I own a dry land farm in Southwest Oklahoma. I don't like the price of GM or Hybrid seed but I sure pay it every time. I need less fertilizer, fuel, insecticide, water and herbicide than with public domain seed. The patents on seed don't last forever and they will still be good in coming years as they are rotated to preserve the patents and to stay ahead in the arms race between insects, weeds and GM plants. Twenty or thirty years form now the GM genetics we use now will be useful again as the pest will have lost most of the resistance the developed to them.
If you look on the drought monitor http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ there is a dark red spot in Oklahoma that been there for years. My place is in the middle of that. Some years have been a bust but the fellow that farms it has harvested the best crop of both cotton and wheat off it ever made in the last 5 years on an unbelievably small amount of rain.
The only thing different is being able to farm it no till due to GM Cotton in rotation with conventional bred alfalfa hay and Hard Red Winter wheat. He kept what little moisture he had by not disturbing the soil. My family has farmed that place for right at 100 years with better average yields almost every year until the last 7 year drought. It will make that up when the drought breaks as they always do. I've been though 3 and my family has been thou 9 and 2 really bad weather events. My grandfather was very impressed by his grand fathers stories of the Year with out a summer. My great grand mother's stories of the winters of 1885-1886 and 1886-1887 when 75% to 80% of the cattle on the range in the USA froze to death in the "Great Dieup" kept the winter of 1899 from killing even more cattle when Galveston Bay froze over in a 5 day cold spell at 9 degrees F.
I'll take modern farming thank you as the world was on the edge of starvation using organic methods in 1900 before the Fritz Haber invented an efficient way to make ammonia from natural gas and electricity.
Red