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Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

longnow.org

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Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#51

Post by giantg2 »

greetings wrote: post #24
MostlyStable wrote: post #12

Home gardeners seem like a pretty good option here. For more regular vegetables, this is already a thing that exists with seed libraries and exchanges, and programs that preserve heirloom varietals and sell the seeds to gardeners. Buying these seeds is basically just a way to help pay for the continued cultivation by the breeder (unfortunately, unless you really know what you are doing and are quite careful, preservi…

Wowa, something I have experience with. I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread. I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube. The…

I did a small patch of wheat and barley. I also malted it to make my own beer.

I just used a box fan for winnowing. I built a 5 gallon bucket thresher to use with a drill. Worked really well.

I'm doing winter wheat this year for bread.

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#52

Post by MostlyStable »

dheera wrote: post #43
MostlyStable wrote: post #12

Home gardeners seem like a pretty good option here. For more regular vegetables, this is already a thing that exists with seed libraries and exchanges, and programs that preserve heirloom varietals and sell the seeds to gardeners. Buying these seeds is basically just a way to help pay for the continued cultivation by the breeder (unfortunately, unless you really know what you are doing and are quite careful, preservi…

> are a dead-end genetically Is this on purpose or a technical limitation? Can we create a new plant that (1) tastes good (2) is not a genetic dead end (3) is easily spread to other farms by squirrels and birds (4) low maintainence, and put an end to this DRM? I mean it would be kind of nice if there existed a forest full of food that nobody had to maintain. > they are paying to support the continued cultivation of t…

I meant dead end in the sense that their genes aren't going anywhere. 90+% of home gardeners don't save seeds, and the few that do are almost certainly not preserving the strains they think they are since, most gardeners grow multiple varieties at the same time that are all getting cross pollinated. It was not meant to imply anything about the viability of the strain they are growing, many of which are fantastic heirlooms that have been around for generations.

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#53

Post by MostlyStable »

giantg2 wrote: post #51
greetings wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wowa, something I have experience with. I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread. I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube. The…

I did a small patch of wheat and barley. I also malted it to make my own beer. I just used a box fan for winnowing. I built a 5 gallon bucket thresher to use with a drill. Worked really well. I'm doing winter wheat this year for bread.

I'd be interested to hear about the bucket thresher. Most of the DIY options I found when I was looking where larger with custom flail mechanisms and bike-chain drives etc. Honestly, building the thresher itself seemed like kind of a cool project on it's own, but it was just more effort than I was willing to put in. But a 5 gallon bucket option that runs of a drill sounds much more my speed.

How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you think you would have been willing to process with that method?

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#54

Post by [deleted] »

favorited wrote: post #21
bryanlarsen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Long Now Foundation's mission is "Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now." The leading zero is a way to trigger people to think about the next 10,000 years.

Interesting, thanks! I'd never heard of The Long Now Foundation before.

[deleted]

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#55

Post by karaterobot »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #42
karaterobot wrote: post #22

If there are hundreds of thousands of plant varieties in that massive seed bank in Svalbard, and only 150 plants are cultivated for consumption today, how the heck is eating a more diverse range of plants supposed to replace seed banks? Is it that everyone on earth is going to eat 1000x more plants than we do now, or is it that there will be 1000x more farms, each making 1/1000th as much money? I know the author is n…

I want my own small farm, but I think that I want to make food instead of money. It's a different proposition, I suppose.

What I'm saying is, he's either proposing that every farm grows 1000x as many types of plants as they do today, or that a massive number of small farms (let us say 100 times as many as exist today) each grow a huge variety of plants (let's say 10 times as many types as they do today).

But, crucially, these small farms could not grow the plants they chose to grow, instead they would have to grow an assortment of diverse species or cultivars, for no other reason than to support a living diversity. 99.9% of the plants you'd be growing would be plants that people decided a long time ago that they didn't want to eat, or use for any other purpose, because there was a better alternative.

Ignore the money part. That was me saying that, if consumption/purchasing of plants is more or less stable, then if you introduce 200,000 varieties of plants into the world, every plant would be sold a lot less. It would be more or less impossible to make a living as a farmer.

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#56

Post by chefkd »

groby_b wrote: post #47
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want my own small farm, but I think that I want to make food instead of money. It's a different proposition, I suppose.

This is likely not an answer. Small-scale sustenance farming is not enough to support humanity at scale. (Without ag-industry methods, we're about 4 billion people past the planets carrying capacity) Also, if that small farm is something you dream about, I strongly suggest actually working on a farm for a while. It is surprisingly not fun. I know "I'm gonna have a farm" is a popular escapist things for many folks in…

This may be a little tangential (sorry) how is the planet's carrying capacity calculated? The malthusian school of thought never made sense to me

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#57

Post by karaterobot »

citruscomputing wrote: post #35
karaterobot wrote: post #22

If there are hundreds of thousands of plant varieties in that massive seed bank in Svalbard, and only 150 plants are cultivated for consumption today, how the heck is eating a more diverse range of plants supposed to replace seed banks? Is it that everyone on earth is going to eat 1000x more plants than we do now, or is it that there will be 1000x more farms, each making 1/1000th as much money? I know the author is n…

If I understand correctly, it's that everyone will still eat < 100 plants, but they'll be different ones from everyone else. Maybe every grocery store won't have the exact same kinds of squash in it. Maybe we'll have more region-specific crops! The example given about olive trees is illustrative, I think.

That's where the economics question comes in. How do you make a living as a farmer selling a very specific variety of squash, when there are now (let's say) 9000 varieties of squash on the market, and the same number of people out there buying squash?

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#59

Post by 8372049 »

prox wrote: post #50
0xTJ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the homepage of the site: > The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. Seems that it's adding a zero to make you think of the future, and thinking over long periods of time. Looking at scales of thousands of years instead of tens or even hundreds.

Some people seem to think its a long way to the chemists, but thats peanuts to space.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

#60

Post by Retric »

karaterobot wrote: post #57
citruscomputing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, it's that everyone will still eat < 100 plants, but they'll be different ones from everyone else. Maybe every grocery store won't have the exact same kinds of squash in it. Maybe we'll have more region-specific crops! The example given about olive trees is illustrative, I think.

That's where the economics question comes in. How do you make a living as a farmer selling a very specific variety of squash, when there are now (let's say) 9000 varieties of squash on the market, and the same number of people out there buying squash?

The same way you make a living when there is 1 type of squash in the market and 9000 farmers planting it. Mostly through government subsidies sometimes supplemented by selling actual food eaten by actual people.

That’s perhaps overstating things, but remove biofuels and we would have an even larger surplus even as everyone gets fat from excess production. Western farming has no real need for increased efficiency unless we get rid of a lot of farmland.

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