Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture.
The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds.
While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example, almond farmers in California are far far more productive than pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard. If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and pecans could replace almonds for many applications.
Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.
There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest.
Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output.
And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money.
Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0].
Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory, not the farming.
Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.
EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us, albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes.
If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.
They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that.
The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts.
Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a horrible comeback when the original comment’s “evidence” is as a YouTube video.
Not all farmers understand the depths of the biology they work with, but some probably do.
Not all programmers understand how their instructions influence the circuits that execute them. That does not validate statements like "programmers don't understand electronics."
Yeah, I don't know why you think farmers are "smart" (taking this meaning to convey that we shouldn't question their practices). If you pump enough water and fertilizer into the already-fertile land you can get things to grow. Wow. If farmers were actually smart they'd start thinking long term on how their practices are destroying their livelihood (draining aquifers, polluting rivers, degrading soil quality) or how their politics are driving future generations from rural US (anti education, anti immigration, anti everything). Credentials: grew up in rural midwest.
It looks easy until you face pests, diseases, soil nutrient deficiencies, drought, unfavourable market conditions leading to losses etc. And it's a low margin business so you need to do everything with maximum efficiency to stay ahead.
A programming analogy: Anyone can write an hello world program in Python after a 10 minute tutorial, but delivering software that you can make a living from is much harder.
> returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value.
Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs).
Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.
I'd totally agree w/ this from the "grow corn and then feed cows with it" standpoint.
This is doubly bad if you're displacing natural grasslands and grassland grazing with this. I.e. plant corn on your previous grasslands and cram the cows into some barn.
This came through HN just recently. Another way to do the same though is to go back to what the big buffalo herds were naturally doing. I.e. let your cows actually "trample and shit on the land" and that's what actually keeps it fertile. Then you harvest the cows for meat while keeping their number stable.
Same with many random islands explorers came across: they'd leave some livestock so when they came back later they'd have some dense and fresh food ready to harvest.
Didn't work so well in Australia. And probably any of the islands most likely.
Iceland actually has some trees. But in that climate they don't grow very tall.
Also, much of Iceland is a desert of lava, glass, and black sand; some other parts are covered with ice. Not many plants can survive in such a landscape, and those which do are usually not trees.
Deforestation in Iceland predates industrialization.
“Deforestation is a major issue that is highly prevalent throughout the world. The country of Iceland has been hit especially hard by this catastrophe. A nation that once had forests covering 40 percent of its countryside began to lose its tree cover, when the Vikings arrived in the 9th century. By the early 20th century, however, this tree cover was reduced to just 0.5 percent. To this day, the government of Iceland is working towards reviving the lost forests and restoring the land, in order to work towards a more sustainable future. This problem relates to the course of Sustainability for the Common Good because it covers the environmental issue of deforestation as well as the solutions that are being put into play to make the land more sustainable”
Then you have a dispute about who owns the 10000s of acres and who to pay for the grazing rights. And who is responsible for maintaining all that range? And can somebody be tried twice for a mistake in their management of open range? Then people with and without badges show up with guns.
I'm not sure I understand. Nowhere did I say anything about actually putting bison back out there in the way the settlers found things when they moved in.
But instead of planting lots of corn and feeding your barn full of cattle with it you can also own that same piece of land and sustainably make grass fed beef. Said beef would keep your soil fertile by trampling and shitting on it.
In addition to this your vet and meds bills will be lower to non existent because you don't get the same disease issues you get in cramped barn quarters.
In the USA, the BLM administers some 18000 permits to farmers and ranchers who pay them grazing fees.[0] Then cattle wander on that range exactly as you propose.
The BLM also employs snipers and gunmen to intimidate ranchers who don't pay the grazing fees. Some ranchers respond with impromptu militias.
Sometimes things escalate to the point that goverment agents kill protesters. Sometimes law enforcement officers get assassinated.
But mostly, cattle graze as you suggest and the BLM collects grazing fees.
