How has the science evolved on GMOs? I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient to some sort of vendor lock-in to a giant agribusiness, but what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant?
Vendor lock-in is due to hybrid vigor, not due to GM technology.
Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process.
This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved.
There's also a safety benefit. It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora and you'd have a landscape of corn and beans.
I don't know the veracity of this, but when I've seen concerns about this raised, usually it's mentioned that something that pours so much energy into the edible part for no reproductive benefit would have a hard time outcompeting something that doesn't do this.
> It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora
This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer.
It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.
Yes, it's evolved significantly. For example, plants expressing a Snf7-targeting double-stranded RNA to control western corn root worm are now commercialised. dsRNA does not have the toxicity issues associated with many synthetic and organic insecticides, and is far more specific (so doesn't impact on beneficial species). There are no additional applications of anything required for the effect.
> I think it's pretty horrific to engineer a crop to make the farmer subservient
Last time I looked, Monsanto was not using terminator genes and promising they would never use terminator genes while the green press was running stories that were precision-engineered to give you the impression that Monsanto was using terminator genes.
Has that changed? Did Monsanto start actually using terminator genes? Or is the story still, uhh... "speculative"?
Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff. Hundreds of thousands of tons of glyphosate soaking into the ground and into the water table, reaching our rivers and lakes, year after year. How can it be safe?
You can say likewise about any other pesticide on that basis.. but I do wonder where the "hundreds of thousands of tonnes" comes from. My farm applies 540 grams of glyphosate per acre on our soybean crop each season.. if that is applied to every acre of farmland in the USA that would be 500mt of glyphosate. So you believe that a majority of the acres in the USA have at least 540g/ac applied and that a majority of that glyphosate is not metabolized by plants but is mobile in runoff?
I would be extremely interested in the research that validates that because it is not consistent with my experience.
Glyphosphate has a pretty short persistence in the environment. It breaks down relatively quickly. It has a half-life in the environment from as little as 15 days to a couple of months.
One of the significant problems with earlier pesticides and herbicides where the chemical in question would stay in the environment for decades (DDT, an insecticide, had a half life of 10-15 years and tended to accumulate in biological tissues). Glyphosphate is also not very acutely toxic.
I would have to eat an entire pound of pure glyphosphate to have a 50% chance of survival. (I consume many things every day much more toxic)
There are some questions about long term carcinogens but the signal there is not particularly strong.
As opposed to some other, especially older agricultural chemicals, many of which got their start as actual chemical weapons used in war.
Can you get pure glyphosphate? Yes, but it requires a license. It comes in about a 50/50 mixture with water usually.
It is much too difficult to distribute the pure substance in such small quantities so it is diluted with water to varying degrees (down to a few percent concentration) for safety, accuracy, and to avoid burning plants with unavoidable variations in application.
A small amount of a attractant is also added so the chemical better applies to leaves and doesn't just bead up and drip off onto the soil.
I believe you have to do some minor training and get a like certification, but yes, it comes in about a fifty percent concentrated solution with water. The LD50 of that solution is about a quart as far as I can determine.
The point of the example is that it is not acutely toxic unless you ingest a sizable amount while dealing with concentrations only available to certified farmers. The lethal amounts come up to around how much you would apply to half an acre of cropland.
> Whether glyphosate causes cancer or not, there is much less doubt that it has a harmful impact on insect populations and on aquatic wildlife from runoff.
It's actually not glyphosate that can be harmful to aquatic animals. It's the accompanying surfactants, added to help glyphosate to enter the plants. You put too much of any kind of surfactant (basically, a soap. A chemical that lowers the surface tension of water) to a small volume of water, and it will be harmful to aquatic life.
"Their" being the "Glyphosate Renewal Group", which requested the renewal and had to present studies that covered its safety. To sum those 11,000 pages up: the GRG investigated itself and found no problems, the EU trusts that these findings are accurate.
Glyphosate has demonstrated a very significant potential to impact gut microbiome. Imbalance in the gut biota has been linked to an extraordinary number of negative health conditions, including many cancers as well as modern epidemics such as obesity, depression and auto-immune illness. For example, glyphosate has been specifically linked to Celiac's, which is increasing significantly in prevalence.
I don't know if I'd be so quick to call it 'safe.' It requires an infinite number of experiments to prove any chemical is perfectly safe. It requires only a few to demonstrate the opposite.
Yes, this whole narrative that farmers are idiots and that the agricultural industrial complex is manipulating us is both extremely popular here on HN and highly offensive.
