I'm a little worried that having plants sending signals to soil bacteria to produce ammonia without releasing the associated sugars and nutrients that legumes do, might put evolutionary pressure on those soil bacteria to stop reacting to those signals, potentially harming legume crops if that non-reactive soil bacteria proliferates.
I’m not sure if I’m following you correctly. If a non-reactive strain is evolved, by definition it will be unable to establish itself in the plant nodules, and that niche will still be occupied by reactive, symbiosis-capable bacteria. Besides, the signal for ammonia production, rhizopine, is actually a sugar-like compound.
I don't think you can just "by definition" reality like that. Sure, the non-reactive strain won't be called a symbiotic partner, by definition. But that doesn't poof the bacteria out of existence.
That said, I think you're correct about not being so concerned. If the symbiotic relationship was so exploitable, it'd probably be a great evolutionary advantage to do so. The signal being a sugar itself, as you note, doesn't surprise me.
> But that doesn't poof the bacteria out of existence.
By “definition” I meant “the rhizopine signaling pathway”, implying that no pathway → no symbiosis. Of course that signal insensitive strains or species can exist. It’s a symbiote and not a parasite, after all.
It makes sense. Same thing happens with antibiotic resistance, for example. It costs them energy and nutrients to develop and maintain resistance capabilities. Previously resistant bacteria may become sensitive again if exposure to the antibiotic ceases. The logic is they will be wasting energy duplicating and expressing useless DNA and proteins whose only purpose is dealing with antibiotics that are no longer present, so getting rid of them increases fitness because it frees up resources for other purposes.
Totally happens even with insects. The biotech industry started using BT genes (a fungus which takes care of corn ear worm) in GMO corn. Previously, BT was an organically approved pesticide, carefully applied by growers according to guidelines which made sure the target pest did not develop resistance. But with the genes making the nasties continually = BT all the time = excellent evolutionary driver = cases of resistant corn ear worm appearing. Biotech reaction: "we will just think of something new and keep doing it!" ref: https://entomologytoday.org/2018/10/23/problems-driving-resi...
> Previously, BT was an organically approved pesticide, carefully applied by growers according to guidelines which made sure the target pest did not develop resistance.
Excuse me, I'll just be over here laughing so hard I can't breathe.
In terms of possibility: some adaptations, whether these or others that we can't predict, will occur eventually; evolution doesn't stop.
In terms of how long it'll take: evolution is slow in terms of number of generations per organism, but it's relentless. The more widely any modification is deployed, the more interactions there are, and the quicker in terms of time some adaptation will occur; and, once an advantageous adaptation does occur in one place, seed dispersal will allow it to spread quickly.
As an example that I single out because I read about it recently in the delightful "Lives of weeds" by Cardina (https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759000/live...), the adaptations of plants to deal with the "irresistible" Round-Up pesticide are highly improbable, but there were trillions of chances, and so it didn't take long for them to develop; and, once developed, they spread very quickly.
> Scientists have accomplished a key step in the long-term ambition to engineer nitrogen-fixation into non-legume cereal crops by demonstrating that barley can instruct soil bacteria to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia fertiliser.
Farmers have practiced crop rotation for nitrogen fixing for millenia, among many other benefits : less favorable conditions for weeds and pests due to changing conditions, diversification of nutrients, improved soil structure which in turn improves carbon sequestration, ...
Legumes also provide amino-acids that are lacking in cereals, which makes a legume-cereal combination a healthy well-balanced diet.
Crop rotation doesn't prevent mechanization or reduce farm productivity in any way, rather the opposite because it improves soil health.
So, my question: what is the benefit of this? Would that further improve yield in combination with crop rotation?
There are places where the weather permits 2 harvests per year, and if you could do that without rotation, and without added nitrogen then you could produce as much or more barley on less land. Or rotate between this GMO, barley, and soy while still building up nitrogen.
While crop rotation has its place, it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.
> it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.
The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up. Humanity is doing completely unprecedented things now - we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means... and eventually, that soil won't be able to keep up any more, but humanity will have grown a fatal addiction to cheap grain and other agricultural products (the fact we're growing plants to turn them into bio-fuel is maddening!).
And by then, it will be too late to fix the issues in the soil for at least a couple of years if not decades. Healthy soil is something that grew over hundreds and thousands of years after all, and humanity will blow through it in a century. What remains is to burn down forests like it's being done in the Amazonas area, but even that destruction will only yield something like two to four seasons and then it's gone (which is why the farmers burn down so much every year).
