I remember a famous academic study in the nineties that questioned whether PC's really produced any appreciable return on investment.
Course that would be so laughable today that no scientific journal would publish it. This article is similar in quality. Got to give it to the anti GMO folks they never give up, even after its clear that they've lost.
I worked in agriculture for over twenty years as an agronomist. I wasn't in an ivory tower, I was on the ground walking farmers fields. My customers used less insecticides with the introduction of GMO seed. They used much safer herbicides. Farmers work in an extremely low margin business. They continued to buy GMO seed because it made them more money. Farmers are the original environmentalists and the use of GMO seed was cleaning their community.
In America we spend around 11% of our income on food. In Europe it's more than double that number. In Europe a small but loud group of activists prevented the adoption of GMO seed. They destroyed research crops so that tests could never be completed on the efficacy of GMO seed.
Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain. Let people starve cause hypothetically something could be bad for them is the height of hypocrisy.
If they [the environmentalists] lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 60 years, they’d be crying out for fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation canals and tractors and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.
- Norman Borlaug, inventor of the green revolution and winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace prize
People don't starve because a lack of food to eat, they starve because they can't afford food to eat. You honestly think it's more effective to spend money paying farmers for crops here and transporting them halfway around the world to deal with the logistical nightmare of getting them to villages is more effective than spending the same amount to pay for the food in Zambia?
Regardless of how you feel about GMO's, food aid is a farmer subsidy pure and simple and one that makes a long-term problem worse by lowering prices for the local farmers where the food is being dumped.
I mean, seriously, think about it, you are looking at a country where 72% of the population is employed in agriculture. You think the answer to their problem is putting them all out of work by dumping food on them?
I don't think keeping locally grown food prices and employment up are the key issues when the harvests are failing. The argument of giving them money instead of food and let them handle it themselves is not bad per se, the food would still not come from Zambia or the other countries though. While food aid can act as a domestic subsidy for the country giving it, that doesn't mean that it inherently bad, just that the donor country gets something out of it as well.
The following are some details from the famine of 2002:
Hundreds have already died in Malawi and the threat of famine looms large in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Lesotho.
Crops have failed due to droughts and floods. Attempts to deal with the problem have been hampered by political chaos and the inadequate infrastructure in the most affected places.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said that southern Africa needs 1.2m tonnes of food to help it through the year. The EU and the US are helping, but the main problem is effective delivery.
> Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain. Let people starve cause hypothetically something could be bad for them is the height of hypocrisy.
Zambia wasn't starving; as far as I can tell there was a regional famine, while some areas were actually experiencing an above average output. According to government sources the main issue was getting aid to affected areas inside the country, not the inability of the government to procure food from other countries.
I've tried to search for any evidence that anyone starved to death, but couldn't find any. It's telling that when searching for info about the Zambia famine, you mostly get articles talking about GMOs and can't find any (at least I couldn't) talking about anyone who starved.
This is one of those topics where whenever it comes up you can usually expect a ton of disinformation thrown about from all sides.
Look harder. Stunting means malnutrition; starvation is not the only outcome of lack of food.
"4) The prevalence of stunting in children - low growth for age - is 40 percent."
Malnutrition is a pretty different claim from starvation ("Let people starve", in the initial comment). I also don't see much evidence that rejected GMO food aid in 2002 (which the above comment talked about) has a big influence on the 2015 numbers.
And worth noting, from your link:
"More than 350,000 people in the country are food insecure"
350,000 from a population of about 14.5 million is ~2.5%. According to the USDA, "An estimated 12.7 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2015"[1]. You can look at various articles on nutrition in the USA as well ("...only half of all children ages 2 to 17 meet federal diet quality standards"[2]).
That's not to say that there aren't issues in Zambia, but I'd need to see more evidence to show that rejecting a specific aid package offered in 2002 (what was being discussed) is the reason for the malnutrition numbers you stated.
This is true if not somewhat misleading. Most commercial GMO crops do not target yield but lessens the amount of effort required to maintain production. Similar yields are readily achievable by throwing manpower and tons of agrochemicals at it, however that is effectively a loss of productivity and just as bad for the environment.
Ultimately one can only fit so many plants of maize on a single acre. What is yet to come are GM crops that actually prove the efficiency of photosynthesis and carbon fixing by directly engineering cellular biochemistry, making them closer to the food factory mankind has been working towards for thousands of years.