One of the goals of regenerative agriculture is to get most of the benefits of fallow land while still using the land.
From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.
Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because the crops need to be collected in the few days when they are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous machines.
The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.
We are collecting and redistributing grain at a discount and using it for anything we can think of. Highly processed food, grain alcohol, “corn fed beef” which is likely a dietary disaster for humans.
Remember, ethanol in gasoline is predominantly about lifting demand for corn in order to court votes from the upper Midwest. We don’t actually need to use corn for fuel.
You can feed pigs on grain and nuts that fell before or after harvest. Ten pigs are pretty big harvesting machine. Birds as well.
Mark Shepard is claiming about twice the yield per acre of conventional farms. He’s doing this by getting less than half a yield of four+ crops on the same land. The trick to being Mark Shepard is putting enough time and energy into your job to understand a dozen crops instead of hyper specializing in two, as if your neighbors aren’t doing the exact some thing.
Now at the end of the day, we still need some staple crops around. That we can stockpile grain for three years and canned food for 18-36 months helps level out boom and bust cycles in agriculture. Good year? Rent warehouse space. Bad year? Let the warehouse lapse, or do invasive maintenance.
Regenerative agriculture is still a big step down from returning the land to natural ecosystems. Quantifying how big that step is, to the point of being able to pick a point in the pareto curve, is a big political decision. There's definitely a place for a lot lots of regenerative agriculture, but it's one part of a solution.
Indeed. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.
It goes beyond country boundaries. There was an interesting case where China stole I think it was specialized corn to begin producing their own instead of spending large sums by buying the product or IP.
Another interesting case was PepsiCo suing farmers in India over a variety of potato. A few years later, PepsiCo withdrew their suit... only to have a group of farmers continue to press the claim and have the courts rule that PepsiCo couldn't patent a seed.
> The general public does not understand agriculture well,
Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming.
It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too.
Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.
They're also a huge pain in the ass to produce, at least in my experience.
Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by planting the two varieties in the same field, with one combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of variety B. Then you need to wait until variety A is grown and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn silk. This is usually done by hand, by a bunch of people walking through the field and cutting the stalk between the ears and the tassels.
Once that is done, your variety A ears will be pollinated by variety B pollen, and all of those kernels will be hybrid. But your variety B ears be purebred B, not hybrid, so you now you need to harvest the field while keeping the two sets separate. This step isn't too bad, if you did a good job planting, you just need to first harvest the combine-wide strips of hybrid corn before going back to get the B corn.
But yeah, you're looking at a lot of extra work -- and money, you need contract labor to detassel a field in the narrow window of opportunity -- to produce a hybrid seed for better yields next year, and most farmers don't find it a good use of time, which is why most farmers were buying most of their seed well before seed patents and GMO were a thing.
I used to hear about "detasseling corn" as an utterly miserable short-term summer job option for high school students. Walking through cornfields in heavy clothes (to avoid getting cut up by the leaves) in summer in Iowa.
Miserable indeed! I was in Southern MN and did this job for a few weeks in the summer. We started around 5:30am and worked 8-10 hrs per day, rain or shine.
Why do this? At the time (early 2000s) it was an extremely well-paying, unskilled job at $15/hr!
Also, if you miss a couple of plants while de-tasseling it can be very bad. You must also sign contracts with your neighbors where they will refrain from planting the same crop (in exchange for $). Additionally, to get the best yield they usually place beehives to enhance pollination.
I watch Laura Farms on the YouTubes and she goes into great depth on growing seedcorn as her family’s farm does it under contract.
The de-tasseling is mostly automated these days with a sprayer attachment chopping off the tops and the legions of kids coming behind to get the ones missed.
Then they come along with another specialized attachment to ‘destroy’ the males. Basically just chop them up and leave in the rows which later on gets eaten by the cows. The outside border rows of males gets harvested and turned into winter feed for the cows.
Eventually the remaining corn gets harvested by a crew hired by the seed company because they want the full heads of corn to do their evil deeds to.
