Lloyd

Thanks for the comment "You decide if decomposing plants that are more resistant to pests are bad for your compost pile." maybe that's the main point to think about.

I am feeding some hogs out and wanted organic feed for both food security and soil security in the compost. At least until I find out otherwise, I am going to pursue organic feeds so my concerns for the soil are lessened. But it costs more and is a bit of a hassle so would stay with traditional (now gmo)feeds if I could only know : )

Lloyd

Now keep calm and compost on!

The fancy schmancy genetics part of it is this: They know what part of the genome will make a perennial grass in the wheat family. They are running DNA analysis on the seedlings from the hybridization to identify those that have the selected traits. Instead of tediously growing them out to see what's there, they can snip off a leaf and look at the genetic makeup.

Those that have the right stuff get kept and hybridized again. Those that don't can be culled very early.

Nothing like being up to date.

Lloyd

;-)

horster, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to Franken-gene it once they come up with a successful production strain.

I thought though that the controlled burns were a good thing. Up here without them those red "cedars" keep taking over. They are nice in windbreaks and for some other applications, but not choking out all other types of vegetation.

I'm not saying one way or the other, but I have two observations on this.

1) The brief comment above about GM living matter being made out of the same building blocks as anything else, and therefore just as biodegradable, was something I was going to say myself. I'm not too worried about different DNA or proteins put into my compost somehow affecting MY health directly.

2) Do we really know that there are NO unusual chemicals produced in these plants that may negatively affect the soil food web? Someone else said it was a grand experiment and that we haven't really studied its effects on the planet. With respect to the soil food web I would bet this is true.

So, I don't know that the sky is falling, but I have concerns.

"No one really knows whether GMOs are safe or not -- so little work has been done on this and even less has been released to the public."

The fact that the technology is untested, but so widely adopted, is at best unsettling. Perhaps you haven't any progeny about whose future you're concerned, or perhaps profits trump ethics in your world view, but I prefer a prudent ideological approach to the pronouncements of an organization that is soundly anchored in the biotech world.

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana 1905

"There are none so blind as those who will not see."
attributed to Thomas Chalkley, 1713

Though the original purpose of the FDA may have had to do with safeguarding the food supply, now its principal purpose appears to be safeguarding the profits of pharmaceutical and food companies. Otherwise, how could all these drugs, food additives, and "foods" be labeled safe for human consumption without long-term testing?

Monosodium glutamate, aspartame, red dye #40, hydrogenated fats, olestra--all have known problems that they create in the human body, ranging from allergies and sensitivities to damaging the cardiovascular system. Personally, I have quick unpleasant reactions to the first three (ranging from hives to vomiting and metabolic upset)--the latter do long-term damage. All have biologically REAL counterparts that they replaced, but the chemical creation is cheaper to produce and usually stores far longer than the natural version, so it can processed and stocked on grocery shelves. It's not that those in the know don't understand--it's the MONEY.

Often the best way to understand what is really going on in a fubar situation is to follow the money.

Just a guess.

Lloyd

Perhaps 100,000 people a year die to approved drugs... misuse and such. How many reported deaths from supplements...about zero if you exclude a few diet pill abuses. Yet the FDA and cohorts want to circumvent health freedom...dastardly.

Oh, thanks for the abstract link, always helpful to know where some of this stuff actually comes from.

Oh BTW, is this the 50s, kinda sounds like it, there's a communist hiding around every corner, AAAAHHH! Take a GMO-free chill pill maybe.

In 1970, we were less than four billion.

Now, forty years later, we are seven billion.

Kansas and Nebraska regularly go to court to fight over water rights because of Nebraska's use of water out of the Republican river to irrigate cornfields.

Why do we need to grow so much corn? Because without food, people fall over dead. (Thus saith my water resources engineering professor.)

Resource pressure is also part of the driver for the GMO crops. Lesser of two evils (perhaps) to tinker with the genes to make the corn produce its own Bt and make it resistant to glyphosate than let people starve. We don't know the long-term effects, but we know the short-term effects if people don't eat.

I don't know how this will all play out. I really worry about our futures, long-term, and about the future of my daughter. We have our own little patch of earth where I grow as much of our own veggies as I can, and we have chickens (that eat commercial feed) to produce our own eggs. But what will happen as we keep growing?

EPA can't just wake up one morning and decide to change the regime of tests that have to be done to prove a pesticide is 'safe' before it can be marketed. It would require, at most, federal legislation; at the very least, rulemaking (i.e. revising or making new regulations within the current statutes or laws). Even rulemaking is a heavily political process and is not done in a vacuum by the agency.

I'm not defending them, just suggesting that regulation is a slow process and subject to politics. So if the current rules do not require that a GM plant be evaluated for whether its proteins affect the soil food web, it's gonna be awhile before that's seriously considered or implemented, even if the agency agrees and tries to pursue it.

Regulation lags behind science and industry for this reason. They invent something new and the existing regs don't consider its potential issues.

All actions have consequences, it just seems that society has developed an element that, while noble in intent, is going astray in a counter-productive way.

Ralleia: you can add CO to the states list. Bonnnie reservoir in CO along the KS/NE border is being dismantled over the stink. Bonnie is a rather small lake and hardly seems significant but by god somebody sure wants those few gallons, too bad for the migrating waterfowl and lots of other critters in an otherwise dry place.

Most of that corn grown from those irrigated areas is going to ethanol plants, some of it goes to feed animals, none of it is used to feed people directly.

I've noticed that the Republican is definitely running more water than it used to since the pumping restrictions began, no surprise there really.

Without a doubt, world pop. is a huge issue, my solution is simple yet elegant but extremely difficult..... breed the human race to be about 3' tall. Just think of it, we already know how to do the science and if everyone was 3' tall we'd need about 1/2 the resources, housing, food, fuel, etc.. Guess I'd have to be one of the first to go, unfortunately being near 6' tall :-(

The crop residues don't concern me in and of themselves. Crop parts definitely entering the food chain, I haven't yet seen any rigorous research indicating a definitive cause for alarm.

Bottom line for me, I am not opposed to the research, any more than I am to cold fusion, the Large Hadron Collider, space exploration, or any number of other highly technological and potentially dangerous technologies, but it seems to me fundamentally unethical to introduce those technologies to a broad segment of the population without rigorous safeguards and the broadest transparency, and that is most definitely not the case with food-related GMOs. I believe it is in our nature as humans to explore, but it is in very few of those explorations, GMO research being one of them, that we willingly take our children along for the ride.

I am a bit perplexed at the apparent lack of university research and/or even private research put into the soil side of this issue. Obviously, the major players don't consider it an issue, either they don't want to deal with it or have looked into it on some level and don't care to release their findings for any of a host of possible reasons.

With the state of things in Europe, it is interesting to find a relatively tiny amount of research into the food side of things.

It doesn't surprise me to find many people concerned about things that are new and not understood to them, it's part of the human genome I think. Way, way back in human history people probably reacted by creating superstitions and folk lore about things they didn't understand, that help them live with those things. A lot of people were pretty scared of the steam engine when it first came on the scene.

Really, I'm not trying to poo-poo your's and other's concerns about the GMOs, just trying to step way back and look at them in an attempt to discern if a problem really exists. No doubt we'd agree, if there is a problem, it would be far better to know it now than way down the road, kinda like P caused eutrophication in bodies of water.

Yeah, Monsanto's legal tactics make me furious, what a miscarriage of justice.

I've enjoyed reading your posts.