The Academy report they link does consider the economics, and while the evidence is not super high quality, on net it does seem like the GMOs generally improve the economic situation: https://agbiotech.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/NA... OP doesn't consider this anywhere that I can see.
Criticism that GMOs have "not accelerated increases in crop yields" misses the point. If you pick weeds by hand, even organic farming can have great yields!
Are GMOs making food cheaper to produce? The answer is almost certainly yes -- otherwise farmers wouldn't be buying the more expensive GMO seeds, which now dominate the market for many crops.
Also, there are some crops (e.g., the Hawaiian papaya) that wouldn't even be viable today without GMOs.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a company that was acquired by Monsanto.
Living in central Wisconsin, one runs into a few farmers. I've heard the opinion on more than one occasion, that roundup ready corn & beans eliminate having to control weeds by plowing them under, thus reducing cost, fuel use, and soil runoff.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner. With the current cost of fuel, and the razor thin margins, minimizing trips over the field is the #1 way stay profitable.
I'm not sure, because it's hard to guess whether the cost advantage of electric cars is due to efficiency or subsidy. By the same process, one could ask why they don't just run their tractors off of ethanol produced from their crops.
But regardless of the energy source, an extra one or two passes across the fields is going to be an added cost.
I do wonder if electric cars paid a tax equivalent to the gas tax what would the cost be?
Has anyone done the calculation? If a gallon of gas gets and average of X miles across all cars then how much electricity is that to tax the same amount? I'd be curious since I have strong privacy and persecution of poor people objections to a mileage tax.
Temper tantrums are fun. I get it. It's better to use numbers though. Diesel produces roughly 37 kwh/gallon [1] a powerwall can supply about 12kwh "all day" [2]. A powerpack is more like 100kwh.
So, let's say 10 gallons an hour. you'd need 30 powerwall 2s to cover power needs.
I think you're underestimating how well electric motors do in low speed high torque situations. I'd bet there are some efficiencies to be gained from those characteristics. Simpler mechanical linkages. One motor per application rather than a big hydraulic system and a funny transmission, for example.
On the down side, batteries are HEAVY. You probably lose most of the weight savings from simplification to added mass in batteries. Back on the pro side, simpler systems are simpler to repair and maintain.
But, i get your point, it's probably not there yet.
You'd still use the hydraulics, they are by far the best solution for that application. Utterly reliable, extremely high power levels available if required, no gears or other fragile bits. The most likely way in which that would work would be an electrically driven hydraulic compressor and the rest of the system stays just the way it is today.
A large farm tractor produces 100KW to 200KW of power, and most of that in high torque low RPM situations where an electric motor would definitely be a contender (that's why we have diesel-electric hybrid locomotives as well).
A simpler drive train would also be a big gain for maintenance reasons, the weight added by the batteries would not be a huge issue, weight in a tractor isn't nearly as bad as in a regular road vehicle, in fact for many tractor applications weight is added to the machine on purpose.
10 gal an hour is too low. I know someone who does soybeans at about 20 gallons per hour.
So 60 powerwall 2s. Even if you solve the weight issue (60*270 lbs = 16,000 Lbs), the $330,000 cost for that many packs every 10 years makes it infeasible. That doesnt even account for electricity cost.
Poking around a little it looks like the real measures are gallons per acre. Which makes sense, a gigantic machine moving fast will clear a ton of acreage, and suck down fuel like it's going out of style. So i picked a bad measure.
As i said, i mostly agree, it's just not there today.
That said, battery capacity historically improves 5-8% a year. Cars aren't worth it, but they're very close. I'd take the yes side of a $10 bet about John Deere selling an electric tractor in 15 years or less.
Actual workhorse? Those can have 200L or 400L or even bigger tanks - when you go out in the field you are going to stay there until the work is done (or the day is done). So account for 10 or 12 or more hours of work.
So let's take the best case scenario - 200L tank on a machine that takes ~10 gallons (say 50L)
40% efficiency for the diesel engine cuts energy available from the tank giving us 3040kWh for 4 hours of work of not-the-biggest machine
That is ~225 powerWALLS (at 5,500$ a pop it gives us 1,237,500$), The weight is 27000 kg
That is 16 powerPACKS 2 (wiki doesn't say if those are available really) - at 145,100$ a pop it comes out to 2,321,600 - but it might be wiki numbers, it also says 445$/kWh - it comes out to 1,352,800$ - more reasonable compared to powerwalls, the weight is ~26000kg
That is for a small-ish (relatively) machine with 200L tank, for 4h of work...