> The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up
We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn.
> we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means
The US and Europe are re-wilding substantial amounts of land, precisely because less is now needed to grow food.
> We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn.
The problem is that now the produce only consists of fertilizer. Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive.
Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2].
Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature, but the long term of continuing as-is will only lead to an utter catastrophe and cascading effects - e.g. groundwater depletion once the soil compresses, effects on the local and regional climate (clouds and in consequence rain need evaporation of water) or heatwaves and as a direct consequence uninhabitability because pure sand can't buffer off heat.
Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO² and other climate gases such as methane leading to a greenhouse effect, the collapse of ice shelves, the permanent destruction of arable land, the compression of soil in deserts destroying groundwater, predators going extinct and throwing ecosystems out of balance, invasive species being transmitted by air and especially water cargo, humans ending up with half a dozen pandemic or almost-pandemic events in two decades because we keep intruding on animal reservoirs in our ever deeper search for space... we need to stop and seriously rethink how we want to live, if we want to leave our children a planet they can actually live on - and that's leaving the social issues like erosion of democracies, of international law, and of war and aggression and their impact on nature, completely out of the discussion!
And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species!
> Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive.
If the variety is the same I generally can't tell with things like onions, potatoes, and most fruits. As for flour you'd be hard pressed to see any difference. I bake and brew and spend some time looking at spec sheets for flours and barley and organic/not doesn't really register as a difference. Price tiers matter, but that doesn't correlate well with organic. It may be the case that less intensive agriculture makes sense for non-staple crops, but that isn't the issue here, we're talking about things like barley, wheat, corn, soy, and rice.
I'd also mention that organic doesn't mean anything about soil health, size of the farm, or really anything other than some specifics about chemical application.
> Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2].
This is largely being solved by a shift to no till agriculture.
> Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature
This strikes me as religion, and not a judgement based on science or economics. Switching to more responsible irrigation, and reforesting old agricultural will go a long way towards alleviating those issues. More crops from less land leaves more land for undisturbed nature.
> Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO²
This is a great case for returning more former crop land to forests.
> And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species!
It isn't really a bandaid, it's taking a traditional technique of using beans to fix nitrogen in depleted soil, and giving that trait to other crops. It's pretty amazing in fact. Humans have always shaped landscapes on REALLY large scales, and we going to continue to do so just by our very presence. It makes sense to use every tool available.
Crop rotation is not an old esoteric practice. It's widely used in European fields with 3 or 4 types of crops, including cover crops, and actually improves yield. The USA farming practices keep it to a strict minimum, I believe to reduce labor costs(?) but at the expense of soil health.
The US system is optimized to produce the most grain and soy of consistent quality at the lowest possible price. It’s clearly not a perfect system, but it makes food staples really cheap in a lot of places where the historically were quite expensive.
It’s kind of hard to compare US and Western European agriculture apples to apples, since the US is so heavily focused on commodity crops for export. But it’s pretty clear where the corn comes from.
American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land. Historically (and currently), the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it.
So the productivity of the land isn't a concern. The goal is to have a system where one guy can produce enough food for 400 people.
There are some implications of moving in the other direction that you might not like. In the one-farmer-feeds-400-people model, food is very cheap because it represents a trivial amount of work. In a model that devoted more resources to cultivating the same land at higher yields, one of two things would happen.
The less likely option is that food would become much more expensive because of all the additional labor. This would preserve the general standard of living of Americans, except of course that they'd all be much poorer because so much of their money would be spent on food. But they'd all be poorer together.
The more likely option is that the price of food would only rise a little, and a class of extremely poor people would provide agricultural labor. This would be a blow to American egalitarianism.
> American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land
At least with respect to corn, US farms produce 4 tons per hectare more each year than the global average, and have substantially higher yields than the 4 nearest competitors[1].
> the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it
We've actually increased forrest cover substantially in the last 50 years, which is great.
This is a really fussy question, but I notice something odd in your link:
> The typical farm in Brazil produced corn and soybeans in 2020. Corn was a second crop following soybeans and was produced on approximately 78 percent of the typical farm’s acreage during the five-year period.
For corn to be a secondary crop following soybeans, at the same time it's produced on 78% of the farm's acreage, something has to be weird. Either soy is so much more productive and valuable than corn that its yield can be worth more while less than a third as much land is devoted to producing it (why not just grow more soy?), or a given acre might sometimes produce corn but more often produce soy over the five-year period, while being counted as "an acre used in the production of corn".
