

 

[arkirk]

You too...into ad hom? What you are not getting is that these processes are for the express purpose of increasing the size of massive monocultures by industrial means. That, in itself, is a problem. I have already covered that in this thread and you and other "we don't need no stinkin' labels" advocates have not addressed it. The GMO people and the industrial agriculture corporations are putting all of our eggs in one Titanic basket. Like the Titanic, whose passengers were sorely impressed with the elegance and grace of that mighty ship, it does not pay to jump on board without a little more knowledge of possible consequences. Before the ship left port, they knew they didn't have enough lifeboats for everybody on board. They felt this was not important because this ship couldn't sink. Welcome aboard, Jarhyn!

Agriculture is perhaps the most significant human effect on the planet. Your turning it over to a few wide eyed developers of monoculture crops is indeed an uninformed and foolhardy choice. Monoculture requires the extermination of species of animal and plant life that might compete with and perhaps diminish crop yields. The expense is one of diversity. The expense is one of annihilation and conversion of ecosystems. GMO and gene implant technology can be used in a myriad of other applications, but it is foolhardy to further push the envelope of its application in such a manner as to irreversibly co-opt the existing wild and domesticated stocks. This is true of industrial agriculture in general and anything that pushes the balance any further in that direction is truly foolhardy.

Transgenic science is a nascent field....a mere babe in the woods. You can't seem to understand that. I believe that as a bare minimum of protection, we should have labels that tell us what we are eating. We should have laws that allow us to research the safety of these products in independent laboratories and if the industry objects...then let the government do it and not abdicate its duty to the public. You guys who want this stuff in your own bodies without even knowing it is there...try some other form of gambling that actually might have a payoff. You can live just fine without GMO...possibly with...but then, we really don't know!

Monoculture isn't something inherent to GMOs. Farmers will use the best seeds they have available to them for the crop they want to grow. If there is a beneficial trait that can be added to seeds using a GMO technique, then such a trait can be added to _multiple varieties_ of seeds of any given crop.

If you eliminate GMOs, you still have the same seeds being used minus the GMO trait.

The "farmers" you speak of are not "farmers." They are corporate agribusinesses with huge holdings. The small farmers that are left usually grow diverse, higher end crops. What I am talking about is the kind of "farming" they do in the southern San Joaquin valley...thousands of monocrop acres, hard to even drive through with the windows open for the incipient pesticide in the air....or Imperial valley. Or anywhere in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska. This stuff is highly mechanized, has huge environmental footprints, huge energy costs, air pollution and wildlife destruction. This is industrial agriculture. And yes, they go to their one or two sources for seed. This actually is a separate subject, though GMO crop marketing is a part of it. What happens on these farms is often not even determined in the same state where they exist. Policies concerning these operation is determined wherever their corporate boards sit.

If it were otherwise, there would not be much of an argument over this GMO stuff. Smaller farms get immediate feedback on the policies they adopt from their fields, from their markets, and from their own experience farming. They are by their nature, more diverse and have less environmental impacts. You seem to want to confine your observations only to the market and not to myriad other considerations that must be made and are often made blindly by corporate boards.

I have watched huge operations fight their way into new territory, buy the land use regulators, start up their project, draw down the water table, then fail a number of times where I lived in the desert. The so called farmers turned out to be "systems engineering" firms. This happened in the Calif. desert with Jojoba farms. Big projects lasted six to seven years. Some friends of mine have operated a small jojoba farm in Coachella valley now for 20 years. They are small scale and they actually succeeded in making their project work...of course it is a small operation and not a square mile, like the "systems engineers" said were necessary for economic viability. So we have a farm operating for 20+years that was deemed "economically not viable" and a section of land not far from my place in the desert...that is again open desert, though chemically stripped of other living things and no jojoba anywhere in sight overlaying a remaining depression in the aquifer.

Massive changes are massive in their consequences... Your notion the GMO is a minor change is pure rot.

