And decreasing efficiency is sustainable? We don't have infinite land you know, everything has a cost, and if you lose efficiency, you lose wild land. Somehow, that sounds less sustainable than various chemical inputs.

I stopped reading at the point where you forgot that the past couple thousand years have been plagued by constant threat of famine. Out of sight, out of mind. Kinda crazy how detached people are from agriculture these days.

Are you volunteering to be the one to pull weeds and squash bugs in the hot summer sun for hours on end and then shoulder the immense cost increases that would bring? Or are those burdens for the sweat and blood of 'other' people so that you can live comfy and judge the hand that feeds you? Because if you are willing, find your nearest farm and sign on up. I'm sure the farmer would be thrilled to save a few bucks on inputs while you spend your days doing backbreaking labor for dirt cheap.

I wonder what will happen to their CCD rates. I doubt there is any one cause to CCD, but this could be a contributing factor, so it will be something to watch.

You're saying the people who produce the most food aren't real farmers? Nice. But yeah, polyculture is great and all in your garden, and intercropping systems are something worthy of more research, sure, but economically scaling it up might be a problem, and even then, it is highly unlikely to be the end of pest problems. The thing with simple solutions is that if they were really that simple everyone already be doing them.

From TFA:

Sorry to say, but I think the apocalypse has been postponed yet again.

What could go wrong? I don't know, maybe a disease that kills 22 thousand people? Sorry developing country kids, you gotta die, but hey, at least you don't have to worry about something that might somehow be even worse, like the dangers of unknown consequences, in other words, I don't have an actual argument, but I do have the first world heebie-jeebies, so here's a non-falsifiable appeal to ignorance. Try not to die of hemorrhagic fever while I vacuously muse about precaution from my overpriced organic café. Man, I'm glad you 'What could possibly go wrong' people weren't around when some crazy dude tried fighting disease by injecting people with dead viruses.

I'm not an entomologist, nor an ecologist, but I do recognize the standard MO among genetic engineering opposition, and this looks like the same horse shit type of opposition we see when dealing with genetically engineered crops, so unless someone can give me an actual reason (no, Jurassic Park doesn't count) as to why this is not worth trying, I fail to see the problem with this.

Both, and sometimes not without reason, but those who distrust science sure do like to pass their anti-science off as a more reasonable sounding anti-corporate sentiment.

I had to reread that a few times to realize you didn't forget an 'A'.

And one other thing I forgot to add:

There is no single gene for yield. Yield is a factor of weather, soil fertility, moisture, biotic conditions like disease, pest and weed pressure, ect. You take away pest pressure, and you don't think yield won't go up? well, it kind of doesn't, not in developed countries anyway, where we were spraying pesticides to control pests. But in developed countries, things are very different. So, you really can't say they don't improve yield, or sustainability. Even the much maligned herbicide tolerant ones do.

Of course, higher nutrient crops don't fair any better than Monsanto's crops, perhaps they are hated even more, if the protesting is anything to go by. Which makes sense I guess...the claim that GMOs are all bad and there's no nuance whatsoever and therefore you should don't money to professional anti-GMO activists might look a bit silly when it is out saving even more lives. God forbid Greenpeace, Navdanya, OCA, and all those other greedy sociopaths put humanity before profit. Their actions have lead to more deaths than the anti-vaxxers.

They didn't create the terminator gene, they bought the company (Delta & Pine Land Co.) that did. They then promised not to use it when people got angry about it, and have never commercialized it, although people are also angry that GE crops can cross pollinate with non-GE crops (like every other outcrossing plant species on the planet). They're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