> But pure glyphosate isn’t sprayed on crops, Roundup is, which contains a variety of adjuvants and surfactants meant to help the glyphosate penetrate into tissues. And indeed when the study was repeated with what’s actually sprayed on GMO crops, there were toxic and hormonal effects even at doses smaller than the 1 or 2% concentration that’s used out on the fields.
> Roundup was found to be 100 times more toxic than glyphosate itself. Moreover, Roundup turned out to be among the most toxic pesticide they tested.
At this point any time someone switches from talking about Roundup to glyphosate, they either have an agenda, or they picked up their argument from people who do. Some of the 'inactive' ingredients in Roundup are more toxic than glyphosate, and stick around longer. Spraying it directly on yourself, the glyphosate may or may not be your immediate concern, but touching something that was sprayed weeks ago the glyphosate is the least of your problems, so making it an argument about glyphosate is one you can kind of win.
It's very much like the tobacco lobby playbook. Nicotine may not be that bad for you (unless you're a bug) but you aren't smoking nicotine. You're smoking a broadleaf plant exposed to soil minerals and four kinds of pesticides and antifungal compounds (fungi and human livers are susceptible to many of the same chemicals) which may or may not have prevented fungal volatiles from ending up in your lungs alongside the trace amounts of uranium.
You know, I wonder if GMO technology has advanced enough to replace hybridization.
Hybrids give you two different chromosomes, uniformly in your population. You take population AA and aa and get Aa. The next generation you're back to a mix of AA/Aa/aa.
There's no reason -- in the abstract -- you couldn't duplicate your gene and put two copies of it on the same chromosome, one A and one a, so that you can skip the hybridization. But does that work with current technology? I don't know!
But then the GMO company patents the result, and it's not legal for a farmer to do what farmers have been doing for ten thousand years: save some of the seeds from the crop and plant them the next year, or give some to a neighboring farmer. Getting out of that trap is a prime motivation for "open source seeds" projects.
Aside from, you know, the vast uptake of hybrid seeds, which couldn't be saved for reuse either.
Anyway, why exactly is this tradition so important that it would swamp the social benefits from improved plants obtained from GMOs (and such benefits must exist, or else farmers would not use these seeds)? This sounds like reflexive conservatism, wanting an old thing just because it is old, and damning changes just because they are changes.
> save some of the seeds from the crop and plant them the next year, or give some to a neighboring farmer
That hasn't been the predominant practice for the majority of farms for coming up on a century. Cross pollinated hybrid seeds are just way too productive to justify growing your own open pollinated varieties.
That was the promise, and the fear, around GMO, but it really hasn't had that much of an effect. Biologically, the point editing allowed by generic modification, even with our enhanced skills from CRISPR/Cas9, only allows small changes.
Generic modification by molecular techniques is just another tool, that does not supercede or override any of the past forms of generic modification by breeding that humans have been doing ever since we were humans.
Hybrids aren't stable genetics. You cross two S1 parents and get an F1 hybrid with inconsistent traits but hybrid vigor. What would the point be in owning ip of a hybrid? Sure you can select a good one and propagate it and have copies of that one, but then you lose hybrid vigor because they're clones. Ossi is for breeders not farmers.
> which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.
>The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs.
This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point.
They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*) roundup.
The "objectors are ignorant anti science types" with the subtle mislead renders it an extraordinarily effective talking point.
I don't understand, is the talking point what you quotes from me, or their taking point about GMOs?
Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.
There is a little evidence (10.1186/s12940-021-00729-8) that a very particular form of non-Hodjkins lymphoma is associated with glyphospate exposure (occupationally!), but ultimately... it's hard to say.
There's evidence of genotoxicity in human cell lines (10.1007/s13205-018-1464-z), but at possibly an unrealistic dose of glyphosphate-based herbicides. They are also demonstrably endocrine disruptors (10.1016/j.tox.2009.06.006), though again true in vivo exposure levels to glyphosphate is not well established it seems, so these studies are ultimately novel.