 

[Jarhyn]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk: anti-industrial Luddititism. To be frank, factory farms make sense. They make more food with less land and less resources. If there was a machine that you poured dirt soil and shit into and out the other end with no work at all came corn, I'd support that. If it meant the end of farming across the world, too bad.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with eliminating those unnecessary low-hanging jobs and reclaiming all that delicious land they're taking up for forests, parks, homes, and businesses. I don't hold onto romantic notions of the American farmer being wanted or necessary. It's nothing more than the same tripe the republicans spew about maintaining some mythical way of life with marriage discrimination. Spend the effort we save not rolling around in the mud on educating kids to do important things like engineer new traits for fun and progress.

You're operating on pure and unmitigated pathos. The fact is, better GMOs mean less pesticides and less impact per acre. Better more designed pesticides mean less pesticides used overall. Doing all the farming in Nebraska keeps farming away from our homes, which would need to happen if we didn't do it industrially. Better herbicides like roundup mean fewer crops to produce the same yeild.

Is it perfect? By no means. I would far rather use transgenics to produce people who need less food, and make farmers obsolete that way.

 

[bilby]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk: anti-industrial Luddititism. To be frank, factory farms make sense. They make more food with less land and less resources. If there was a machine that you poured dirt soil and shit into and out the other end with no work at all came corn, I'd support that. If it meant the end of farming across the world, too bad.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with eliminating those unnecessary low-hanging jobs and reclaiming all that delicious land they're taking up for forests, parks, homes, and businesses. I don't hold onto romantic notions of the American farmer being wanted or necessary. It's nothing more than the same tripe the republicans spew about maintaining some mythical way of life with marriage discrimination. Spend the effort we save not rolling around in the mud on educating kids to do important things like engineer new traits for fun and progress.

You're operating on pure and unmitigated pathos. The fact is, better GMOs mean less pesticides and less impact per acre. Better more designed pesticides mean less pesticides used overall. Doing all the farming in Nebraska keeps farming away from our homes, which would need to happen if we didn't do it industrially. Better herbicides like roundup mean fewer crops to produce the same yeild.

Is it perfect? By no means. I would far rather use transgenics to produce people who need less food, and make farmers obsolete that way.

Homeothermy is certainly very wasteful; now that first-world humans control the temperature of their surroundings as a matter of course, perhaps we should ditch some or all of that trait, and save a fortune on food. Poikilothermy is much less food intensive.

I suspect it will take us a while to reach the level of sophistication needed to engineer such a significant change to a systemic and multi-faceted evolved trait though. So agribusiness will be with us for some time yet.

The romantic notion of the happy peasant farmer on his smallholding who feeds the nation, was outdated in the 1930s; it is amusing that it still persists in the 21st century. People really don't know jack shit about where their food actually comes from I guess, and that leaves a big disconnect between reality and perception, that can be filled with romance.

The idea that seven billion humans could live that way is as absurd as the idea that a billion humans could have lived without agriculture, but that doesn't stop hippies from dreaming - they just say we should have a smaller population, hand waving away the unprecedented genocide that would be required to achieve that end.

It's OK if 99.99% of people don't want to return to stone-age living; because less than 0.001% of us would survive such a thing. So that's all right then.

 

[tupac chopra]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk:.

Unlike you Akirk, is able to think about the social cost of things and that making things more "efficient" in the short term may have unintended consequences.

 

[Jarhyn]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk:.

Unlike you Akirk, is able to think about the social cost of things and that making things more "efficient" in the short term may have unintended consequences.

No. He is thinking of the short term small picture social costs to people he already likes: his small farm friends in the desert. Keeping things sustainable is one thing. Attacking a process that is distinctly capable of making sustainability a reality (if you're willing to dispense with the misplaced romantic bullshit) is entirely another. Transgenic sciences are a reality. They have great potential. You attack transgenics rather than specific strains. Pick something to not like, but not liking the process itself is being a Luddite. Period.

