GM Crop Producer Monsanto Using Data Analytics To Expand Its Footprint 128
Nerval's Lobster writes "Monsanto is more infamous for growing its genetically modified crops than its use of software, but a series of corporate acquisitions and a new emphasis on tech solutions has transformed it into a firm that acts more like an innovative IT vendor than an agribusiness giant. Jim McCarter (the Entrepreneur in Residence for Monsanto) recently detailed for an audience in St. Louis how the company's IT efforts are expanding. Monsanto's core projects generate huge amounts of bits, especially its genomic efforts, which are the focus of so much public attention. Other big data gobblers are the phenotypes of millions of DNA structures that describe the various biological properties of each plant, and the photographic imagery of crop fields. (All told, there are several tens of petabytes that need storage and analysis, a number that's doubling roughly every 16 months.) With all that tech muscle, the company has launched IT-based initiatives such as its FieldScripts software, which uses proprietary algorithms (fed with data from the FieldScripts Testing Network and Monsanto research) to recommend where to best plant corn hybrids. 'Just like Amazon has its recommendation engine for what book to buy, we will have our recommendations of what and how a grower should plant a particular crop,' said McCarter. 'All fields aren't uniform and shouldn't be planted uniformly either.' Despite its increasingly sophisticated use of data analytics in the name of greater crop yields, however, Monsanto faces pushback from various groups with an aversion to genetically modified food; a current ballot initiative in Washington State, for example, could result in genetically modified foods needing a label in order to go on sale here. The company has also inspired a 'March Against Monsanto,' which has been much in the news lately."
Farmer types, a question for you (Score:5, Interesting)
Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering what happened in Oregon recently with Monsanto Wheat Experiments, I think maybe they need to improve the geolocation part of their data analysis.
That, and offer to pay for genetic testing of the entire agricultural industry now polluted with their test genes.
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Interesting defense. "Your honor, a seed that we tested 11 years ago in the area was found in the wild because somebody sabotaged us".
If you were an impartial judge, would you buy that?
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Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
Because we feel like it? What's it to you?
Different crops take different nutrients from the soil. Rotation allows the soil to recover, leaving it fallow allows further recovery and feeds livestock. This has been known for around 700 years, and was the case until a few decades ago. So, other than lining chemical companies' pockets, adding back what's been over-farmed, it's worth asking those that actually know what they're talking about.
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Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
Because we feel like it? What's it to you?
Different crops take different nutrients from the soil. Rotation allows the soil to recover, leaving it fallow allows further recovery and feeds livestock. This has been known for around 700 years, and was the case until a few decades ago. So, other than lining chemical companies' pockets, adding back what's been over-farmed, it's worth asking those that actually know what they're talking about.
The same reason anything else is the way it is - it's the most profitable. You choose to farm the thing you will get the most money for (based on a lot of different considerations - like for example will it even grow in your climate and soil type), and you optimize your operation for doing that. Plus, letting a field go fallow essentially means it is unproductive if you are cash-cropping, so it's basically costing you money sitting there. All letting a field go fallow does is replace nitrogen, and that i
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Because different crops are different. They require different care, different equipment, and have different market demands. That means different prices, different profits, and different outcomes. Instead of just growing and harvesting a crop, you're now managing a multi-year multi-stage process across several rotating plots, and a single bad year can disrupt the next several years of work as you try to rebuild that delicate year-to-year balance of nutrients.
I know the nostalgic image of the gentle old-time farmer is romantic, but the simple fact is that modern farms are a production industry. Just like any other production industry, there's a significant expense associated with every redesign and retooling for a new project. Generalization has some benefits (labeling food "organic", for instance), but specialization has its benefits as well (lower expenses).
Source: I grew up in farmland. When the wind blows just right, you can smell the manure from the pig farms. When it blows the opposite direction, you can smell the manure being spread on the crop fields.
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aka: The Smell of Other People's Money
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:5, Insightful)
"I know the nostalgic image of the gentle old-time farmer is romantic"
It's also smarter than you think you are. When the genetic crops fail they will ALL fail and the bio-diversified crops will reign.