Now take a 20 gallon/h that works for 10 hours.
And finally, we come to the issue of lifespan. In work machines you are going to be using close to nominal power for the whole time it's working - batteries don't like that, they get hot, the cells might die and worst of all it really damages even the working ones
Then there is an issue of ground pressure - you don't want your machine sinking into the ground and fucking it up
My understanding is that there is government mandated pricing for crop insurance in the USA, which includes a legislated discount for GMO crops (after lobbying from the seed production firms).
So, it ends up being a subsidy from the government to the farmer. Farmer choice as an indicator of increased production is not required, only that total cost (or risk) to the farmer is lowered.
That's remarkable. Tons more pesticides and herbicides for no actual improvement in crop yields.
Annoyingly, the NYT article focuses repeatedly on bullshit "health" controversies, ignoring the actual reasons that GMOs are largely banned in the EU - namely, their environmental risks. It's extremely strange how virtually nobody on any side of the debate in America or in the media seems to be aware of this.
There is no wide ban of GMO's in the EU there is an authorization process (which isn't technically unique for GMO's any type of new crop or livestock has to be approved) and most of them do get authorised, only a few GMO products those which were engineered to produce biotoxins that can act as pesticide are actually banned.
This isn't a process that would take a year or even two, it is likely to take decades and in all honesty it's more likely to be reversed than expanded.
And more importantly since the GMO ban is effectively a ban only on cultivation this is more of a step to protect and subsidise the farmers in the EU rather than an ecological or public health related policy.
As long as the US, China and AfriChina (read about it) produces GMO crops and exports them it wouldn't matter.
Environmental risk of GMOs is not limited to biotoxins. I imagine parent commenter was mostly referring to the impact of Roundup, a synthetic pesticide used in GMO crops.
You do understand that normal crops require at the least as much pesticide and herbicide as GMO's right?
The environmental impact is monoculture and even that isn't exclusive to GMO's and the real one that effectively the farmers have to give in to the demands of the seed companies and they often are forced to sign exclusivity deals for their fields.
>You do understand that normal crops require at the least as much pesticide and herbicide as GMO's right?
Doesn't sound like you read the article. Suggest you do. Here is a supplementary source as well.
A paper published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Sciences Europe found that overall, GMO technology drove up herbicide use by 527 million pounds, or about 11 percent, between 1996 (when Roundup Ready crops first hit farm fields) and 2011. By 2011, farms using Roundup Ready seeds were using 24 percent more herbicide than non-GMO farms planting the same crops.[1]
Well they haven't been focusing on yield, really. They've been doing things like making the crops resistant to glyphosate to make weed control easier, or incorporating Bt to decrease the need for insecticide. Nothing specifically targeting yield increases, to my knowledge.
Herbicide-resistant weeds are not unique or new (natural selection is not dependant on GMO's ;)), there is now ones that are also resistant to Glyphosate/Roundup...
Glyphosate resistant GMO crops were developed in the mid 90's and early 2000's, Roundup was on the market in the 70's....
Resistance to pesticide and herbicide has been always developing, the fact that we have weeds that are resistant to Glyphosate doesn't have anything to do with GMO's, Glyphosate would still be used.
Glyphosate usage has also increased in normal crops since seed treating technology was introduced which enables seeds to sprout in soil treated with herbicide regardless of GMOs (this actually predates GMOs by about 2 decades).
The use of Glyphosate has been steadily increasing even before the introduction of EPSPS crops.
You used to do spot sprayings with glyphosate... because it would kill any plant. Now that we have Glyphosate resistant GMO crops we just spray the entire field.
Normal conditions in nature don't favor a heavily glyphosate resistant plant, multiple sprays of glyphosate in a season does.
> "Monsanto pitched them as a way to curb the use of its pesticides. “We’re certainly not encouraging farmers to use more chemicals,” a company executive told The LA Times in 1994..."Figures from the United States Department of Agriculture show herbicide use skyrocketing in soybeans, a leading G.M. crop, growing by two and a half times in the last two decades"
As a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. We could have plants that eliminated the need for petroleum based fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover does and that are resistant to disease and insects. Instead we get Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops. And lie to us about their GMO's reducing the use of chemicals.
