GMO seed, Would you?

[DarJones]

I'm starting this thread to sound off a bit about GMO seed. I hope others will post their thoughts. Please take time to post something reasoned, not just an emotional blowoff.

I will intentionally post a very positive message about GMO because I know most of the responses are going to be negative. Please keep this in mind, I am not actually pro-gmo at this time.

I believe the potential of GMO is tremendous. Our current capabilities are pretty much limited to single gene insertions but long term, we will be able to build in complete bio pathways. What would you think of a corn variety that makes its own nitrogen? It would require some manipulating to insert genes from a legume like Cowpea.

Even today, there are varieties like Golden rice that have an inserted gene to produce vitamin A. This has huge potential for subsistence farming where vitamin deficiency is a problem.

long term, we have the possibility of creating new life forms from scratch. What would you think of a Corn Tree? It grows as a perennial, uses C4 photosynthesis, and makes a crop of corn 'ears' every year that fall like acorns to be picked up.

DarJones

[mjc]

Just because we can doesn't mean we should...

long term, we have the possibility of creating new life forms from scratch.

Now, if that isn't hubris, I don't know what is.

All the 'lofty ideas' about GMO plants have yet to live up to a fraction of that 'promise' in the 'real world'. Contrary to the marketing hype, herbicide resistant GMO crops do NOT reduce herbicide use...same can be said for insecticide producing crops (one, the most common Bt varieties only work on certain kinds of insects, so the crops still need to be sprayed for others AND at the same time, Bt resistant strains of certain insects are starting to emerge...in the real world, the Bt bacteria will adapt to that change and it will continue to be effective...but the Bt corn, just producing the Bt toxin can't adapt...it would need to BE altered). Yields are NOT up with GMO varieties. Yes in some areas they may be, but then again that is probably due to the fact that the 'base' variety...the one that had the modifications applied to...would probably show the same increases in the same areas. This is probably because the 'base' was well adapted for that region/growing area.

And in a farming system that doesn't rely on monocropping, why does one need a corn that produces its own nitrogen? The simple fact of the matter is, modern agriculture is its own problem. Pests (plant and animal), decreasing soil fertility, increasing salts, compaction and other soil problems all can be traced back to monocropping...not till vs no-till, not what is grown or where...but HOW it is grown.

Altering plants to 'better fit' a system that is more fit for producing a car than food is not a solution. The solution is to fix the underlying problem...farming is not and cannot be a true industrial process. If you really want that, then grow the food in a vat of mixed chemicals...or make Soylent Green.

[grunt]

Daryl: I have to agree that the potential of GMO's is tremendous. Unfortunately, the potential will never be realized, because of specifically who is doing the development. As long as the process is in the hands of major corporations, the main driving force will be the bottom line, not the betterment of humanity. So long as that is the case, there will never be any altruistic seed development, and there will always be "hooks" in the seeds, and conditions attached to growing them. "Round Up Ready" means more than that the plants will tolerate Round Up applications, it means that the plants are dependent on Round Up to reach their best potential, which is usually far below that promised. Another little hook in the dependency, the levels of Round Up required often make it impossible to stop planting RUR crops and shift to something else for at least several seasons. I know they say the Round Up rapidly dissipates, but I also know that it doesn't. Side effects of the GMO crops are never properly investigated before the seeds are released, and the testing of the varieties is left up to the developer, and rarely checked thoroughly, if at all, by the FDA (for which the FDA is currently being sued, if memory serves correctly).
The potential that GMO's have will never be realized, so long as it is in the hands of Monsanto, and corporations of like ilk.
The fact that BT resistant strains of insects are appearing does not surprise me. What bothers me more is that the effect that the consumption of that same BT on humans and animals has never been properly tested, and large examples of deletrious effects on both have been noted in India and the Philippines. In the Philippines, it wasn't even ingestion of the crop, just exposure to the pollen (maize) that caused people severe health problems. In India, sheep turned to graze on BT cotton after the crop was harvested, became very ill, and many died.
And I see I am starting to babble and about to really rant, so I'll back off.
Again, I will say that the potentials are huge, and add that they are also, potentially, hugely dangerous. And I will repeat something that I have said elsewhere here = large agricultural corporations have no conscience : they do what they do to keep the bottom line looking good, not feed mankind, or perform a public service. And that is what makes GMO's so dangerous.
Cheers
Dan

[klorentz]

Dan speaks for me on this one. I could not have said it better.


Kevin

[robertb]

The theory might be fine, unfortunately the practice is anything but. Under current circumstances, I can only answer with a resounding 'No'.