Then, the productivity of the farm is given in yield per hectare. But we've already seen that "hectares" is a funny measurement. What's the yield per hectare-month?
Also, this is fully compatible with American strategy being to use as little labor as possible:
> Labor costs as a proportion of total costs were relatively higher for the typical farms in Russia and the Ukraine.
(Annoyingly, the article's chart doesn't display the detail the article discusses. But "operating costs", the category that includes labor, are anomalously low for the US, beating everywhere except Argentina.)
On that model, high productivity per acre would be more of a happy coincidence.
Not relevant to the topic, but sad:
> Economic profit for the five-year period was positive for the typical farms in Argentina and Ukraine. [But not for Russia, Brazil, or either US farm.]
Yeah the economics of farming are pretty tricky and it is easy to end up in an apples to oranges situation. Corn is tricky as well, because ThenUS is so dominant in that crop so that surely displaces some growers.
I’m not discounting the labor angle entirely, but there seems to be some consensus that for at least some crops US farms are quite productive.
This might have been true in the early 00s, but not now: Based on satellite imagery analysis I've seen, large parts of the midwest are doing crop rotation with corn and soybeans in the main season, which more differences in the winder depending on weather.
The reason a US farmer chooses what to plant each year is the same as everywhere else: Given the state of their soil, the expected weather in their plots, legislative incentives and some guesses on crop value, they plant whatever they think will keep making the most money. The increase in soybeans as a useful rotation crop come from higher price per bushel vs 2000, and the increase demand making it easier to sell it in their local elevator. The extra $4 a bushel makes it much better than doing all kinds of extra treatments to the soil to keep trying to run more corn. As prices rise and fall, practices change to match.
And this is why modifying plants to lower the need of fertilizer can make such a big difference: A crop that before might not have been economical can become more viable. If a farmer has to risk soil health to have a somewhat profitable year, because anything else looks like losing money, they'll take the risk, in the same way that they'll cheap out in their pesticide applications. When the farmers are making good money with safer practices, they'll use them, and they'll keep investing. But for every 2012, when drought raised prices through the roof, and everyone else got their insurance payouts, there's many years where the farmer doesn't cover costs.
Always assume that the farmer is doing the best they can to make money, whether they have some organic apple orchard, or they are planting Monsanto soybeans.
I have recently discovered Greg Judy on YT and have become fascinated with the possibilities of regenerative agriculture with grazing. He is producing organically with almost no inputs, no heavy equipment and it is growing better soil. Pretty impressive when you compare how many inputs are required with other methods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmYlRMuXo8
The thing about food production is that intensive fertilizer use allows double-cropping (two+ harvests per year in one field, like corn-soy). Brazil uses this a lot. So if you switch to lower input 'regenerative' processes, you'll only get one harvest per year most likely. This means Brazil might stop exporting food, and a lot of countries rely heavily on those exports.
There is a stat going around which states that !if everyone went vegetarian we could free up 80% of the farm land", yet with comments like double cropping per year which we see in the UK that 80% figure should actually be a lot lower especially if fallow time was factored in.
So if fallow time was factored in, in reality we have probably already run out of farm land to grow livestock and are at or just exceeding the available farmland to grow nutritional crops!
It makes the MIT population collapse model prediction for a global collapse in society by 2040 seem more believable when looking at the lack of farmland this planet has to grow decent nutritional crops.
A lot of that grain is fed to cattle, what is interesting is that here is a way to raise cattle with almost no inputs and certainly no feeding of grains.
I don't agree, because with that kind of thinking nobody has to ever stop. After all, convincing "everyone" is hard. Better to just start and do it over time, after folks see your solution works.
Our agrarian ancestors were highly food insecure, and often died in droves if a few harvests failed in a row they also achieved this feat with more land per person under cultivation. Factory farming ins't ideal, but it feeds far more people on far less land. We should improve our methods, take soil health into account, and conserve water and other resources but there's a baby in that bath water.
Land under cultivation in 1970 in the US was 464 million acres and is now about 384 million acres and production has nearly doubled. A lot of that 80 million acres has been re-wilded. We now have more tree cover than we have had for more than a century.
factory farming will kill us eventually. Not factory farming will kill us in 90 days, on average, since that's how much food storage we have as a species.