If farmers don't want to grow GMO/glyphosate resistant crops they have options, I personally grow mostly non-GMO crops and make plenty of money doing it. Basic economics applies to GMOs like like it applies to microchips or flip-flops and the capital owners (in this case land owners) have agency in this process.
> what Canadian grain imports have anything to do with glyphosate?
You want wheat (and other grains) to be dry before harvest. Harvesting when wet increases losses due mold growth. Wet stems cause sticking and blocking in the harvest machinery. In many countries it's common to apply a defoliant: You kill or half-kill the foliage of the crop plants, and wait a small number of days, so grains and stems get drier before the harvest.
This use of glyphosate has nothing to do GMOs (there is no GMO wheat in markets anywhere). In a small number of countries, it's forbidden to use chemicals (plant poisons) to force desiccation.
Yeah, in oats now the harvest is managed in terms of if a pre-harvest desiccant was applied crops are binned and handled separately.
I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.
You can engineer “round-up resistant” crop seed and then nuke the field leaving only your crop as survivor. In this context it is, but yes it is otherwise not.
So if the farmers didn't grow glysophate resistant corn instead they would grow non-GMO wheat and spray it with "selective" herbicides that kill wild oats and broadleaf plants over those acres and society would be better.. how exactly?
Roundup is a lot cheaper than Axial Extreme + MCPA or Velocity M3 or Tandem or Rexade.. and, TBH, Roundup isn't tha good at killing a lot of the weeds that those other products kill very well. It's just not as simple as you might think.
There are several varieties of insect-resistance traits, multiple brands of herbicide resistance (off the top of my head there’s Roundup Ready and Liberty Link), drought resistance, and several more. I was last deeply interested around 2008 so my knowledge is stale.
Watching the path-dependent nature of technology is fascinating. It seems Monsanto has largely given up on GMOs, due to public backlash, just as crispr and the like are set to make the whole endeavor a lot more precise. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/01/monsanto-gmo-techno...
The hot new thing these days (as I understand it, I am not a farmer) is precision ag - better use of maps, sensors, drones, robotics, etc to make better use of resources and better target chemical application. Bayer’s marketing site is probably a good place to get the farmer’s perspective: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/innovations/data-science/d...
I don't think "Monsanto" has given up on GMOs, now they are Bayer and they sell a lot of GMO products.
The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work.
GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident.
The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!
>what about modifying a plant to be more drought or pest resistant?
This is mostly done with breeding and hybridization as opposed to genetic engineering, though there have been some transgenics where anti-pest genes from other organisms have been spliced into corn.
There have been more herbicide resistance genetics recently.
Glyphosate resistant genetically engineered corn is patented and only available from the inventor (Monsanto, now owned by Bayer) of glyphosate (Round Up) herbicide. Spraying a field of glyphosate resistant GE corn with glyphosate kills the weeds and leaves the corn which improves yield since weeds use nutrients and moisture.
To put it mildly, Monsanto has been very aggressive at enforcing their patents.
> Spraying a field of glyphosate resistant GE corn with glyphosate kills the weeds and leaves the corn which improves yield since weeds use nutrients and moisture.
So the vendor lock-in is that... it's a better product? If that's what your idea of "vendor lock-in" is I can totally get behind that.
I don’t know of any non-hobby farms that keep seeds. Saving seeds on mass scale is difficult, and requires specialist equipment. Many commercial seeds are pre-treating with fungicides and/or starter fertilizer as well, which is often worth paying the premium for. As you mentioned, some non-GMO plants (hybrids - common with corn, wheat, cotton) don’t produce good seed anyways.
Which is why in Europe they have created a system for protection of rights to modified plants outside of the realm of patents and copyright definitions. See https://cpvo.europa.eu/en
CPVO is just an EU agency coordinating plant breeder's rights at the EU level. But plant breeder's rights are nothing new. The way you describe CPVO as something new and sinister, is quite dishonest.
This is what everyone was complaining about over a decade ago, it's no longer true...and has actually rarely ever been true. There have only been a few cases which of course people (people that wrongly think GMOs are dangerous despite every study saying it's not) grappled onto. Unfortunately people's ignorance/stupidity on GMOs has infamously cost lives due to nutritional problems (but of course not in the West where these lies originated.)
Nice usual GMO propanganda, but no.
Look at the social impact of GMOs in India (suicide), the environmental impact overall which is quite negative.
GMOs itself might be safe for consumption, but the amount of pesticide required for those stupid roundup ready crops is definitely not.
World nutrition? Nature already provides all the elements for it, GMOs won't solve wealth distribution problems.
In addition to what the sibling comment says about the patents expiring, that’s also not really lock in. You can switch to another vendor anytime - just because you used RR product once doesn’t mean you have to use it forever.