That's a bit complicated. I believe you have been mislead by the anti-GE propaganda because within the proper context that makes a lot more sense. That's exactly how breeding and crop improvement programs work. We bred for hessian fly resistant wheat, and the fly evolved. We bred for late blight resistant tomatoes, and the late blight evolved. The first herbicide resistant weeds emerged in the 70's. That was conventional breeding, not genetic engineering, and the exact same thing happened, but no one makes a big fuss because breeding is not controversial, so no one calls them super pests or super weeds or super diseases. You are describing a problem of agriculture, not one of genetic engineering. And what would you have rather had, more pesticide sprays? Ignoring the pests and hoping they go away? That argument is like pointing to anti-viral resistant strains of HIV and claiming we should just stop trying to treat HIV. There is no prefect answer here, not when dealing with biotic systems anyway. Maybe with nutrient acquisition or drought tolerance or cold hardiness traits, yeah, abiotic factors don't evolve, but biotic factors are complicated. The way the media has been dealing with this has been sensationalist, ham handed, and completely fails to give the proper context of the matter, so in a sense its no wonder people hate Monsanto and their GMOs. The best thing to do is to use a multi-pronged mode of attack, with multiple modes of action, and biological and cultural considerations, but unfortunately, between the over-bearing regulations hindering new genes being utilized and other issues such as some people not planting their refuge areas and ruining it for everyone, the ideal methods are not being used.

That's anther misconception. they're not super at all, they are just resistant to one particular type of insecticidal protein or herbicide. If you don't use Bt crops or glyphosate, if you use Liberty Link crops for instance, there is little to no difference to you. The threat here is not that we're creating a race of super weeds and super pests (BS emotional terms by the way) but that we will lose the benefits GMOs have already provided. By the way, funny how the anti-GMO groups went straight from 'There's no benefits to GMOs!' to 'Ha! They are losing their benefits!' Talk about having your cake and eating it too.

Basically, yeah, people hate Monsanto for the reasons you gave, true, but those reasons actually are not very convincing. Unfortunately, there is a lot more rhetoric and baloney being put out there than actual fact and essential historical and scientific context.

Yeah, accusations equal guilt! Who cares to stop to do some fact checking to see if they are actually doing anything people claim they do? And while we're at it, death to Merck for their autism causing vaccines!

How the hell did that get modded informative, that's blatantly false.

'They' here being farmers, do you have any idea how supply chains work?

Yes, your degree from Google University means you know more than all the scientists at Monsanto. And what the hell do plasmids have to do with anything?

Man, if horizontal gene transfer happened that easily we'd be living in a very different world, however, that didn't happen. This is evolution 101 here; apply a strong selective pressure over a large area upon a fast reproducing species and you produce genetic shifts. If you knew anything about agriculture (you clearly don't) you would know that the first examples of herbicide resistant weeds emerged in the 70's, decades before GMOs. This is a problem systematic of agriculture, not one of GMOs. As for the Roundup resistant weeds, their mode of resistance is well understood, with mutations such as amplification of the EPSP synthase enzyme, or blocking of glyphosate translocation, or modification of the glyphosate binding site responsible, but never once has there been a single instance of the weeds uptaking the crop's genes. I'll eat my hat if you can find me a single example of the C4 EPSPS gene (the gene used in RR crops) being integrated into a weed's genome. Come on, prove me wrong, I'd love to hear about it. If Monsanto is so evil, and the hate so justified, the evidence of what you say should be abundant, and it shouldn't be hard to shut me up.

And here's Monsanto talking about it., Two seconds on Google is all it would have taken to find that. That news is all over the ag world, no one is covering it up, its been a topic of discussion for a long time, and if you paid attention to ag news or watched ag TV programs like on RDF-TV then you'd know that.

I really wish people who knew nothing about agriculture would stop going around saying what's what when they wouldn't know guanine from glufosinate.

They're not monopolized though. That's not how patents work (that's like saying Sony has a monopoly on Playstations, it is kind of true, but a monopoly is controlling all of a thing, not all of a particular type of a thing), and anyway, don't like Monsanto, there's Syngenta, or Pioneer, or Bayer. A much more important problem is the over-regulation preventing publicly funded projects from being commercialized. Ending patents won't do much of benefit.

Yeah, fuck them for blocking important technological advances like insect resistant crops and lifesaving Golden Rice! And fuck them for suing farmers for unknowingly having their crops cross pollinated, even though that never actually happened. Oh wait...what are we angry about again? You know, before you start damning folks to hell (it wouldn't be the first time I've gotten that one), maybe you should check to see that you're not being lied to and emotionally manipulated by people out to advance their own social, political, and economic agendas.