What seems a "no brainer" requires one, to ask yourself questions. Like what does the continual use of roundup do to OUR genetic makeup?
Crops have been developed for centuries for particular areas and are called heirloom varieties and passed down legally to each other for eons.
Now Monsanto wants everyone to buy only theirs. But your propaganda is clearly obvious. Superior? Super? Suspect.
Don't change my world Monsanto. Go steal the farms in India like you are doing...to the farmers here with lawsuits.
Absolutely shameful on US
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When the genetic crops fail they will ALL fail
[citation needed]
(plus, do ya got any good tips on the 2013 MLB World Series ?)
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Bananas. [wikipedia.org]
Or maybe I misread the GP.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Instead of them all failing, the concept of engineering a crop so that poisons can be applied without killing the desired crop is a dead end path, and doomed to failure.
By large scale application of the poisons onto many, many, fields, the main thing we are accomplishing is an evolutionary experiment that just speeds up natural sele
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Perhaps you should go work with farmers for a bit (real family farms... yes they still exist) and get a grasp of their current methodology, both the how and the why. Then you can take your position with knowledge rather than fear.
Your arguments are fairly scattered, so it's hard to pin them down and reply logically to them. Monsanto isn't forcing farmers to buy their seed. Rather they offer a distinct advantage over the heirloom varieties and that appeals to farmers, and they actually have a small benefi
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Wanted to comment on the "when the genetic crops fail" comment. GMO crops don't "fail" any differently than heirloom crops do. An ecological disaster that wipes out GMO crops is going to wipe out "bio-diversified" crops too. Your argument is thus a fallacy.
Perhaps you are referring to monoculture. However monoculture as a problem has nothing to do with GMO crop. Non-GMO crops can be just as mono-cultured as GMO. There is interesting research going on now into the idea of growing multiple crops togethe
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Because different crops are different. They require different care, different equipment, and have different market demands... blah, blah, blah
That giant whooshing sound is GP's subtle humor flying right over your head. Ironically, you and he are saying the same thing - "profit". I think his version was ever so much more artful.
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Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
Taking land out of production has never been an easy choice to make. Each crop in the rotation has its own labor and material cost. Different skills. Different tools. It adds up.
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:5, Informative)
Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
What makes you think that modern farmers don't rotate crops? I grew up on a farm. My parents and all my neighbors rotated crops regularly, and still do.
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:5, Informative)
Most corn acreage isn't rotated sustainably. 30% of U.S. cropland is planted in Corn, and there are counties in the U.S. where corn has been planted on 64% of the acres for 4 or 5 out of 5 years (source = satellite data analysis by USDA). 5% to 10% is the maximum acreage in the U.S. that should be planted in corn at any one time. Corn planted year after year degrades the soil, and results in much greater use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation water and other inputs. As corn is one of the least-efficient at utilizing fertilizer, about 2/3rds of the fertilizer runs off into waterways, creating all kinds of problems that farmers say are just not their problem.
Crop rotation systems are scalable and work well, however the U.S. subsidizes commodity corn in various ways (crop subsidies, insurance subsidies, demand mandates such as the Ethanol mandate which as 40% of our corn production going to ethanol, etc). But there are basically no subsidies for livestock, which are essential for sustainable agriculture. See the Union of Concerned Scientists recent report at http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/advance-sustainable-agriculture/healthy-farm-vision.html .
Scientists get it. Consumers get it. The only people who don't seem to get it are those who are captive to the system and benefit from the externalized costs such as pollution and the loss of topsoil...which won't effect this year's Profit and Loss statement, but will affect all our children. Buy local, support farmers who are using sustainable agriculture, support a level playing field for federal subsidies (either eliminate them or at least make them support sustainable agriculture) and call B.S. on those that say monocropping is the only way to feed the world. The only people it feeds are their short-term shareholders.
