Yeah. That sounds like they're growing a protein or RNA in a lab and then just spraying it on the plants. So no worries about heritability, but more cost to farmers.

Heirlooms are awesome, but it's not that there's less breeding than modern ones, just back then the economic incentive was to breed tastier fruits and vegetables. We could still do that today, we just have to fix to food system so those incentives come back.

Yes. If you want to cite statistics or experience go for it, but in my experience, pollen drift drops quite low (maybe one kernel per ear for corn) within 5-10 rows. This is very easy to tell when you grow corn containing genes for purple or red kernels next to lines that produce white or yellow ones. And once you get into transposons you pay even more attention to contamination rates.

If this hypthotical farmer is actually selling his seed to other growers he'll have more buffer than that, as his reputation will be ruined even faster by selling seeds contaminated by other lines (which will behave differently, be suited for different environments, require different levels of fertilizer, and flower and be ready for harvest at different times than the seed he claims to be selling.) than by seed with a small drop in germination rate.

Strawberries and Tomatoes are both listed under "In development."

Just to be clear I'm not saying there will never be GM tomatoes or strawberries, just that you can't eat them today. So while you or others may feel tomatoes today are less tasty than they used to be, the fault doesn't lie with genetic engineering since the ones everyone is eating haven't been touched by the technology.

Thanks for the link though. It's a great resource.

Forgive me. I've been unclear.

Farmer A plants seeds with a GURT trait like Terminator (nevermind where he got it since the technology was never commericalized). Some small amount of contamination drifts out of his field and into the edge of farmer B's. Those few seeds obviously won't germinate. Farmer B is either forced to marginally increase his sowing density, or use seed from the center of his field, or the center of his property which has no contamination. Either is that great to farmer B (although most people who're preserving their own breeds of crops already use the center seed as pollen contamination has been an issue for centuries, not with GM but just producing mixed seeds (like mutts) that don't carry all the traits of the purebreed), but hardly constitute a threat to his livelihood. And most to get back to my point above, his own seed isn't contaminated with sterility or any such nonsense.

And as a consumer (not a farmer I'm afraid) I can't believe Judge White claims to be championing the right of consumers to choose whether or not to eat genetically modified beet by taking the choice completely of our hands. Once you take genetically modified sugar beets off the market, this is no choice it's either non-genetically modified (and therefore must be grown in ways that increase topsoil erosion and require herbicides that are more toxic to humans) sugar beets ... or other non-genetically modified sugar beets (that also must be grown in ways that increase topsoil erosion and require herbicides that are more toxic to humans).

Pollen drift had some risk of reducing choice slightly. A judicial order will end choice completely.

Agreed. Looking at the genome of say, rice, you can easily pick out some genes that are most closely related to genes in fungus than in other plants, and presumably arrived via horizontal gene transfer. Not a lot, but that's because most horizontally transfered genes serve no purpose out of context in such a different form of like and would be preserved or spread through the gene pool.

...and then the poor farmer's crops can't produce fertile seed, just like its parents. Wait, what? If farmer A's crop is sterile, how can it mate with farmer B's crop and produce more sterile in his field the next year? Seriously, that'd be like me saying "yeah, I'm completely sterile, I inherited it from my Dad."

Unless you happened to live in California for a few years in the 1990s you've never tasted a genetically modified tomato (and I understood they sold quite well during that time).

Unless you were at one point a grad student who engineered them yourself (or worked in a lab with someone who did) you've never tasted a GM strawberry.

If I'm wrong please point me toward where I can buy the GM seed for either of those.

For the record the only GM fruit or vegetable anyone will probably encounter right now would be a papaya from Hawaii engineered to resist papaya ring spot virus, as GM papayas were introduced after ring spot virus decimated the conventional papayas.

I don't think many people would disagree. But the solution isn't to ban genetically engineered crops it's to change the law so a farmer can only be sued if he or she can be proved to have known (or had the information to know if they'd cared to think about it) that their seed was actually carrying the trait, and also benefited from the trait (ie it's not like the farmer benefits at all from having beets resistant to a sepecific herbicide if they don't actually spay that herbicide, which would have killed their beets if they didn't contain the trait.)

Quite simply.

1. The technology was developed mostly because of environmental concerned about pollen drift. Farmers have been buying hybrid seed since the 1940s.

2. When the technology was announced, everyone hated it (as you well know). To the point where Monsanto hasn't actually sold a single seed containing the trait. I'm serious.

Find me a field of commercial (not research) corn or soybeans or cotton or anything else that'll produce nothing by sterile seeds and I'll eat my words. Until then stop spreading the misinformation that'll be mindlessly echoed by poor people like Starcub who trust you.

If the tribbles eat the hungry's grain, feed the tribbles to the hungry?

I wonder what the energy efficiency of the grain to tribble meat conversion is? Must be pretty good, after all they don't move around much, which would burn off calories.

In 1965ish there were 3.5 billion people and basically no food surplus. Today we're nearing 7 billion. If yield hadn't done up on existing agricultural land there'd be 3.5 billion people with nothing to eat (well not all at once since many of them would have starved before now), you can bet starving people would have cut down every tree they could lay their hands on. (Which would be pretty much everything but the Boral forests of Russia and Canada). Between keeping their family alive and saving a tree, no one is going to pick the tree. (The key is to keep it from coming to that choice)

Have you ever read about what happened on Easter Island? Bird colonies extinct. Reefs harvested of every large fish. Tree species driven to extinction which meant they couldn't build the boat they needed to fish farther out at sea, and finally turning on each other as starvation set in. Imagine that going on around the world.

Right now so many basic tools in molecular biology are still under patent. And the approval process for a GM crop is very expensive. Basically the only option crop biotech start-ups that actually develop something cool have is to license it to Monsanto or another couple of big players. No start up has the cash to license all the patents they've infringed and bring a crop all the way through the approval process to market themselves.

As patents expire and (hopefully) the approval process gets less onerous as it continues to be clear that GM crops are no more risky than conventional ones, the market will hopefully become more open to competition and address some of those concerns.

Agreed. As to who it is, I've heard the radio ad from chase at least half a dozen times out here.

Absolutely. The best book I ever read on the subject of what genetic engineering is and isn't is "Mendel in the Kitchen" by Nina Federoff. If that one seems a little too heavy on biology OR if you're already interested in organic agriculture I'd recommend Tomorrow's Table which was written an organic farmer and his wife who's a plant biologist at UC Davis.

The best article I ever read about Norman Borlaug himself and his contribution to the Green revolution wasthis one.

For a better grounding of the problems faced by both conventional ag and conventual organic, read the first two sections of Michael Pollen's the Omnivores Dilemma (you can read the other two sections of the book if you like too, they're just not as relevant). His science and stats are sometimes off, and I don't always agree with his conclusions but it's a fun read.

There was a BBC documentary that came out last fall called "Jimmy's GM Food Fight" which, if you can track a copy down did about as good a job as possible of summing up the issue in 60 minutes.

If you're more interested in the history of agriculture than the recent Organic vs Conventional vs GM split, there's a lot of good background in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Hope this is helpful. I can cite blogs as well, but it's harder to find ones that are informative rather than pushing an position. Good luck and I wish more people were interested in the subject!