Well, I agree with that, but I think we're talking about very different bullshits. I'm talking about the fact that, if the field of plant improvement had not been set back by 15 years by activists using Monsanto as a generic boogeyman, we'd be awash in all sorts of beneficial crop traits. Instead, publicly funded GE crops stopped with the extremely successful Rainbow papaya. Bangladesh is just now getting Bt eggplant, and its about time (and just wait, when it inevitability makes it to India, there's going to be a shitstorm among idiot activists who've never stepped food in either a farm or a lab). Golden Rice still has yet to be released. Something is very wrong here, and this time it isn't the big corporation.

Yep, seems to be about that way. I've got some blue tomato seed that has no patents on it (Dancing With Smurfs, actual name), and no one makes a fuss about it. I don't see what their point is here. I was about to mod you up but since I actually work with plant breeding think I'll give my own 2 cents instead.

The claim in TFA about being worried about no more germplasm is totally ridiculous. With my blue tomatoes I've got a bunch of heirloom varieties of things (Blue Jade sweet corn, Dragon Tongue bean, Red Kuri squash, Giant Prague celeriac, Star of David okra, and lots more) that can in no way be patented. They are there, and as long as people keep propagating them they'll always be there, free to use. Furthermore, the patents on plants do expire; Honeycrisp apples used to be pateneted, but they're not anymore (by the way, that patent brought in tons of money to the program that developed it, allowing them to develop some other pretty amazing varieties). And Monsanto (because everyone brings up Monsanto) is not an exception here; their first Roundup Ready soybean goes off patent in a few months. That means this very year, farmers can, if they choose, save that variety and plant it for the 2015 crop. I really can't see the problem people have with these sorts of patents, isn't that how things are supposed to work? Develop, patent, recoup losses, then the invention falls to the public domain, and the profit is reinvested for new innovations (ex. SnowSweet apples and DroughtGard corn). Don't like patented plants? Fine, don't grow them, problem solved. And with the 'farmers sued for cross pollination' thing being a myth (no, accidental cross pollination is not the same as intentional selection any more than making a home movie is the same as recording a film in a theater and selling it), so I really don't get the Monsanto hate people are inevitably going to flame up with this. The vast majority of the reasons they are demonized for are nothing but lies, and yet somehow, Monsanto is still the bad guy here, not the weasels lying and being emotionally manipulative to make an extremely important technology look evil via guilt by proxy.

Additionally, I am envious of these guys if they have a program that has enough money to release things for free, although reading TFA it seems like they will be picking and choosing which is released for free and which is patented, indicating this is just a way to get some good publicity out of things that would otherwise be discarded. I work with a breeding project and you can bet whatever comes out of it will be patented, not because I'm out to get rich (we'd all go corporate if money was the prime concern) but because there is not enough funding for public agriculture research. You think we want to? We don't, but breeding programs need funding. That's a fact of life. Times are hard for funding, and sometimes it seems the only time the public stops long enough to pay attention is to demonize us for saying GMOs don't cause cancer, or autism, or whatever the hell the denialists and conspiracy theorists are prattling on about today. Maybe if everyone called up their local congresscritters and other politicians and demanded more funding for their land grant universities and public agriculture research that wouldn't be the case. Ever been to a corporate lab? Well I have, and it'd be great to have the equipment they can afford. But hey, go on attacking Monsanto and other private breeders for trying to support themselves (anyone think pluots just magically appeared? Someone spend a hell of a lot of time and effort developing those, nice to hear from the anti-plant patent crowd that they deserve to get screwed over for it), I'm sure hurting them will make all the actual problems magically disappear.

All that aside, its damned cool that they're working with quinoa breeding. It's about time we see a stronger focus on quinoa breeding. Now if only teff, amaranth, sorghum, millet, manoomin, fonio, chia, and Job's tears programs will follow...