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:4, Informative)
For the last 4 years I have lived right next to two crop fields that are worked, but not owned, by a local family that has been farming here for many generations. They have never rotated crops in the time I've been here. One field is always corn, and the other is always squash. Every year they plow in fertilizer, flood irrigate, and spray who-knows-what on everything. What's more, they rarely harvest any of it. At the end of harvest, they always tell us we are welcome to pick whatever we want. Did that once and never did it again; everything was completely flavorless. Then they plow it all under and do it again the next year!
I can think of only two possible reasons for this behavior. One is that they would lose subsidies and the land owner would lose tax discounts if they don't grow anything on the land. The other is the big increase in deportations since Obama got in office and tougher state level regulations have made getting farm labor to pick stuff more difficult.
With millions of pounds of food uneaten and wasted every day around the world, I don't think crop yield is a problem. Economics and logistics are the problems in getting food from the field to the people that need it, when they need it. The business model of companies like Monsanto, getting rid of small local farmers in favor of big industrial farms and prosecuting seed savers, makes those problems worse, not better.
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And it's not so much that they would lose subsidies. Subsidies are paid at the market, so it wouldn't make sense to waste the crop. And for the most part you wouldn't have to let a field go fallow anyway, what you would do is set up a crop rotation. But a crop rotation adds complexity and cost. Instead of just growing corn and only having to pay
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Manual labor wouldn't have an effect on corn and squash. Both of those are mechanized crops. Illegals are used to pick labor intensive crops like berries.
Not in this case. This family farms on several separate fields that vary in size from 1 to 5 acres, which they lease from the landowners. They use machinery to plow, fertilize, and spray. But I've never seen them use machinery to harvest. Usually it's just a few laborers pulling up in a pickup truck with a bunch of cardboard boxes and going at it.
They never harvest one corn field near a public road. Instead, they let it dry out, and in Oct/Nov turn it into a corn maze that they charge admission to.
So u
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Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:4, Informative)
Excellent points. Sometimes I forget how things are down there in the corn belt. Even here in Canada, my neighbors to the east (next province over) are now starting to come to terms with the consequences of not rotating Canola like they should.
Just to help people understand why crop rotation is often cheated on, consider that corn is a very lucrative crop. Soybeans, the second choice, is about 2/3 of the profit of corn. And wheat is possibly 1/2 of corn. A heavily-leveraged farm is going to be sorely tempted to to maximize short-term profits. Yes it will come crashing down eventually.
On my farm, multiplying seed canola brings me more than double the income per acre of any of my other crops. We joke about rotating snow canola snow canola, but we know we can't do that and so we have to be careful and plan things out as best we can. We constantly look for alternate crops to try, that we can grow with our current equipment. Some work out, some don't. This year we're trying dry beans and faba beans.
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I tried rotating crops, but every time I till them the plants just die.
Now I thought of switching to growing chicks. But no luck either.
Dunno whether I planted them too close together or too deep.
Re:Farmer types, a question for you (Score:4, Informative)
In fact I do. I farm roughly 3000 acres. We religiously stick to a 4 year rotation. Spring wheat, Canola, Winter Wheat, Legume. Any tighter of a rotation leads to massive disease problems (which, by the way, have nothing to do with GMO crops). My rotations are limited by several factors: soil type, total heat units, availability of water, labor, and most importantly, machinery investment. There are some crops I simply cannot grow because they would lead to massive soil erosion either in spring before the crop overs the ground and in the winter when only residue is left. Other crops I can't grow because they are too labor intensive for my operation. I currently don't have any row-crop equipment, so that precludes beats, potatoes,corn, etc. But my current equipment allows just a small number of people to effectively manage the crops I do grow.
In days of old, in my area, rotation really wasn't possible at all because it was too dry to grow anything but wheat and rye. Now with high-efficiency irrigation, everything from corn, potatoes beans, peas, wheat, canola, onions, dill, mint, and many other crops are grown. On a large scale, there is now more diversity in crops in my area than there ever was. However, these crops are grown in large fields (no smaller than 130 acres), so that leads to local monoculture, and also a difficulty in controlling weeds.