However, it's clear that they should be given more care than they are now. Hell, it took me like.. two months? to get a pesticide applicator certification and now I can roundup the hell out of anyone's crops, and I barely know anything about the stuff.
> Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
There are three problems:
- the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at the stranglehold large corporations have over politics - Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying their employees so much they have to apply for food stamps, and local politicians or unions are unable to do anything against it because Walmart can at any time decide to just close shop and leave an area completely without access to groceries (made possible in the first place because Walmart systematically undercut local stores on pricing). And people (i.e. voters) would not blame Walmart, but local politicians and unions. No one wants to add yet another mega-corporation to depend on for survival.
- second, concentration of genomics. When everyone and their dog sans a couple eco activists and seedbanks raises the same variety of crop or the same breed of farm animal, pandemics have an incredibly easy game. The best warning sign what can happen in such monocultural environments are forests (where bark beetles and other pests run rampant and completely destroy them) or bananas (Gros Michel famously got wiped out by a fungus and Cavendish is at the cliff from another fungus).
- third, the impact of pesticides as a whole. No matter what kind of pesticide, they all have serious side effects - most notably, they cause bees to die and as a result, all plants depending on bees for pollination can't reproduce any more. And ffs it's not just bees. All kinds of insects suffer, just compare your windshield after driving a car in the 90s and today through a rural area. And all these insects were part of the food chain for larger animals... leading to an ever growing loss of biodiversity further up the chain.
> But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.
We don't need to go back that far in time. Like half the food produced is wasted instead of reaching a human's mouth - spoiled, rejected for missing quality benchmarks, never sold because stores require an overabundance of choice for the consumer, wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews... the list of causes for food waste is immense. Cut down on food waste, produce less food in total, and maybe avoid the need for intensive agriculture in the first place.
> the most obvious, concentration of market power.
The solution to concentrated market power is not to abandon the productivity gains, but to use law and regulate to de-concentrate market power. We could instead ban specialization and the productivity it brings, but that's dealing with the wrong thing.
> concentration of genomics
Again, solved not by banning specialization, but rather through diversification of the market. Which also helps the market be less concentrated, and further improves productivity. "Free" markets used to mean those that were unconcentrated and allowed easy entry and competition, but rally bad market-fundamentalism ideology has twisted the meaning, and invited reactionary thinking that "markets in general are bad," which is just as wrong as the market fundamentalist approach of "markets must always be used and always are right." Markets are merely a tool that can be used for good or for bad by societies, and markets are socially constructed by law and tradition, both of which are changeable, as is other parts of society.
> pesticides
This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag tech.
> food waste,
This is a rounding error in comparison to the increase in ag productivity that we have created. Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
> This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag tech.
Or by restructuring how land is used. When you have miles upon miles of corn fields, it's a fucking buffet for corn pests. In contrast, land that has a great variety of usages - corn, wheat, grass for making hay, marijuana, rice, potatoes, berries, tomatoes - makes it difficult for pests to explosively sweep over entire swaths of land and leaving nothing but total destruction in its wake. Our ancestors knew this and changed sequentially what seeds they sowed, they even let land sit idle for a season or two so it could recuperate nutrients. All of this is extensively documented, a lot of it has actual scientific backing, it just takes a bit more effort so it isn't worth it under capitalism.
Also, California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for the Saudis to feed cows with it. That is a waste of water and land that could both be used for something more productive than blood money from oil returning home. And they're not the only ones doing atrocious wastes of all kind of valuable resources.
> Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
Well... France for example forces supermarkets to provide leftover food instead of trashing it. That led to a massive increase in food that ended up in people's mouths via food banks, over 10.000 tonnes a year in fact[1], additionally it creates a negative incentive against overstocking.
Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes (which might also have side effects to improve public health, aka obesity epidemic).
Stores could be forced to do regular maintenance on their cooler systems to reduce the amount of food lost there.
