In which a Maori beekeeper explains that he doesn't want any unnatural GM modified rats to offend the spirits, while laboriously smoking bees out of their hive to take their honey...
@xj9 It's not really about spirits, but about a selective definition of "natural"
"natural" and "unnatural" are usually proxies for "familiar/understood" and "unfamiliar/not understood". there is also "artificial" vs "natural" which is usually delineated by a thing's origin being human or not.
you are stuck on some semantics that are not important to the question at hand. all of these distinctions are arbitrary. the real issue is one of familiarity. we don't know how gene drives will behave in the wild. we know some very specific and powerful bits of information. we know how to make a gene drive, but we lack the wisdom to predict how it will behave in a large ecosystem.
we are very powerful beings, but we are young and shortsighted. if we aren't careful, we could easily make this planet very difficult to live on. we certainly *should* do and experiment with "unnatural" things, but scope and context need to be taken into account. we have no backup or test planet to work with and no real knowledge of existing in a truly hostile environment for extended periods of time.
Everybody is eating these today even though the radiation-induced mutations were completely random in their effects and might have modified much more genes than just those intended.
Now, when we came up with a very precise surgical techniques like CRISPR that are safer than anything known before a bunch of undereducated activists or scientific crooks like Seralini are fighting them as "unnatural"...
"During the past seventy years, mutation breeding led to more than 2250 plant varieties (Maluszynski et al. [4]; Ahloowalia et al. [5]). 70% of these varieties were released as directly induced mutants, and the other 30% from crosses with induced mutants. The use of chemical treatments was relatively infrequent, but gamma rays were frequently used (64%), followed by X-rays (22%) (Ahloowalia et al. [5])." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2218926/
I am not against the concept of any of these high tech genetic modification techniques but from reading on developing agriculturally productive genetics, precise genetic modification isn't a useful technique. using a hex editor is rarely the best way to produce a computer binary you want. of course there are exceptions, like university of hawaii's papayas.
I am against "patents" on genetics,
I am against doing the same idiotic arrogant "THIS TIME we really fully understand the ecosystem *introduces species/chemical and makes things worse*
i am also against any intentional use of even low tech methods that create F1 sterile hybrids
> humans actually were doing efficient agriculture for centuries
It wasn't really too efficient if in 19th century people were still dying of hunger due to poor harvest or pest.
Part of the Green Revolution of 20th century was creation of high-yield crops, which allowed to increase yield from the same amount of arable ground tens of times.
It's not efficient agriculture either if people are getting blind in Asia due to vit A deficiency...
Average gardeners won't feed a city. They won't even feed their own family unless the whole family works in the field for most of the year, leaving no time for creative jobs or education.
Not surprisingly, this is precisely how people lived in pre-industrial era with life expectancy of some 30 years.
@hushroom @xj9 Bt brinjal was *designed* to be resistant to particular pest (FSB).
Trademarks are not patents. If you are a farmer you can buy the same herbicide under trade name of Roundup (and pay more) or chemically identical generic glyphosate (cheaper) produced by other companies since patents expired in 2000.
>Roundup Ready is the Monsanto trademark for its [!]patented[!] line of genetically modified crop seeds that are resistant to its glyphosate-based [just trademarked, phew] herbicide, Roundup.
So can you save the seeds and replant them?
>Saving beans for replanting on your own farm – Right now, you CANNOT SAVE ROUNDUP READY SOYBEANS FOR REPLANTING. After the patent expires, you can save certain varieties of Roundup Ready 1 soybeans for replanting on your own farm. It likely will not be legal to raise varieties with expiring trait patents and sell them to your neighbors.
>Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Yield trait technology and Roundup Ready trait technology are protected by different patents. While the Roundup Ready soybean trait patent expires in 2015, the Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Yield trait is protected by patents for many more years.
No thanks Monsanto, My freedoms aren't being respected
1) The freedom to save or grow seed for replanting or for any other purpose.
2) The freedom to share, trade, or sell seed to others.
3) The freedom to trial and study seed and to share or publish information about it. 4)The freedom to select or adapt the seed, make crosses with it, or use it to breed new lines and varieties.
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beans, i do save and replant. for squash and brassicas, i plant both saved seeds and new varieties that sound interesting.
im a pretty beginning gardener just doing this for personal enjoyment and hobby, so i just do whats fun for me and if anything is successful i eat it and give it to friends and neighbors, or feed it to chickens. other gardeners around here are much more dialed in with planting diets, routines, and varieties and that stuff.
just like every single year i've been alive, even with precision GMOs, basically never due to global production shortage, also caused by politics and economics preventing distribution, not just agricultural technology
>Green Revolution
Was enabled by discoveries such as the haber-bosch process that consumes fossil fuel energy to convert atmospheric nitrogen to various forms of fertilizer. the genetics don't work without artificially high nutrient levels from synthetic fertilizers, and [pest|herb]icide to suppress competition.
if you don't want to invest millions in farm equipment and depend on chemical factories, the average food grower will be better off with landrace genetics
http://garden.lofthouse.com/adaptivar-landrace.phtml