I do happily grow roundup-ready canola, and sometimes soybeans. I have relatively few qualms (except those I list below) with growing roundup-resistant broad-leafed crops. However roundup-ready wheats or grasses would be a very bad thing. The reason is that broadleaf weeds are easy to control with standard, relatively benign chemicals even if they are resistant to round-up, whereas grassy weeds not so much, especially wild oats. Likewise, I strongly oppose the current research into 24D-resistant soybeans because such plants, when volunteer weeds, would be much more difficult to control.
Old news (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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so the company is using data analytics to determine where it should plant crops most efficiently? thats pretty cool. Chances are great theyve been using analytics heavily in their biosciences divisions for quite some time, considering output from computational modeling software is rarely terse.
this might seem naive, but wasnt this the grand plan for the future? a supercrop that never needs to worry about weeds or bugs? that grows tens of times larger than its regular counterpart? I have a legitimately difficult time bashing monsanto but ive followed lots of slashdot discussion on the matter and it seems to be a pretty common thread.
The beef you're *supposed* to have with Monsanto, is that while everyone is rallying around the incredibly remote possibility of cross-pollinated crops becoming infertile or unkillable or somewhere in-between (the somewhere in-between has been the outcome so far, cross pollinated plants act just like any other species, they are always of the same species and arbitrarily inherit a combination of traits from both progenitors) the amazingly more likely scenario of a devastating form of TB or bird flu or Ebola
Re:schitzophrenic summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite frankly the beef(s) *I* have is that is with suing farmers whose crops show the "patented" gene through cross pollination (because that's how nature works) and forcing GM farmers to strict contracts that don't allow them to keep seed for next years crop.
There are a lot of STINKY business practices going on here. It isn't just about the fact that they've bribed officials to write laws outlawing GM labeling or bribed officials to pass a law that makes sure they have no liability for *anything*.
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Show a single case where a farmer was sued because his crops 'showed' the patented crop, where the farmer was not causing that to happen (by intentionally killing off all the non-GM crop).
Re:schitzophrenic summary. (Score:4, Informative)
Quite frankly the beef(s) *I* have is that is with suing farmers whose crops show the "patented" gene through cross pollination
Perhaps before you have a "beef" with someone, you should spend a few minutes looking at the facts. This mythology about Monsanto suing farmers for cross pollination comes up regularly on Slashdot, and no one is ever able to cite a single case of Monsanto actually suing anyone for that sort of unintentional infringement.
Re:schitzophrenic summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
they've bribed officials to write laws outlawing GM labeling or bribed officials to pass a law that makes sure they have no liability for *anything*.
Could you please explain what you are talking about? What laws are these? There was recently a ballot initiative in California to require GMO labeling, and it was voted down by the voters not the politicians. Food labeling should be based on science, not superstition, and even for those that want to avoid GMO, it is unnecessary since it is already perfectly legal to label food as "Organic" or "Non-GMO", and since these foods sell for a premium, anyone selling them would be foolish not to label them as such.
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In all fairness, labeling it Genetically Modified would be scientifically accurate. The assumption that Genetic Modification is a horribly evil thing is certainly superstition, but I consider that a separate issue.
I'd actually like to know a whole lot more than that myself. What is the point of the Genetic Modifications? If it helps the crops to grow in more diverse soils or produce more food that's good. If it's to make it more tolerant to various (Monsato brand) poisonous insecticides then I'm a little bi
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In all fairness, labeling it Genetically Modified would be scientifically accurate.
In all fairness, requiring them to be labeled as GMO would not be scientific all all.
The assumption that Genetic Modification is a horribly evil thing is certainly superstition, but I consider that a separate issue.
It is not a separate issue when people are trying to subvert the government regulatory process to promote their superstitions.
I'd actually like to know a whole lot more than that myself.