Students could get education on how to cook, how to check if food is still edible and other food aspects. It's not like their parents are teaching them...
tl;dr: stopping food waste can be tackled on so many levels and, given 50% food waste ratios, even slashing half of that is equal to provide 25% more food to the world's population.
> California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for the Saudis to feed cows with it.
Dairy is like the auto industry: every state seems to think it needs to have its own protected domestic industry, but it's far from a strategic industry when every nation ends up with excess capacity.
Canada, an excellent environment for dairy production, kneecaps itself in this industry. Could be an export juggernaut, but instead, NZ is the biggest dairy product exporter. 20th dairy producer in the world despite being a top6 barley/oat/wheat/hay producer.
You can’t reasonably expect farming families to be able to afford all the specialized equipment to be able to willy-nilly change the crops they grow and large corporations are just going to specialize based on economy of scale.
When all you need is a water buffalo and a shitton of labor you can diversify crops all you want but if you have to compete in a low-margin mechanized market you do whatever it takes to keep the farm going even if that means diversity gets thrown out the window in favor of cash crops.
Correct. Rubber meeting the road comment here. This is the reality of most farms in America. Possibilities are not "endless" for revolutionizing farm practices, they must be profitable and margins are tight.
>> wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews...
Not everybody eats restaurant food for entertainment. Sometimes you can't cook and a larger portion means leftovers and usually more calories per dollar.
There's nothing wrong with large portions. If you didn't want that much food, go to a different restaurant, or a buffet where you can select exactly how much food you want.
And what large portions are we talking about anyway? That peaked in the 90s just like your bug splattered windshields.
> But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture.
I disagree, open source ag is completely compatible with hybridization. And if open source couldn't somehow deal with the benefits of hybridization, then open source ag is not a route we should follow.
Farming is a transformation of inputs into food. It's not about seeds and propagating seeds every season... that's just an attachment to a practice like being super attached to, say FTP as the only way to transfer files and deploy a website.
Open Source Ag is completely compatible with maintaining two strains, crossing them, and then distributing those seeds. Having widely distributed access to these seeds, and information about them, gives the chance for more innovation in the crossing, too. The question is whether somebody can get compensated for the efforts in discovery...
It's not fundamentally incompatible, but non-proprietary hybrids are extremely rare. The effort to maintain the two parents and do the cross is much greater than that of saving seed from an open-pollinated variety, so very few growers will undertake that even given the chance. Even if multiple growers do, the smaller population of plants in each of the pure lines increases the chance of significant divergence between sites, at which point the multiple production sites implicitly become multiple different varieties.
Anyone interested here might also wish to read Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". She's a Harvard-trained geneticist and amateur vegetable breeder, with special interest in open-pollinated varieties derived from proprietary F1 hybrids. Her book extensively discusses the underlying biology, the practical breeding process, and the legal situation of such work.
'hybrid vigor' is when you take two inbred genetic lines and cross them together to pick up some of the genes you accidentally deleted while selecting for something else.
For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and went from there.
One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is doing the same thing, though I think their methods are recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else.
I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect resistant trees over time.
In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.
Fixed water requirements from tree crop farming in states where water is a concern is the dumbest agri business ever. Tbh most of America's farming sucks, bulk corporate welfare keeps most of it propped up and is used to buffer against the efficiency of global markets and y'all do some incredibly dumb stuff like but farms in water restricted areas.
Lol nearly all your beefs feedlot... You do well to feed the masses, but the countries process of getting there is like it's stuck in 1950s. Lol go watch some of ya broadacre boys and they still monocrop tilling thousands of acres by throwing fertilizer at it. Bumpkin stuff, hardly advanced.
And if you could do it better you wouldn't be here throwing shade about stuff you only barely understand, you'd be out in a field somewhere dunking on the local farmer's co-op. If you think modern ag is a bunch of ass-backward hicks then explain why some comment section hero hasn't already revolutionized the business. We'll wait.
The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds.
While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example, almond farmers in California are far far more productive than pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard. If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and pecans could replace almonds for many applications.
Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.