I don't have much of an opinion on certain transgenic traits beyond the fact that due to me eating them for my whole life, I consider than safe. My goal is to defend the process
Of transgenic modification from Luddites because I hope to use it on MYSELF, to benefit directly from the ability to define 'humanity' for myself. I would burn the land and boil the seas, I would make the earth an inert cinder if it meant our minds living forever. No price of darwinian life is too high to see that happen. But it will only happen when enough of the romantic hippies grow up and realize not dying is more important than our planet, which is destined to be scoured by its sun no matter what we do.

 

[tupac chopra]

Unlike you Akirk, is able to think about the social cost of things and that making things more "efficient" in the short term may have unintended consequences.

No. He is thinking of the short term small picture social costs to people he already likes: his small farm friends in the desert. Keeping things sustainable is one thing. Attacking a process that is distinctly capable of making sustainability a reality (if you're willing to dispense with the misplaced romantic bullshit) is entirely another. Transgenic sciences are a reality. They have great potential. You attack transgenics rather than specific strains. Pick something to not like, but not liking the process itself is being a Luddite. Period.

Each one needs to be judged on its merits

I don't have much of an opinion on certain transgenic traits beyond the fact that due to me eating them for my whole life, I consider than safe. My goal is to defend the process.

But how can you defend the process without more testing. Claiming ignorance is not really much of a defence. All you guys end up saying is..."we don't know why a different process might produce different results, so we will just assume it doesn't.
."
Are you unaware that Arpad Pusztai, who worked for 20 years developing GMO's suspected that it was the "process" that was responsible for problems he saw. But he was immediately sacked.
It is far too costly for America to consider that the process itself might have problems. American corporations involved in GMO's can't possibly entertain that thought. The American government can't as it needs the tax revenue and it's already in a precarious situation WRT it's debt.
This is why we found out (only via wikileaks) that the American government puts pressure on countries to soften their stance on GMO's.

In response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007, the ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of former US president George Bush, asked Washington to penalise the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.

"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.

Thankfully a Russian NGO has launched the long term study referred to earlier. They may have their axe to grind too but at least a study is underway
The American government and corporations like Monsanto will never ever do these studies. They can't afford to find out they stuffed things up. Too much money involved.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The "farmers" you speak of are not "farmers." They are corporate agribusinesses with huge holdings.

They're growing commercial cops. That's a farmer in my dictionary.

The small farmers that are left usually grow diverse, higher end crops.

Because they compete better this way.

If it were otherwise, there would not be much of an argument over this GMO stuff. Smaller farms get immediate feedback on the policies they adopt from their fields, from their markets, and from their own experience farming. They are by their nature, more diverse and have less environmental impacts. You seem to want to confine your observations only to the market and not to myriad other considerations that must be made and are often made blindly by corporate boards.

1) The big guys have a bigger sample size and more reason to monitor--they will have better feedback than the small guys.

2) The small guys will have a larger impact per unit of production.

I have watched huge operations fight their way into new territory, buy the land use regulators, start up their project, draw down the water table, then fail a number of times where I lived in the desert.

The water table is a definite issue.

- - - Updated - - -

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk:.

Unlike you Akirk, is able to think about the social cost of things and that making things more "efficient" in the short term may have unintended consequences.

The problem is he assumes big = bad. Generally a bigger outfit does a more efficient job and thus has a lower impact for the amount produced.

 

[tupac chopra]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk:.

Unlike you Akirk, is able to think about the social cost of things and that making things more "efficient" in the short term may have unintended consequences.

The problem is he assumes big = bad. Generally a bigger outfit does a more efficient job and thus has a lower impact for the amount produced.

The problem is you think "efficient"=good, but there are other important ways to measure how we live

 

[Jarhyn]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk:.

Unlike you Akirk, is able to think about the social cost of things and that making things more "efficient" in the short term may have unintended consequences.

The problem is he assumes big = bad. Generally a bigger outfit does a more efficient job and thus has a lower impact for the amount produced.

The problem is you think "efficient"=good, but there are other important ways to measure how we live

Yes. Like total per capita weeks per week spent on food production efforts, and total outflow of resources into that food production as a percentage of available.

