[hyko]

No it won’t.

Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike the last one? Anyone? Yes, that’s right: Homo Sapiens. If we want biodiversity, we’re not going to sit around smelling our farts for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.

[asdff]

This is why it's been so dangerous to allow anti GMO rhetoric into our grocery stores. It's normalized. GMOs are seen like harmful pesticides to the lay public, but GMOs are what we will need to rely upon if we are to ensure our grandchildren don't go hungry. We will have to introduce biodiversity ourselves as we lose it in our monocropped cultivars.

[cmrdporcupine]

GMO -- separated from the pure research angle -- is a tool, a method of production. And like any tool in an industrial capitalist society, the primary purpose of it is to increase profits. Industrial capitalism increases profits through mechanization. This isn't a recipe for diversity. In fact, given the fact that the primary use of GMO at this point is to allow for large monocrop farms via wide application of herbicides to resistant plants, it is having the opposite effect.

I know personally what happens when the farmer next door to my hobby farm (and forest) sprays his field of GMO soy. And is the opposite of an increase in plant (or animal) diversity, let me tell you that. The effects of spray drift is visually obvious immediately, god knows what it does in the long term.

The science behind genetic engineering has the possibility of increasing diversity. Market forces do not. At least not for now. Perhaps some competitive pressure will eventually get us there. But primarily this is just about making lots of soy, maize, and sorghum. Mostly to put into animal feed.

[TaylorAlexander]

A) I don’t think that’s true. GMOs are not the kind of biodiversity we need. We can move to mechanized automated organic farming and get all the biodiversity we need from healthy soil and diverse planting regimes. I am working on this problem and making our solution open source so the technology can quickly spread. [1]

B) In practice GMOs are used to enable massive use of harmful biocides (glyphosate) which poison the soil, the workers, and our food. So the idea that they are like pesticides is not exactly correct but it’s not far off. [2]

C) GMO patents have allowed large firms to extort farmers with predatory business models and Monsanto/Bayer for example have filed hundreds of lawsuits against farmers who accidentally had some contamination with their “patented” seeds. [3]

GMOs are not a cure all. The whole reason we have problems in farming is our failure to see the whole system of life and our reliance on pinpoint “solutions” that only cause more problems.

[1] https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk

[2] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/study-monsant...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...

[asdff]

I agree the lawyers are a cancer, but the technology is golden. Mechanized automated farming does not get you biodiversity in your crops, it's unrelated. These organic farms plant monocrops just like nonorganic farms, and these cultivars will also fail no matter how you harvest them since the farmer has selected for a handful of commercially desirable traits even if they are farming organically.

For example, an organic banana you buy in the store is the exact same cultivar of cavendish banana you get that is nonorganic. It is also susceptible to the blight that is spreading around central America and whiping out entire plantations of banana. The cavendish is selected by the farmer because it transports better than land race varieties you can also grow in central America. genetic modification could include increasing expression of traits found in the cavendish, like a more durable peel, in these other cultivars that are naturally resistant to this blight. Suddenly you have a new banana cultivar in grocery stores in America that is resistant to blight. Blight actually whiped out the cultivar that used to be found in grocery stores in the 1950s, the gros michel banana.

Reliance on monocrops is a huge issue for our food supply as the environment changes. Genetic modification is an excellent tool to perform changes that might take dozens of seasons making crosses in the field otherwise, with many more perhaps unfavorable traits also being inadvertently selected for thanks to linkage.

[TaylorAlexander]

There are issues with massive commercial “organic” farms and I’ve got a book on the way that has more details on it.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277465/agrarian-dreams

But I have been studying small scale regenerative organic or “biodynamic” agriculture and it seems that biodiversity in the soil itself - a healthy complex microbiome - is an important part of fighting disease. Stressed soil leads to stressed crops that can’t fight disease when it comes.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Jason Hobson talk about this here: http://regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com/episode-69-jason-h...

And I agree completely that monocropping is a problem. But look at the farming of JM Fortier or Eliot Coleman. There is no monocropping. I am hopeful that with my open source farming robot we can help make farming like that viable at larger scales without sacrificing biodiversity in the soil or the crop patterns.

[esarbe]

It is still not the kind of genetic diversity you need for a resilient ecosystem.

[asdff]

No, but it is far better than doing nothing and allowing our cultivars to be wiped out from blight.