Just because you would like to know doesn't mean other people should be required to tell you. Far more people are concerned about whether their food is kosher or halal. Should we have government regulations requiring food to be labeled as "non-halal"? Of course not, because there is no nutrition
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The guy did not get sued (and lose) because his crop was 'accidentally' pollinated by his neighbors plants, he got sued (and lost) because he intentionally killed off all of the non GM crop, and kept the seeds from what was left. That is why the phrase 'knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant' was in there, and that is why he was sued and lost.
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And again, he was not 'on the hook' because Monsanto's stuff got into his stuff. he was on the hook because of HIS actions. He knew exactly what he was doing - farmers don't routinely try to kill 3 or 4 acres of their crop without a good reason.
There is a reason that this case is one of the very few that people can find where Monsanto sued a farmer - because it just does not happen like people like to claim. There are NO cases where the actions of the farmer (and not simple cross-pollination) are not the
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Nobody said he had to destroy his entire crop (or any part of his crop). Nobody said he was required to know if his crop had been cross-pollinated or not. What they said was that he DID know (because of his actions). There is no indication that had he not intentionally isolated the GM crop he would have been sued. Surely there are many farmers in that situation (cross pollination), yet nobody can find a case where they were sued.
He admitted he intentionally sprayed 3 or 4 acres to see if they were Round
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Re:schitzophrenic summary. (Score:4, Funny)
2) The Supreme Court put aside the award of Schmeiser's profits to Monsanto, and fined him just $1. Their reasoning was that while Schmeiser may have used Monsanto's GM seed and either deliberately or unwittingly helped it to spread to his fields, he did not benefit from it in any way for the simple reason that he did not spray Roundup on his crops. He sprayed it in the areas surrounding his fields to kill weeds, and he sprayed it in a small section of one field to determine if it had been contaminated. But he did not otherwise use it on his crop fields. In other words, Monsanto's seed did not benefit him in any way, and there was no motive for him to have acted with malicious intent as Monsanto claimed. Monsanto's hypothesized version of events (where Schmeiser attempted to create a Roundup-resistant canola strain without paying the licensing fees) is most likely baseless for this reason.
3) The court decision you cite took Monsanto's word that resistance to Roundup could not develop naturally. It thus found that Schmeiser "should have known" that the canola which survived Roundup in the ditches had Monsanto's patented gene, and he should have treated it as contraband. However, it's since been shown that Monsanto was wrong [slashdot.org], and Roundup-resistance can arise naturally in plants. Schmeiser's behavior of testing and putting aside seed from the contaminated field can thus be explained as him believing that perhaps he had a new strain of naturally Roundup-resistant canola. It doesn't have to be Monsanto's explanation that he knew he had Roundup Ready seed and was secretly and deliberately trying to incorporate it into his crop.
4) The court accepted Monsanto's explanation that seed which fell off of trucks could not travel the distance from the roadway to the field. It cites testimony from a Monsanto engineer (paragraphs 117-118) that seed which fell from a truck couldn't have fallen and been blown that far. I find that extremely dubious for the simple reason that the roadway is not limited to one truck and the wind. Other cars travel on the same roads. I have seen debris blown for miles along a road as other cars pass by and stir it up over and over. The court also incorrectly pegged 1997 (when Schmeiser first noticed the canola which survived spraying with Roundup) as the year of the contamination, and thus found it difficult to believe so much of Schmeiser's property had been contaminated so quickly merely from seed blown by the wind. But Schmeiser didn't spray Roundup throughout the ditches. He sprayed it only where he saw weeds (mostly around utility poles where workers couldn't keep the vegetation cut). The contamination could have begun years earlier, and only came to his attention in 1997.
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The beef most people want you to have with Monsanto is that they're out to monopolize crop planting and eliminate organic food, or something like that, or that GM crops are somehow unhealthy. It's not so much beef as BS.
As far as I can tell, the beef Slashdot collectively has with Monsanto is that they think, like software patents, that they can patent just about anything and sue anyone purportedly using it, even if there's never been any commercial transaction, even if it's an organic farm.