[Tom Akers]

Would anyone change their minds if it were a tomato that could endure early blight, late blight, TMV, etc.? I think I might have been tempted to use one last year.
Just a thought,
Tom

[ianpearson]

I'll start by saying that I'm anti-GM. Now I'd like to counter all of the pro points that have been stated so far:

Corn that fixes nitrogen? Nice idea, but it would be safer/cheaper/equally effective to undersow conventional corn with white clover. Ah, but wouldn't that compete with the corn, reducing yield? Possibly, but if the imagined GM corn had to use part of it's resources to support a nitrogen-fixing capability, that could also result in a reduced yield (the plant provides some nutrient to the N-fixing bacteria).

Golden Rice with inserted Vitamin A? I'm not familiar with this, but an alternative solution is to promote a more varied diet (don't eat just rice!). That way, the consumer will be ingesting ALL the essential vitamins and micronutrients, including those that science does not yet know about - not just Vit A.

Creating perennial grain crops from scratch? There's no need to, we already have them. They have the potential to be as productive as annuals, but have not received the same level of breeding and development. I am pro-perennial crops, but don't see why they need to be GM.

GM blight resistant Tomatoes? It might work, but blight fungi regularly and quickly evolve, so it would be an ongoing arms race. The presence of blight resistant tomato breeds would accelerate the evolution of the blight fungi. It's not immediately obvious why this is, but it's what happens with increased use of antibiotics/infectious disease in human medicine. Stronger strains of blight would wipe out non-GM tomatoes, destroying genetic diversity. It might even force blight to evolve to attack other crops.

[spacecase0]

the current methods will never get the results that we need.
the new proteins that are created really end up hurting people by causing new food allergies,
and there is not any way to stop that from happening,
making a GMO really is just like Frankenstein,
there is no control over what gets created,
you can select out what you get to some degree,
but you still don't know what it is doing,
it could have trigger in it to do just about anything,
it might start making a poison after 6 hours at 93.2F or something...
it likely will not, but you really can't be sure at all,
the testing that you would need would take a very very long time

when someone can program it directly and then hit the "print" button on the system,
then we will have a chance to do all the good things that seem like they are possible,
but we will have to wait for new technology for that one.

[mnjrutherford]

Good question Tom. I can sure see where it could be tempting. I sat here and thought about that cause we do have those problems and with tomatoes in particular, it's making me crazy. I took the notion to my bottom line and this is what I came up with:

GMO seed is a lot like "feminine protection". There is a man out there extorting way to much money from way to many people who for some bizarre reason believe him when he says that his way is better. A thinking person should consider, "How can his way be better when the original system functioned successfully and at almost no cost at all for thousands of years?"

Regrettably, I was not a thinking person when it came to feminine protection. I am not interested perpetuating that bad habit in my garden. So, here's to mixing thyme in my potting soil and planting tomatoes in giant plastic buckets in the hopes of getting a better crop this year than I have in the past 5 years. ;D

[DarJones]

Grunt, I happen to fall pretty squarely in line with your thoughts on current GMO technology.

Late Blight and Early Blight on tomatoes? Now that is something I can do things about. I happen to be growing Mountain Magic tomatoes this year that are highly resistant to Late Blight and have moderate resistance to Early Blight. No GMO needed either, these are conventional breeding from Randy Gardner.

I also have 10 separate lines where Randy crossed disease tolerant parents to known good flavored heirloom. including Brandywine, Malachite Box, etc. It will take several years to grow these out from the f1 and stabilize them hopefully into something that has a combination of flavor, disease tolerance, and production potential. Give me about 3 years and we might just have something to talk about re Late Blight.

DarJones

[canadamike]

I really like the spin you gave to the discussion, Dar....

Dan spoke for me. But I would like to add that the control these companies have over universities is the heart of the problem. There is an immense intellectual apparatus working in a narrow minded way. Lab rats work to create a new blight resistant potato in their own lil'universe, going back home almost masturbating about their place in history, while ordinary but highly intelligent folks like Tom Wagner can pump up loads of truely naturally resistant cultivars. He is the ennemy.

WE ARE...Tom is one of our heroes, and he represent what we are all about, and we will quietly win...

As for ''potential'' let me tell you one thing:

I am potentially a future billionaire
I am potentially a future murderer
I am potentially a future oncologist
I am potentially, despite my old age, a future father with 1000 kids from ( I sure hope) extremely wild sex with 1000 different amazingly younger, more intelligent and more beautiful than me absolutely adorable women.
I am potentially a future chemical gardener too, probably the least possible of all...possibilities

Anything can be ''potential''. Anything....

The problem with GMO's is that, because of where it comes from, it holds ''potential'' but no possibilities...which are a VERY different thing....