It's a shame Monsanto has abused the potential of GMO to boost profits by selling more chemicals instead of using it for good.
I'm not sure we should get our science from the UN. It's a political institution. Take with a grain of salt. I'm sure the relative yields of GMO vs non-GMO crops is a well studied topic. What's the consensus? Or is it simply too political to even do objective research in this area. Not a good situation.
So how would you test this? Have two fields with different crops? Wind and insects lead to contamination.
...so two greenhouses. There are many ways to deal with things like soil enrichment, what's considered a pest and what's considered a weed. Some think that a consortium of specific "pests" and "weeds" if managed "properly" are net beneficial for instance.
There's different ways to water crops, rotate them, and the levels of biodiversity for a given acre over some time. There's climate differences by location and year, multigenerational effects not only on the plant but the soil, the insects...
How do you measure yield? What if there's 10% more product but the labor intensive expensive harvesting season in 30% longer... What if the gmo crops come out a different size, or aesthetically different, or having different shelf life, or different characteristics with regard to bruising and shipment or a different ratio of edible to non edible parts... What if there's the same average but a different variance?
Now let's presume you have all of that and one multibillion dollar company claims their patented seeds are better through a very expensive trial run.
Who funds the confirmations or the counter studies? What money is backing the non proprietary strains?
What about climatological and ecological externalities? Perhaps there's a carbon sequestration difference or toxicity not in an insect that come in contact but with the creatures that eat those insects...
If the fundamental claim is "this is better and is how we should feed billions of people; deploy this single strain globally at a massive scale..." Maybe it's OK.
The problem is with the ease of use. If you can apply roundup all-around the season, you do so. And if you do, some undesirable plants will survive, hidden out of sight.
These will adapt and thus, genetically modified crops "breed" multi-pesticide resistant weeds.
In the traditional approach to farming this did happen only seldom, because the times when pesticides were applied, are severely limited. And if resistant weeds where encountered, a change of the grown culture and apply of broad-band pesticides could eliminate them.
TL,DR; Genetically Modified Crops grow resistant weeds that drastically reduce the harvest.
Pesticide resistance is much harder to develop and spread than Antibiotic resistance. Vastly smaller populations and much longer reproduction means plants adapt/evolve much less quickly. Further, lack of horizontal gene transfer means each species needs to evolve resistance independently.
Yes and yes. But you have a Million dices, being rolled every year, and some of those dices are loaded with sloppy applied, diluted, pesticides.
And once the Weed is in existence, it can rely on transfer by car, truck and train.
The problem is not the GMO are not financial viable (they are, as long as there are no resistant weeds), the problem in my point of view are not health risks (though some of the in abundance used pesticides are on the carcinogenic watch list here in the EU)- the problem is the same with developing antibiotics. You do, and everyone and his dog uses it for minor injuries, resulting in a fast resistance.
Meaning, this whole genetically engineering is a constant uphill game against statistics.
Is there actually any evidence that indicates this? In theory it sounds like it could happen, but I'd also expect the time scales to be proportionately... macro, compared to what's happening with resistant bacteria right now.
GMO + broadcast applied herbicides is a long term loser. For years cotton growers in the South Eastern US applied Round Up from planes. The chemical would dissipate on its way down and apply half doses to weeds. Some of these weeds could metabolize the Round Up while others would die. But the next year all that was left were the weeds that had some resistance. They bred w/ e/o and on it went. The annual selective pressure has created some pretty impressive weeds, most notably Palmer Amaranth. Growers I've talked to say, "Round up just pisses it off." It can grow over an inch a day, it has over a million seeds in its bud and once it has grown past 4 inches, no selective chemical can kill it. You can kill 98% of it one year and its population will be bigger the next year. Once you get an Amaranth population, you more or less can't get rid of it. It's a one way ratchet. As such, Palmer Amaranth is spreading.