Re:schitzophrenic summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
The beef most people want you to have with Monsanto is that they're out to monopolize crop planting and eliminate organic food, or something like that, or that GM crops are somehow unhealthy. It's not so much beef as BS.
[citation needed]
Profit, not to mention a regulatory environment that might generously be called ineffective, has driven a headlong rush down a path with a staggering array of potential problems; environmental, nutritional, etc. No, nobody has died from eating GM corn, yet, but the hubris required to ignore the potentially disastrous consequences is well beyond the "what the fuck were you thinking" mark, IMO.
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What's profit have to do with it? Profit, other things being equal, is good (ask any economist). Would you prefer losses? That's the only alternative.
What's wrong is violating private property rights: Infecting other people's crops, selling nonfunctional seeds, or other forms of fraud and force. Manufacturers do, in fact, have a reputation to uphold, especially bigger manufacturers.
The whole point of GM crops is they're supposed to resist famine, disease, and malnutrition. Regular crops are just as suscepti
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this might seem naive, but wasnt this the grand plan for the future? a supercrop that never needs to worry about weeds or bugs? that grows tens of times larger than its regular counterpart? I have a legitimately difficult time bashing monsanto but ive followed lots of slashdot discussion on the matter and it seems to be a pretty common thread.
Yes, a bit Naive. You are confusing alleged end goals with means.
Just because I say "I am trying to save the world" doesn't make it true. And if I create a product even with good intentions, that does not mean its effective or safe. That said, I'm not sure if anyone will argue that Monsanto actually HAS "good intentions"... neutral/selfish at best.
are they really targeting farmers for intentional litigation somehow? there are plenty of other corn seeds besides roundup ready for example that farmers could decide to plant, and the only evidence ive seen to date was some guy who went to the supreme court to challenge the fact that he knowingly saved proprietary seeds. solution: vote with dollars, dont buy proprietary monsanto seeds.
They do sue farmers who save seeds even if they didn't BUY Monsanto seeds, but simply had their plants cross pollinated with Monsanto's product. Its an easy en
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proprietary seeds.
heh.
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they're still big AG (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Monsanto invests in IT as a competitive advantage doesn't mean they're not acting like an Agricultural bully. It may be great for stockholders, but they're threatening the entire world's food supply by modifying plant DNA so that one year's crop cannot be used to plant next year's crop. That's not playing GOD, that's playing Shiva, the god of destruction.
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Wait a second. If they are modifying the DNA so the plants can't reproduce, then what are all these stories of Monsanto suing thousands of farmers because their crops were 'accidentaly' pollinated by GM crops about?
Oh wait, I know. The only thing preventing this years crop from being used to plant next years crop is a contract, and not DNA. Your 'concern', just like the stories of supposed lawsuits, is pure FUD.
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> modifying plant DNA so that one year's crop cannot be used to plant next year's crop
Uh no, they are not doing that. What you describe is a GURT technology, which has never been commercialized, and it's highly doubtful that it ever will be.
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/terminator-seeds.aspx [monsanto.com]
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oh the horror! (Score:2, Insightful)
They make better crops, increase productivity, reduce pesticide use, and now they even use IT to aid in their nefarious plans! Oh the horror if it!
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make better crops, increase productivity
Possibly by some definitions of "better". Higher yield, longer storage life, possibly. Better tasting, more nutritious, that's arguable.
reduce pesticide use
That doesn't seem to be the case. Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires [reuters.com]
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You're free not to buy their stuff if you don't like it. But most people seem to like it otherwise they'd be out of business.
That particular news story is poorly written and politically biased. Even the title incorrectly supposes that this is unexpected. Of course, you need to keep de
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You're free not to buy their stuff if you don't like it.
That's kind of the rankle. Allegations are that the first thing they try to do when entering a new area is to buy up all the existing seed suppliers, so you're not free to not buy their stuff even in the supply side.
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You're saying that if you're in, say, Iowa, you can't buy non-Monsanto seed? I find that very hard to believe.
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You're free not to buy their stuff if you don't like it.
As there is no labeling of GMO foods in the US, how would you suggest I avoid them?