In the smallest 'most sustainable' farm model, we would all be subsistence farming. The week of the average person would also be about 75% consumed with farming, and we wouldn't have the time to do things like make medicine, train doctors, make lice removal shampoo, or make shoes. Every human would require about an acre of land, and the world would be covered in farms. We wouldn't possibly have enough resources to have a tractor for everyone. We'd be back to ox and plow. We're talking about an agrarian world full of misery and strife, where ancient and highly inefficient methods that utterly wreck the land would dominate, where life would be nasty, brutish, and short because everyone would be fighting over the best contiguous farm land.
Forests would disappear.

Currently, we are doing some pretty unsustainable things. I get that. I just don't see how romantic bullshit like the myth of the sustainable small farm is applicable. For someone who wants to be focusing humanity on rockets, robots, and redesigning our meat suits for vacuum operations, that seems a pretty raw deal.

 

[tupac chopra]

Every human would require about an acre of land, .

Would you be kind enough to explain how you arrived at that?

We're talking about an agrarian world full of misery and strife, where ancient and highly inefficient methods that utterly wreck the land would dominate, where life would be nasty, brutish, and short because everyone would be fighting over the best contiguous farm land.
Forests would disappear.

Forests have disappeared at an alarming rate with technology. Life is nasty for many people in modern societies today, and prolonging peoples lives doesn't always make them less nasty

I just don't see why we need to rush when it comes to GMO foods. What is the hurry.
The Russian NGO is doing a study that will take 3 years (only). Do we need to rush them out there before these sorts of tests are done?

What is the point of Monsanto doing a 90 day study if that study won't show any long term effects?
Why not do no studies if their corn really is "substantially equivalent".

 

[Jarhyn]

Would you be kind enough to explain how you arrived at that?

We're talking about an agrarian world full of misery and strife, where ancient and highly inefficient methods that utterly wreck the land would dominate, where life would be nasty, brutish, and short because everyone would be fighting over the best contiguous farm land.
Forests would disappear.

Forests have disappeared at an alarming rate with technology. Life is nasty for many people in modern societies today, and prolonging peoples lives doesn't always make them less nasty

I just don't see why we need to rush when it comes to GMO foods. What is the hurry.
The Russian NGO is doing a study that will take 3 year (only). Do we need to rush them out there before these sorts of tests are done?

What you don't seem to understand is that without the technology, life would be substantially, intractably worse. I've lived in poverty. I've lived in third world shitholes. I've squatted in mud holes and slept where beds were necessary not because they were comfortable but because they kept us up away from the scorpions. We're talking going back to mud huts here. I'll keep my antibiotics, thanks. If you want to live in a world of subsistence and small farms without GMOs, you can always get that by moving to rural China. But do mind the liver flukes.

Pretty much all of our most important technology over the last 40k years has been advances in food technologies, from selective breeding to accounting, wheelbarrows and fermentation. Antibiotics, chemistry, animal husbandry. Most wars throughout history have been over farmland. We know of time because we needed it to farm and hunt effectively. Because every second that isn't spent on food can be spent making it easier to get food. Until the problem hopefully goes away. We're on the cusp of that and transgenics are the only visible path to that outcome. I don't like how most people have handled transgenics, but you're attacking the process. Like attacking the production of lathes because you don't like cars. It is literally that silly.

Every second spent doing menial chores like sourcing food and building shelter and the other bare bones of subsistence is time robbed from us. You want to literally steal my time by forcing me or someone else like me into the mud for my sake.

 

[arkirk]

And now we cut to the quick of what really motivates arkirk: anti-industrial Luddititism. To be frank, factory farms make sense. They make more food with less land and less resources. If there was a machine that you poured dirt soil and shit into and out the other end with no work at all came corn, I'd support that. If it meant the end of farming across the world, too bad.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with eliminating those unnecessary low-hanging jobs and reclaiming all that delicious land they're taking up for forests, parks, homes, and businesses. I don't hold onto romantic notions of the American farmer being wanted or necessary. It's nothing more than the same tripe the republicans spew about maintaining some mythical way of life with marriage discrimination. Spend the effort we save not rolling around in the mud on educating kids to do important things like engineer new traits for fun and progress.