The Dicamba story is quite interesting. Monsanto is selling Dicamba resistant seeds even though the chemical is not approved for use on those crops. As Dicamba is approved for other uses, growers can buy the Dicamba ready seeds and illegally apply it. Dicamba is finicky. In many weather conditions it volatilizes and drifts to a neighboring farm. If the neighbor doesn't have Dicamba ready seeds, he could lose his crop and have very little legal recourse. Today two growers got in a dispute about Dicamba drift and one shot and killed the other. The drift problem is forcing growers that don't use Dicamba to buy Dicamba resistant seeds as a defense mechanism. It's pretty nuts. I feel like the herbicide resistant weed problem is like a "Global Warming that nobody knows about."
More interesting is the fact that it takes decades to produce a gene / chemical pairing and get it approved for use. The weeds evolve faster than the GMO / chemical companies' ability to deliver new products.
The startup I work for, Blue River Technology, is going after this problem. We make machines that detect the crop, detect the weeds and apply non-selective chemicals to just the weeds. Because we target selectively we can use non-systemic, contact herbicides will kill resistant weeds no matter what. The grower saves on chemicals, put orders of magnitude less poison in the ground and gets better weed control.
The problems w/ this article are numerous. The guy clearly spent more time looking at UN stats than he did walking the fields and talking w/ growers. Somehow he missed the rather obvious fact that GMO + roundup is more cost effective regardless of yield. Regardless, he brought up some interesting points and I'd rather be talking about it than not.
-- Disclaimer --
The company I work for is partially funded by both Monsanto and Syngenta. Not that anything I said is defending the status quo :)
The main reason to avoid any sort of mechanical kill is time. Even if you could deploy and retract a puncher in 100 ms, you'd travel 10 inches during that time. The slowest operation in row crops is about 6mph. Same principle applies to microwaves & lasers. All require time over the target. Chemicals are nice b/c they do their work after your machine leaves and its easy to get a solenoid that opens and closes in 5ms.
There are other issues w/ exploding seed head making the problem worse and w/ making reliable complex moving parts in the horrible ag environment.
Kevin folta breaks down the flaws in the article pretty well:
"1. No genes for yield were ever installed. The current suite of biotech traits were not meant to improve yields, they were made to ensure yields. In other words, they help ag producers farm with lower costs, fewer insecticides, improved weed control and virus resistance in some cases. Same yield at lower cost = better for farmers."
The article says that their research found "genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields." Yields have been on an upward trend for 50+ years.
Did you read the article? The measurement is against places that do not use GMOs. Nowhere does it say there has been no absolute increase in yields.
> An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany.
I'm not going to comment for or against GMOs or whatever. But can we all take a minute to appreciate the staggering stupidity of the CEO of Monsanto saying:
"Every farmer is a smart businessperson, and a farmer is not going to pay for a technology if they don’t think it provides a major benefit"
This is
a) obviously more marketing than anything, pandering to his customers
b) Demonstrably false. It's simply untrue that every farmer is a smart businessperson.
c) Besides the point. What the farmers "think" is not the same as what's real.
Back when GMO soy was banned in Brazil, farmers simply banded together and paid smugglers to bring seeds from neighboring Argentina. If the benefits were not so immediate I doubt they'd bother to break the law.
Right now there are people going to lots of trouble to smuggle rhino horns for use as an aphrodisiac. If the benefits were not so immediate I doubt they'd bother to break the law.
Course that would be so laughable today that no scientific journal would publish it. This article is similar in quality. Got to give it to the anti GMO folks they never give up, even after its clear that they've lost.
I worked in agriculture for over twenty years as an agronomist. I wasn't in an ivory tower, I was on the ground walking farmers fields. My customers used less insecticides with the introduction of GMO seed. They used much safer herbicides. Farmers work in an extremely low margin business. They continued to buy GMO seed because it made them more money. Farmers are the original environmentalists and the use of GMO seed was cleaning their community.
In America we spend around 11% of our income on food. In Europe it's more than double that number. In Europe a small but loud group of activists prevented the adoption of GMO seed. They destroyed research crops so that tests could never be completed on the efficacy of GMO seed.
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/06/11/bbc-panora...
Europeans also convinced a starving Zambia to reject the generous US gift of life saving grain. Let people starve cause hypothetically something could be bad for them is the height of hypocrisy.
http://www.economist.com/node/1337197
If they [the environmentalists] lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 60 years, they’d be crying out for fertilizers, herbicides, irrigation canals and tractors and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.
- Norman Borlaug, inventor of the green revolution and winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace prize