I can and do buy fruits and vegatables from local farmers. I can and do buy locally produced meat as well.
If it's at the grocery store, I have to hope that the store is labeling their meat and produce correctly. If it isn't fresh meat or produce, I have to assume some part is GM.
you need to keep developing new GMOs regularly in order to keep benefiting from them.
On the large scale, This doesn't seem to be a realistic way to have a stable, sustainable food supply. If we have to keep upping the pesticide
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I wasn't thinking you were nutty enough to reject all GMOs, but simply the ones you don't think "taste good". Anyway, while there is no mandatory GMO labeling, but you can certainly find GMO-free foods.
Yes, you do. And no amount of labeling would change that.
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As there is no labeling of GMO foods in the US, how would you suggest I avoid them?
I wasn't thinking you were nutty enough to reject all GMOs, but simply the ones you don't think "taste good". Anyway, while there is no mandatory GMO labeling, but you can certainly find GMO-free foods.
How am I supposed to differentiate between GM and non-GM foods? They aren't labeled, so I can't make a decision based on how they taste. I reject them because I am concerned about the lack of tests on the short and long term affects they have on my body, the environment, and the crops around them. If you want to eat it, go ahead, I'm not here to convince you what to do, I'm just asking that I have the information available to make an informed choice.
If it isn't fresh meat or produce, I have to assume some part is GM.
Yes, you do. And no amount of labeling would change that.
huhwhat? Mandatory labeling of GM ingredients in pac
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You do. It's just a question of defaults: right now, if it's not labeled, assume that it says "may contain GMO". If you don't want that, buy something that explicitly says "organic" or "no GMO".
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So why are farmers buying the stuff?
GE food labeling news... (Score:4, Informative)
TFA mentions that Washington state has a ballot initiative to label genetically engineered foods. Perhaps more importantly, Connecticut just passed a labeling law (http://grist.org/news/connecticut-will-label-gmos-if-you-do-too/).
The Connecticut bill includes a crucial requirement: the labeling requirement won’t actually go into effect until similar legislation is passed by at least four other states, one of which borders Connecticut.
Also note that 37 labeling proposals have been introduced in 21 states so far this year.
WTF ? (Score:2)
The only 'innovation' Monsanto is borrowing from the IT sector is extorting revenue from farmers for growing crops from the farmers own seeds. Even if the seeds were contaminated by accident, such as by cross-pollination by a neighbou
About that Monsanto protest march... (Score:1)
GTFO (Score:1)
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I know that programmers don't really have an ethics requirement like traditional engineers, but do we really need one in order to skip working for a company that stands a good chance of (possibly unintentionally) killing off our whole species? Everything I read about Monsanto points to them being a strong contender for the Famine version of the end of civilization. This corporation is way more evil than Microsoft or the RIAA.
So Monsanto is trying to (possibly intentionally) start an extinction-grade famine, by providing products to allow farmers to grow more food with less energy, on less land? Damn, they are so evil that their evil plots are actually amazingly un-evil ones!
Re:Come on guys, have some ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the argument is that we'll end up with a global GMO monoculture, which will lack the variety to withstand some new pest or other threat, and then we'll have a global famine.
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Why is a GM crop more likely to become a monoculture than a non GM crop?
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Why is GM more or likely to cross-pollinate?
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I admit I don't know, that is why I asked the question (shocking, I know). So instead of giving a non-answer like that, perhaps you could actually answer the question.
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OK, I understand that. But isn't that a farming practices problem, and not a GM problem? GM may have some hidden flaw, but the creation of a monoculture is because farmers did it, and not because of some inherent property of being GM, right?
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I suppose that depends on how much genetic variety there is in in the GM crop.
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If you actually look at what they're doing, making plants roundup ready requires very little change to their genome. On the other hand, selective selection (the process used since time immemorial to modify plants to our liking) modifies the plant's entire genome.