You're operating on pure and unmitigated pathos. The fact is, better GMOs mean less pesticides and less impact per acre. Better more designed pesticides mean less pesticides used overall. Doing all the farming in Nebraska keeps farming away from our homes, which would need to happen if we didn't do it industrially. Better herbicides like roundup mean fewer crops to produce the same yeild.

Is it perfect? By no means. I would far rather use transgenics to produce people who need less food, and make farmers obsolete that way.

Homeothermy is certainly very wasteful; now that first-world humans control the temperature of their surroundings as a matter of course, perhaps we should ditch some or all of that trait, and save a fortune on food. Poikilothermy is much less food intensive.

I suspect it will take us a while to reach the level of sophistication needed to engineer such a significant change to a systemic and multi-faceted evolved trait though. So agribusiness will be with us for some time yet.

The romantic notion of the happy peasant farmer on his smallholding who feeds the nation, was outdated in the 1930s; it is amusing that it still persists in the 21st century. People really don't know jack shit about where their food actually comes from I guess, and that leaves a big disconnect between reality and perception, that can be filled with romance.

The idea that seven billion humans could live that way is as absurd as the idea that a billion humans could have lived without agriculture, but that doesn't stop hippies from dreaming - they just say we should have a smaller population, hand waving away the unprecedented genocide that would be required to achieve that end.

It's OK if 99.99% of people don't want to return to stone-age living; because less than 0.001% of us would survive such a thing. So that's all right then.

Gentlemen, I shall call you that though it is stretching the term:

You seem to be afraid of sustainability because you are both probably quite a ways away from anything that resembles sustainability. I have NEVER SUGGESTED THAT WE RETURN TO THE STONE AGE. On this very page Jarhyn thinks it is okay to "burn this planet to a cinder if it means our minds living on forever." He also said not to worry old earth because it is going to be scoured by the sun anyway. Does he not know that I understand the probable likelihood of our sun expanding beyond the current orbit of Mars? That has nothing to do with raising corn or peaches. It isn't going to happen in anything like your lifetime...get over it!

Your attitude calls to mind a story my dad told me when I was young. He was walking down the street and he saw a girl holding a kitten and torturing it by grinding its nose against a screen door. He stopped and told her to not do that. Her reply, straight out of Jarhyn's moral handbook: "It doesn't matter...my parents are going to have it killed tomorrow." You guys seem to have the same type of religious fervor for GMO's as ISIS has for its Caliphate.

I read Dr. Pusztai's papers and also watched the videos in which he outlined the terrorist tactics used on him...kicking him out of his job, causing him to have a heart attack, and then smearing his name....kinda like the attacks you Luddite hating GMO people seem to feel free to aim at me. Well I may be old but I am in a lot better shape than the good doctor and whether it is him or me, you tend to not be listening to what we are saying. If you read Tupac's posts on this page, you will find he also knows that Dr. Pusztai's business was in developing GMO's. In fact, it was his familiarity with their production in the lab that uniquely qualified him to lead the test effort.

If you paid attention to anything I wrote you would find I am not opposed to GMO testing and experimentation. My concern is poorly framed systems engineering and mass production of products of dubious value. My farmer friends in Desert Center are respectable human beings and continue to run a sustainable farm in that location. On the other hand, the square mile I mentioned formed by so called modern methods remains a piece of unrecovered denuded desert land and people who live down gradient from it suffer flash floods as a result...and also lowered water in their wells. And it now produces zero jojoba.

What I am trying to tell you two and to some degree, Loren is to stop being so arrogant and insulting to ideas you don't understand or simply brush off without any consideration whatever. It is possible to deploy a lot of modern equipment and ideas into environments that simply are not fit for the activity. I am an advocate for scientific methods seeking sustainability...not the return to stone tools.