Somewhat lower yields are fine, just reallocate land from other uses. In Europe there's overproduction so large parts of land ended up growing biofuels, which is incredibly stupid. In America large part is fed to cows (in Europe grazing is preferred).
Switzerland doesn't have lots of excess land, it is highly industrialised already.
In Switzerland of all places there should be pretty accurate estimates what would happen after pesticides ban.
Anyone would be so kind as to link them so we could move beyond such nebulous arguments/counterarguments? ;)
I've planted a large variety of vegetables and clovers, buckwheat and things that wasps and bees love for several years. In the last two years of crop alone, I had absolutely no horn worms on any of my tomatoes or related Solanaceae family, no white moths able to lay eggs and destroy my kale, broccolis, or other greens and this is something if you're familiar with farming is unheard of without pesticides. I welcome so many yellow jackets and red wasps, hornets into our backyard that they just annihilate all those pests. The only thing I've had a tiny issue with is clusters of aphids in my tomatoes late season and I can just spray them down with a mild nicotine tea or mint family oils. If you get the ecosystem into balance, there is no need for chemical pesticides. Needing them is a sign of a total out of whack ecosystem in the first place. Mid summer season, it's fun to just sit back and watch 4-5 yellow jackets climbing up and down heirloom kale plants hunting. Without them, the kale would just about be leaf veins left propped up on stalks, as the greedy little worms will absolutely destroy all the leaf if left to their own devices. Don't spray wasps! They are just as crucial as honey bees.
Many countries have realised that relying on a continuously growing population has its own problems. So you need a pension system for a population that doesn't grow. Basically that means that everybody has to pay for their own pension. It doesn't really matter whether you do it as taxes that get paid to the people currently retired or by saving money. The solution The Netherlands came up with (next to moving to an in…
It does matter, because all the saving and dissaving of the saving-based scheme distorts financial markets and sometimes doesn't work anyway . For example, imagine a system where everyone buys an extra house, then sells it when they retire. Now there are twice as many houses as there need to be. And therefore everyone has to commute 1.41 times farther on average; twice as much lumber is used up; twice as many builder…
I naively assume that if you buy an extra house as investment, you rent it out. So the house is actually being used, no need build extra houses or have a longer commute.
Blindly investing and then assuming that it still has value when you retire has a lot of risks. This sometimes happens with owners of small shops who hope to retire with money they get from selling the shop.
> Considering the vastly different regulations and practices in the EU ( e.g. grazing, crop rotation are very popular) Source? From what I heard, crop rotation here isn't widely used yet.
What? I thought the corn-soybean rotation was the norm in the US?
> The problem with modern 2-party systems in the West Could you elaborate on this? Very few countries i know in the west have a 2-party system.
It's a common mistake to judge the entire west from an US perspective. But the UK is not very far from the 2 parties system either.
Arguably the UK is a "2-party-but" system. The main parties are limited in their policies towards Scotland because of how much influence the SNP has, and we've seen what UKIP managed to do while barely ever winning seats. There's enough of a threat from smaller parties to keep the big ones somewhat cooperative, or at least take a wider range of views into account.
Surely it's better to replace indiscriminate spraying of substances known to be harmful with GMO crops carefully bred to have the smallest changes possible?
Genes do not stay put. Genes do not know how to stay put. Their whole purpose is to spread. The difference between weed and crop is very narrow in many cases. Brassicas especially. Any gene you put into them you’re going to deal with in a weed very soon.
>One example of hybridization between GM crops and wild species has been documented in creeping bentgrass commonly used on golf courses. Scotts Miracle-Gro genetically engineered this grass to contain a gene that confers resistance to a common herbicide so that the golf course can be sprayed to kill weeds without harm to the grass. Because this grass is wind-pollinated, a perennial, and highly capable of outcrossing with related wild species, researchers decided to investigate wild grass in close proximity for the presence of the herbicide resistance gene. The researchers collected seeds from wild plants at varied distances from the origin of the grass farm and used herbicides to detect tolerant plants. They confirmed the presence of the herbicide resistant gene in wild grass up to 9 miles from its origin only one year after the grass was planted [2,3,4]. This distance is very surprising because most hybridization events have been reported between plants that are less than a mile apart. It is clear from this study that genetic modifications can be transferred to wild species through hybridization; however, future investigations will need to be performed in order to differentiate whether the genetic modification increases the fitness of wild species or if these hybridizations are a natural result of planting a large grass farm in close proximity to wild species.
Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own? Bees are dying from neonics getting into the pollen. You willing to bet the biosphere that you’re right, and nothing bad will happen?
Surely it's better to replace indiscriminate spraying of substances known to be harmful with GMO crops carefully bred to have the smallest changes possible?
Those are not the only alternatives available. There are farming practices that give good yield, use none or a minimum of pesticides and herbicides, and don't use any GMOs.
I've watched the entire cycle in the past thirty years as a former agronomist. We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects. This allowed us to stop spraying thousands of tons of less insecticides. But the very people complaining about spraying chemicals rejected these new enhanced plants saying they weren't 'natural'. We have been breeding plants to do t…
I'm all for GMOs that allow reduction of pesticides and more sustainable ag practices in general... but that's not what we've seen happen.
Additionally, the IP issues raised when Monsanto's GMO plant pollen drifts onto my land making me subject to litigation due to infringement of Monsanto's IP... yeah, that's total bullshit.
In Switzerland, we're soon going to vote on two initiatives ¹² aiming at reducing pesticide use. The first is essentially about forbidding the use of all artificial pesticides by 2031 (also importation of food that was produced abroad using pesticides). The second is about removing subsidies to farmers that use any kind of pesticide, or regularly use antibiotics on their livestock, etc. I feel like they are quite dra…
Removing antibiotics use I think is cruel and wasteful as you're going to just instead cause culling of livestock and increased greenhouse gas emissions per piece of product from livestock.
Also "artificial pesticides" are better for the environment than "natural pesticides" for equivalent effect. Natural pesticides are less effective and more frequent spraying which has additional problems associated with it.
No, there were several earlier trials. I think there were issues in scaling up the mosquito modification process.
There is a very scalable process. You breed mosquitoes, about half of which have the gene you're after (so the population isn't infertile). You have machines that can sort them very quickly, and you only release to the wild the infertile male ones. I made a sorting machine that can sort 10 larvae per second - it's all just computer vision looking at their microscopic balls!
Reach out to Tom Scott (I'm serious, he is very responsive to e-mails) and he'll probably make a video about this, especially if you are in the UK like your name suggests. I know I would love to see it.