Mind you, I still would love to have 1000 kids ;D

[grunt]

Daryl: We agree again! Resistance/quality breeding is the way to go, but unfortunately most breeding is done looking for vertical resistance, not horizontal, so we, in effect, end up with a one trick pony as a result. For the most part, we do our breeding in this fashion because we have been taught it is the way to do it, and this standpoint is reinforced by all of the "industrial" breeders, because it keeps them in business ("See RETURN TO RESISTANCE " by Raoul Robinson.www.idrc.ca/en/ev-9339-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html ) Rather than try to explain the difference in the two types of breeding, I'll give this address to the chapter from that book www.idrc.ca/en/ev-114866-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html which explain horizontal/vertical resistance so that even I can understand it. And do click on the link to Appendix B

I am a little late into the game to be starting plant breeding, be it corn, tomatoes, beans, or anything else, and I'm a little short of land to do much horizontal resistance breeding, or I'd probably be well into it. I have a couple of other problems keeping me from doing it as well, one of which is that here, in the Creston Valley, we don't seem to have most of the diseases that everyone else fights, and the only insect pests that seem to be around, are codling moths, flea beetles, and occasional moderate grasshopper invasions.

Having said that, I intend to play with Painted Mountain corn, and a few others, after I get enough seed in reserve (from this years grow outs) to be sure that I will still have some of the originals left. I won't be looking for resistance to anything, just trying to see what I can get from what I have. Hopefully I will stand some chance of sorting the good from the bad, so to speak, and maybe even find something worthwhile.
Sorry, I'm hijacking again.

A question for those of you that are breeding something = if you are breeding for resistance, si it vertical or horizontal, (and why).
Cheers
Dan

[grunt]

Michel: You posted while I was twiddling the keyboard for my post. What you say about the universities is true, and the lobbying of politicians is just as insidious. They do all that they can, even investing in the future breeders, to ensure that the bottom line will always look good.
chasing the dollar makes them forget that one day, one of their little monstrosities may have the side effect of making their d**k fall off. (I know it's a little crass, but it's to the point.

[mjc]

Mar 27, 2010 20:31:46 GMT -5 grunt said:

Michel: You posted while I was twiddling the keyboard for my post. What you say about the universities is true, and the lobbying of politicians is just as insidious. They do all that they can, even investing in the future breeders, to ensure that the bottom line will always look good.
chasing the dollar makes them forget that one day, one of their little monstrosities may have the side effect of making their d**k fall off. (I know it's a little crass, but it's to the point.

That last statement has much truth in it...considering that many of the chemicals behave much like estrogen.

[DarJones]

Dan, Not to further hijack the thread, but if you read carefully between the lines, there is a huge piece of missing information in that article. I'll briefly describe it.

The best overall plant defense against a disease/pest is a combination of both horizontal and vertical resistances. Here is how it works.

Take a known resistant variety that has been conclusively proven to have a high level of overall tolerance to a given pathogen. Once you have identified a variety that has a high level of tolerance, start stacking in vertical resistance genes until you have a minimum of 3 highly effective single gene resistance factors against a specific pathogen combined with the proven horizontal tolerance.

Randy Gardner identified and combined two vertical resistance genes PH2 and PH3 to provide a very high level of resistance to late blight in a single stable breeding line. Late blight comes in two flavors, LB0 and LB1 each of which has a genetic key to crack certain tolerance genes. See www.ces.ncsu.edu/fletcher/programs/tomato/releases/index.html and specifically look at the NC 1 CELBR and NC 2 CELBR which give detailed breeding background. These lines also have bred in a single gene for tolerance to early blight.

Now lets go a bit further. Look at LA2533 in the tgrc.ucdavis.edu/ database and you will find that it combines resistance to LB0 and LB1. I am speculating that the resistance of LA2533 is non-identical to the resistance genes present in Randy's breeding work. Now lets say we cross LA2533 with NC 1 CELBR (or one of its offspring) and stress the offspring with severe attacks by both LB0 and LB1. This should separate out any plants with exceptionally high levels of tolerance. The end result in theory would be a tomato with outstanding Late Blight tolerance resulting from stacking a combination of PH2 and PH3 plus the unidentified genes from LA2533. In effect this would yield a very high genetic barrier to Late Blight.

The above describes stacking some vertical resistance genes. What about horizontal resistance? Well, horizontal resistance to late blight is a combination of rapid growth plus tolerance genes. Eva Purple Ball happens to have a relatively high level of horizontal tolerance to early blight and moderate levels of tolerance to late blight. So now we cross an Eva Purple Ball offspring that I happen to be propagating with the above PH2, PH3, LA2533, plus early blight tolerance from the NCSU genetics. With about 10 years of work, there is an excellent chance to develop a tomato that has both horizontal and stacked vertical resistance to both Late Blight and Early Blight plus tolerance to some other tomato problems like fusarium and verticillium.

I'm trying not to go into extreme detail with the above, but you should get an idea that there is a decent chance of developing a tomato with high quality durable resistance to a range of tomato diseases. The 64 thousand dollar question is whether or not it can be done in a tomato that also tastes good.

DarJones