I mean there's a tiny change that you're protesting, but you're just fine with big changes which have an even larger category of unknowns. I can already think of a number of weeds that are resistant to roundup, and that just occurred through natural
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A plant with a relatively homogeneous genome will be more susceptible to certain types, and less susceptible to others.
However, it only takes one very efficient killer to wipe the GM crops out. It may take several different ones to whack the more diverse crops.
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A "GM crop," taken generically, is not more likely to become a monoculture. However, the policies and intentions of the purveyors of GM crops are quite directly geared toward monocultures, both in the pursuit of the one-true-crop in contrast to a diversified genetic portfolio, and in the efforts to ensure that the seed for year N comes from the lab, rather than from breeding at N-1.
This is yet another mistaken correspondence between the technology and the industry. The technology itself entails rather littl
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Better data storage= less likely Monsanto causes the Zombie Wheat Apocalypse, again.
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Everything I read about Monsanto points to them being a strong contender for the Famine version of the end of civilization.
See, it's just this kind of hyperbole that drove me out of the environmental movement for good. It got to be worse than a fucking religion. Every company was evil incarnate, every issue was the *end of the world*, every compromise or attempt at reason was deemed insufficient. Between the wild-eyed Chicken Littles and the misanthropes who seemed to secretly want all humans to commit suicide to save beautiful mother earth, I realized that this was one aspect of the left-wing that I didn't want to be a part of
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If my facebook feed is any indication, conservatives seem to hate Monsato more than liberals. I see tons more posts about Organic this-and-that and "natural herbal remedies" from my conservative friends. I assume it's their distrust of liberal scientific stuff and general yearning for the good-old-days. It's possible my friends are statistical outliers though.
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That's a huge false equivalency. Non-GM foods that come through random mutation via evolution have been tested... over millions of years tested. There is plenty of time to weed out the harmful.
And you misunderstand the OP; radiation or other mutagens *have* been used to create food crops that are on dinner tables around the world, this process has been going on for some 80 years. These are not labeled as GM... Before that, single-generation mutations (highly selective breeding) has been in use for hundreds of years, resulting in untested (by your standards) food going into the mouths of just about everyone in a developed/developing country for the past 300 years. Modern GM does go a far bit be
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The point is they should be.
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And you misunderstand the OP; radiation or other mutagens *have* been used to create food crops that are on dinner tables around the world, this process has been going on for some 80 years.
Uff, any citation on that? As far as I know, the only radiation treatment that has been put to some use in agriculture was to prolong the shelf life of the produce.
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And you misunderstand the OP; radiation or other mutagens *have* been used to create food crops that are on dinner tables around the world, this process has been going on for some 80 years.
Uff, any citation on that?
Sure. Here you go: Mutation Breeding [wikipedia.org]. At the bottom of the page is a list of food crops produced using these techniques.
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Non-GM foods that come through random mutation via evolution have been tested... over millions of years tested.
Except that evolution doesn't select for plants that are deliciously edible and nutritious. It selects for the opposite: plants that use poisons, bitter tastes, or other strategies to avoid being eaten.
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Non-GM foods that come through random mutation via evolution have been tested... over millions of years tested.
Except that evolution doesn't select for plants that are deliciously edible and nutritious. It selects for the opposite: plants that use poisons, bitter tastes, or other strategies to avoid being eaten.
This is actually a misconception. The reason that many plants produce "deliciously edible and nutritious" fruit is that they use the animal eating the fruit to spread the seeds (critter eats fruit, goes somewhere, seeds leave the digestive system). This is where most of our food crops come from, and why we use them as food crops in the first place. Bitter and poisonous plants either use another method to spread their seeds, like having them blow away in the wind, or use the taste and poison to select which
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Dude, have you even read the wiki page on them? [slashdot.org] There's a lot of fear-mongering from the people that fear anything to do with genetics, but Monsanto is your typical giant evil corporation. They're so big that regulatory capture is a problem. They've been caught red handed doing various nefarious stuff over the years. Honestly, any such corporation that large is bound to have bad eggs in them and the money is going to be too good. But hey, they really have brought some innovation and better living to the pop