Yeah, speak for yourself. Foraging for berries and trying not to get mauled by a moose or bear? In case you weren’t aware, that’s how our ancestors did things.
Factory farming is the only reason your great grand parents survived childhood. It’s what allowed your parents to be born and live long enough to raise you.
An argument can be made that the internet and this website only exist because some really smart people weren’t worried about their next next meal every day and devoted their talents to making innovative technologies instead of foraging for food.
The most charitable word I can use to describe this comment is ignorant.
> Foraging for berries and trying not to get mauled by a moose or bear?
A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"...
—edit—
Much apologies I just can’t resist whenever someone mentions moose.
Slow-release fertilizers solve a lot of those problems, and you can indeed make NH3 without fossil fuels, using solar / wind power to split water to generate the necessary hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process. Mining the potash might be the more serious long-term issue though.
Absolutely. There are plenty of naturally occurring beneficial microbes currently being applied/utilized in US Ag to accomplish this. P is different than fixed N as the P is currently in a plant unavailable form in the root zone ie soil. Microbes solubilize thru enzymatic processes this unavailable P into a plant available form. With decades of MAP/DAP application and/or manure there is an abundance of locked up P in the soil and beneficial microbes hold an immediately accessible set of keys!
That’s a really good point. The article was talking about nitrogen and I conflated this with phosphorus and potassium with my “mined fertilizers” comment.
Well...since phosphorus atoms are essential parts of DNA, RNA, ATP, and a <cough> few other slightly-important molecules in most cells, that might be difficult. And the humans or livestock eating the crops also need those molecules in their cells...
> > You can write a 1000 year plan with GMO. Try that with mined fertilisers.
> Been doing agriculture for >10,000 years without either.
Not necessarily endorsing the GP's point of view, but most of that 10,000 years was spent with much smaller populations ingesting much fewer calories per capita.
The only people who think you can accurately plan more than 50 years ahead are environmentalists and economists in the heads of environmentalists.
But if we got everyone to first world conditions we still could be using mined fertilisers in 1000 years, along with using fossil fuels to run the planet in a fine utopia.
Of course I and a lot of others want to be visiting space in decades. Along with the population will start to explode again in decades. And lots of other things like traveling to the nearest star within 1000 years would take a lot of fossil fuel using current tech.
I disagree that it's not worth thinking about the next 1,000 years, but I think you're right that right now we can't realistically plan more than 50 years ahead.
I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural? We killed micro-ecologies from vast areas of land, removed wild plants/rodents and other so-called "pests" and forced large scale growing of plants in various ways - selective breeding and process optimization to boost yields, etc. Do we call all that natural and draw the line at GMO?
I remember all the PR about GMO that told us that GMO makes plants resistant against pests so pesticides would be less necessary. Turns out the main use for GMO was to make the plants more resistant against herbicides so even more could be used. Very disappointing and a very cynical campaign by industry.
I guess the same happened with the push for plastics recycling by industry which also turned out be pure deception.
The first big anti-GMO push was against the transgenic Flavr Savr tomato. It's unfortunate that pesticide resistance is conflated with other potential applications.
Their yields go even higher. It is also a matter of being able to use cheaper broad spectrum herbicides like glyphosate rather than something that is more expensive but won't kill an unaltered crop.
Slight correction, it leads to loads of herbicide usage (glyphosate). The process of desiccation also leads to loads of glyphosate being used just prior to harvest, on non ‘Roundup Ready’ (glyphosate resistant) crops, which may be worse as it doesn’t get rinsed off since it’s used in the drying phase. See:
https://ensia.com/features/glyphosate-drying/
GMO crops lead to different herbicide usage, not necessarily more, and it’s not quite clear how to compare what is “more” between two herbicides anyway.
The alternatives to glyphosphate are quite a bit more concerning when it comes to human toxicity.
This bit about desiccation sounds like it isn’t very common at all, in a quick search I wasn’t able to find references to it from an ag university extension… and it would be quite expensive and hard to justify.
I think you might be confusing herbicides and pesticides.
Some GMO crops can lead to less pesticide usage as the plants can sometimes be engineered to be resistant to the pests targeted.
Weed plants don't generally attack the crop plant directly, instead they merely grow nearby and compete for various resources that the crops would otherwise be able to use.
