231–240 of 371 posts
Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…
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> returned from ag use for ecological restoration. We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value. Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs). Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.
We do that, and actually pay farmers to keep land fallow in some cases. We must have this high leve of productivity before it's even a possibility, but once it's a possibility we can expand its use. The current economic system is changeable, one ag technology allows us to.
From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.
There are two interesting things here from a legal perspective. 1. Licensing works on the commercial seeds because they are patented, and thus the company that makes those seeds can dictate license terms on the farmers. As far as I can tell, these open seeds are not patented and thus their creators can't really impose license terms on the buyers unless they sign a contract before sale. That would be treated solely un…
I thought the same thing, reading the article.
A much more effective way, IMO, would be to establish a trust or foundation with the desired openness characteristics (eg FRAND) defined in its charter, and then have participants assign IP rights to the organization in some contract.
Or, as I said in my other reponse, just end the patent system.
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Isn't the point of GMO technology that you can use it to accomplish this "in the lab" rather than in the field?
I'd be fine with GMO if it weren't for the pesticides that come with it. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-monsantos-roundup-pestic... > But pure glyphosate isn’t sprayed on crops, Roundup is, which contains a variety of adjuvants and surfactants meant to help the glyphosate penetrate into tissues. And indeed when the study was repeated with what’s actually sprayed on GMO crops, there were toxic and hormonal effect…
It's very much like the tobacco lobby playbook. Nicotine may not be that bad for you (unless you're a bug) but you aren't smoking nicotine. You're smoking a broadleaf plant exposed to soil minerals and four kinds of pesticides and antifungal compounds (fungi and human livers are susceptible to many of the same chemicals) which may or may not have prevented fungal volatiles from ending up in your lungs alongside the trace amounts of uranium.
Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…
Hybridisation sounds like a bug not a feature. You get a benefit but with quite an extreme tradeoff. To be clear I understand that hybrids are current best practice. But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture. BTW would you say that seed producers have no motivation to develop non-hybrids that will perform as well as hybrids?
For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and went from there.
One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is doing the same thing, though I think their methods are recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else.
I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect resistant trees over time.
In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.
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That seems utterly irrelevant. Trying to benefit is irrelevant. Trying to steal is what is relevant. Consider the case where the gene edited crops actually implemented a dependency on roundup, and the neighboring farms were forced to use round up rather than did so because it was simply more useful.
No such dependency exists. The only rational reason to spray a crop with RoundUp is that you know you've sowed RoundUp Ready seeds; in any other circumstance you'd simply be killing your crop off. If you contrive a counterfactual where that's not the case, then obviously different fact patterns matter. It's like saying "well, sure, he shot the guy, but consider an alternate universe where shooting someone with a gun…
> The farmers saved a percentage of the seeds and sowed them again the next spring. However, this is not a lucrative model for profit-oriented multinational companies, since the seed breeders only earn a profit during the first sale and not again every year. Was the "inability of the produced seeds to be sowed again and turn into a crop" intentionally baked into the seeds sold by these companies, purely for profits?…
Nearly all modern crops are hybrid strains, which means the offspring won't have the same genotype as the parents. This is the real reason why re-planting doesn't work well. It's not anything nefarious.
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People underestimate how much agriculture is devoted solely to seed crops Can you explain this further? I never thought about where seeds come from. Are there giant Bayer-owned fields devoted to growing seeds?
There are a lot of those fields around growing just seed. Some are Bayer owned, others are regular farmers who contract with Bayer to grow seed as their crop. One of the most common jobs for young farm kids is "detasseling" where they go around to seed fields to cut the tassel (male part of the corn plant) off some of the plants. Normally you plant 1 row of male plants, and 4 rows of female plants, since corn plants…
Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture. The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody…
Government and legislative failure. Just protect the seeds by disallowing any protection/patenting, for the public good, that's why we pay taxes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be fine with GMO if it weren't for the pesticides that come with it. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-monsantos-roundup-pestic... > But pure glyphosate isn’t sprayed on crops, Roundup is, which contains a variety of adjuvants and surfactants meant to help the glyphosate penetrate into tissues. And indeed when the study was repeated with what’s actually sprayed on GMO crops, there were toxic and hormonal effect…
At this point any time someone switches from talking about Roundup to glyphosate, they either have an agenda, or they picked up their argument from people who do. Some of the 'inactive' ingredients in Roundup are more toxic than glyphosate, and stick around longer. Spraying it directly on yourself, the glyphosate may or may not be your immediate concern, but touching something that was sprayed weeks ago the glyphosat…