GMO crops can be engineered to be resistant to specific herbicides. This leads to more of that herbicide (generally glyphosate) being used, since more herbicide = fewer weeds, and amounts of glyphosate that would kill non-GMO crops are tolerated by GMO crops.
I look at research. And in this case, it contradicts your claim.
"A steady, linear trend for increasing number of herbicide area-treatments over the last 25 years was observed for all crops except soybean. The linear trend was not statistically significant for soybean [...]"
That's a misreading of the paragraph. The specific claim is that non-glyphosate herbicide use is increasing faster than glyphosate herbicide use.
Later on, in the conclusion section, the researchers acknowledge that farming is generally a complex system with many reasons for doing things, but nevertheless point fingers at herbicide-resistant GM crops in general (not roundup-ready in particular) as a reason for increasing herbicide usage.
> Some researchers have blamed glyphosate-resistant crops and the resulting evolution of glyphosate-resistant weeds for increasing herbicide use in maize, soybean, and cotton2,6. While this explanation is plausible for these three glyphosate-resistant crops, it cannot explain the similar trends for increasing herbicide intensity in rice and wheat, since no glyphosate-resistant cultivars are commercially available for those crops. In fact, herbicide area-treatments increased at a faster rate in rice and wheat compared with the glyphosate-resistant crops, so the claim that glyphosate-resistant crops are the primary driver of increasing herbicide use is at odds with the empirical data. The broader problem of herbicide-resistant weeds (rather than the artificially narrow focus on glyphosate) may certainly have played a role in increasing herbicide use for all of the crops in this analysis. The most likely explanation, though, is probably a combination of inter-related factors and is far more complex than any single driver.
To recap, you contradicted drewmal above, who said:
> it leads to loads of herbicide usage (glyphosate). The process of desiccation also leads to loads of glyphosate being used just prior to harvest, on non ‘Roundup Ready’ (glyphosate resistant) crops
You replied "Ummm no, less herbicide actually".
The Nature study you claimed supported your assertion said herbicide usage was steadily up, and more was used on non-roundup-ready crops.
I don't know if you meant "no" to reply to one or the other of those claims or both, but it doesn't matter because they both agree with drewmal.
Care to elaborate? Roundup ready crops have glyphosate resistance which allows for broad application of the herbicide on a field to kill off unwanted other crops, weeds, while not harming the crops with genetically engineered resistance. Otherwise, the application of herbicide would need to be targeted to only the unwanted plants, which is a more labor intensive process. Unless I’m misunderstanding something?
You have that completely wrong. GMO's ushered in reduced pesticide use and the pesticides that are used are safer. I say this as a fertilizer company agronomist that was working when GMO's appeared. The amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) around GMO's is high.
The only papers I've seen that indicate GMO has reduced pesticide use were published by various industry groups with unclear ties to pesticide manufacturers. Academic papers seem to indicate pesticide use is higher, especially as the pests develop a resistance to the pesticide. E.g. https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-471...
> Contrary to often-repeated claims that today’s genetically-engineered crops have, and are reducing pesticide use, the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds in herbicide-resistant weed management systems has brought about substantial increases in the number and volume of herbicides applied.
I meant herbicides, so my original comment is wrong.
That said, I’d be surprised if GMO really has managed to reduce pesticide usage. I’m pretty skeptical of big-tobacco-like scientific studies. Do you know of a good study that shows this, and which isn’t funded by Bayer or some similarly motivated company?
In practice it seems like capital intensive large scale mono-cropping does most of that without GMOs needing to make an appearance. Careful application of GMOs could probably cut the need for fertilizers and pesticides.
Figuring out how to maintain some food production capacity without debt peonage in developing countries is a policy problem more than a technical problem.
In practice? A major reason for the explosion in use of the herbicide glyphosate (RoundUp) is the use of genetically modified crops that are glyphosate resistant. Because of this users of these crops can dump huge volumes of glyphosate on their farms. This is a well known example of GMO’s leading to an increase in use of biocides.
That's not really true. Intensive herbicide use in agriculture has been around for a long time. Sugar cane plantations used so much sodium arsenite in the 1800s that it regularly killed working animals and farm employees. Glyphosate was developed to be less toxic to humans and to require far less to be appied 100 pounds per acre vs 1 ton per acre of older herbicides. Yes, 1 ton per acre was the dosage rate for carbon bisulfide, borax, and arsenic trioxide prior to glyophosphate's development in 1974. Even when glyphosate is used as a desiccant it's still used at lower rates than the chemicals it replaced, and is far less dangerous for farmers.
Worth noting, the increase in desiccation practices, to prepare crops for a more scheduled harvest is also leading to a huge increase in glyphosate usage. It’s used high concentrations on crops at the last stage of crop growth just prior to harvest, in expectation of dry conditions which are ideal for harvesting, among other benefits.
The abuse of monopoly powers is a very GMO-specific issue: roundup-resistant strains are patented, so where farmers used to retain enough seed to re-plant the next season, they're now hooked on a subscription model and their "non-GMO" neighbors are in risk of crippling lawsuits because an illiterate bee thought it would be cool to pollinate two fields on the same day.
I've never seen any evidence of anyone ever being sued by an agro-chemical company for accidentally planting/growing patented seeds, and I've spent some time looking. So people have made the claim, and they were later discovered to have been using the seeds intentionally.
I actually think that farmers should be allowed to save those seeds and replanting them, as long as they don't sell them. So I'm in favor of changing the way patent law works there.
> risk of crippling lawsuits because an illiterate bee thought it would be cool to pollinate two fields on the same day
AFAIK, this has never happened. Monsanto states they have policy against it ever happening. The infringement lawsuits I'm aware of, including the ones the anti-GMO crowd like to trot out, sure seem like pretty clear cases of wilful infringement.
I acknowledge that all of the Monsanto Infringement lawsuits have involved farmers who a) Purchased Roundup-Resistant seed from Monsanto b) under contract with Monsanto c) that included a provision not to replant the seed derived from those crops.
It is my opinion, as a political stance, that that provision c is against natural law as well as the laws of man, and is therefore null and void. Farmers, even big corporate ones, should be allowed to replant the seed of their crops, and it's unconscionable to restrict that.
I thought there had been a lawsuit against a farmer who intentionally planted a crop near someone else's roundup-ready crop and then bred the resulting seeds for roundup resistance.
Like you, I take the view toward that (potentially hypothetical?) case that the farmer's evident intent to infringe Monsanto's intellectual property is irrelevant because he hasn't done anything wrong. In that case, he is not even party to an agreement, though note that violating a patent doesn't require you to be party to an agreement.
The “against natural law” is an interesting claim to me. Where is the comprehensive list of all natural laws? How can we prove that there is no yet undiscovered law guaranteeing Monsanto/GMO seed patent holder such rights? Didn’t the US founding fathers assert that Natural Rights included private property rights, including of natural things like land? It seems to be more of an assertion of intuitive feeling to assert a claim of “natural law” than any concrete proof.
And the “against the laws of man” seems to be false based on case law that I’ve read about in the news. Is your opinion/assertion that seeds / engineered plants should not be patentable? Should they be patentable, but sold at a loss or smaller profit?
Those seeds exist because they were engineered to solve a need. Is there a legal requirement for a farm to use engineered seeds? How much do you think the engineer would have to charge for unlimited license of those engineered seeds? I imagine it would be 20x - 1000x of a single harvest limited license for the same number of seeds. Do you agree?
I think the biggest objections to fertilizers are environmental? It's not like pesticides where people worry about residue on their food? They may not be overlapping then.
Fertilizer overuse causing runoff is half the concern, that part causes algae blooms.
On the other half is that fertilizers are either mined (unlikely) or manufactured from nitrogen in the air plus hydrogen. The downside is that the hydrogen is almost entirely made from natural gas.
So, fertilizers start as mostly fossil fuel energetically, and end up feeding algae blooms if overused. This seems like a huge deal to me, I've been keeping an eye on this kind of project for a long time. Reducing use of fertilizer means less fossil fuel use, and if it's generated locally and in the right amounts it is bound to help on the waste side too.
Actually most cases of runoff these days are from lawn fertilizer and manure from very large livestock operations. The later is on its way to being controlled with farmers having to fill out and get approved plans for manure disposal. Nothing is being done that I am aware about lawn fertilizer overuse and I am not certain as to why?
I think we should use less fertilizer because most of it is made from petroleum we should be leaving in the ground. I think GMOs that let us use less fertilizer is awesome.
IIR, there's quite a bit of opposition to large-scale, commercial agricultural fertilizers that is based on "the poor farmers often end up in debt bondage" arguments.
(A line of reasoning which could also be applied to GMO's where the underlying IP is controlled by big, greedy corporations.)
