This is an extremely hard problem. I've been following efforts to replace nitrogen for around forty years. It's part of a bigger trend of the seed industry grabbing a larger portion of the crop production dollar.
It's the science of GMO's. We've replaced some insecticides by letting the plants produce their own. We've eliminated some herbicides (weed sprays) by producing resistance in the plant to first Roundup and later other herbicides. It's truly one of the scientific miracles of the past thirty years.
Yet it has had strong opposition by the very people, organic advocates, that it benefits the most. This saddens me greatly. The very people who run around advocating 'listen to the scientists' on some issues, then selectively don't listen to them on others.
Not supporting Monsanto's business model isn't the same thing as not 'listen[ing] to scientists'.
The issues with blanket application of Glysophate combined with roundup resistant crops are real; application volumes have ballooned and we still don't have a scientific consensus on it's effects on humans. Ignoring, in the immediate, the potential health effects of the molecule, it is also a driving force in the expansion of monoculture techniques rather than more sustainable polycultures.
Monocultural key foodcrops are a long-tail risk to food security. The Irish potato famine, the lightning quick elimination of the Gros Michel clones, etc.
I won't get into the myriad legal issues surrounding Roundup, terminator seeds, etc. but they aren't theoretical either.
This isn't to say there's no benefit from Glyphosate application. It's to say opposition towards it is not driven by scientific illiteracy. Quite the opposite.
I was in the fertilizer business for twenty plus years. I went from Roundup's original introduction in the seventies to the beginnings of Roundup Ready seed. I kept a book in my office (as an EPA requirement) that allowed any employee or customer to view the safety of each chemical.
Roundup was way safer to humans than the cocktail of other herbicides that it replaced. It felt like considerable progress at the time although we all knew it would lead to Roundup resistant weeds in time.
From the beginning there was a small but loud opposition to GMO seeds. Some scientist, usually in Europe, would produce a report that Roundup causes cancer or such. Six different Midwestern universities would try to duplicate the research, fail and then publish exactly where the original researcher made a mistake.
I don't claim to be a scientist but as an interested observer I think that's how the scientific process should work. Now they've switched battlefields to the courts and gained several early victories. I predict they will be overturned on appeal.
I agree with you on monocultural crops. I think rotation should be encouraged but I'm not exactly sure how to do it. What I don't want to see is the government telling farmers what they can plant. They could provide financial incentives however if they can convince the taxpayers it's worth the price.
There's evidence Monsanto influenced the science behind the safety (or not) of Roundup [1], and even tried to manipulate public opinion of it online. [2]
> According to the court documents, Monsanto started the aptly-named ‘Let Nothing Go’ campaign, which plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Roundup litigation believe is part of the agrochemical giant’s tort defense strategy to work furiously outside the courtroom producing carefully-timed “literature” and regulatory decisions that could sway the court.
> The ‘Let Nothing Go’ campaign is designed to leave nothing posted on the internet about Monsanto, its products and GMOs, unanswered. This even applies to social media comments.
> “Through a series of third parties, it employs individuals who appear to have no connection to the industry, who in turn post positive comments on news articles and Facebook posts, defending Monsanto, its chemicals, and GMOs,” according to a motion in the Roundup MDL. But the idea that Monsanto paid internet trolls to disagree with negative comments about the company on social media is just the tip of the iceberg.
> An academic involved in writing research funded by Monsanto, John Acquavella, a former Monsanto employee, appeared to express discomfort with the process, writing in a 2015 email to a Monsanto executive, “I can’t be part of deceptive authorship on a presentation or publication.” He also said of the way the company was trying to present the authorship: “We call that ghost writing and it is unethical.”
That does not play a role in their decision. They are rotating to other subsidized crops as well. If their was a profitable 'other' crop, they would grow it. Commodities are tough
> Not supporting Monsanto's business model isn't the same thing as not 'listen[ing] to scientists'.
Monsanto is dead. Its assets were sold off to other players in the industry.
Further, the patents that brought disdain to the Monsanto of the past expired years ago. The business model that centred around those specific patents has not been a business model for quite some time. Even before those patents expired, it was not their business model anymore as the technology moved forward and those patents were no longer all that relevant.
> it is also a driving force in the expansion of monoculture techniques rather than more sustainable polycultures.
Yet, when I travel through the rural parts of the world, I see endless rows of rusted out row crop equipment that are older than the invention of Glyphosate itself. I am not convinced your timeline really fits.
> Monocultural key foodcrops are a long-tail risk to food security. The Irish potato famine
Another good example. The famine took place 129 years before Glyphosate was sold for agriculture use. Not to mention that it took another 22 years after that before the first roundup resistant crop made it to market.
We have scientific consensus on roundup. We have scientific consensus on vaccines as well. In both cases there are a few who ignore the evidence for political reasons and have found a way to play the media (follow the money - in most cases the big players are making a lot of money from something helped by the attack)
> Monocultural key foodcrops are a long-tail risk to food security.
Not really, there are many different varieties of corn, many different crops (wheat, rycorn, soy etc). And the problem you speak of actually hasn't much to do with monoculture
It's not so straightforward. Those with financial interests in the matter manipulate opinion and pay for lopsided science. That's why many globally and especially in the US still 'doubt' climate change. The evidence today is overwhelming but 20 years ago was still more muddled as Shell & co were funding biased studies, while experts and environmentalists were screaming for action and simply ignored. And still today there are media (in the US) telling their audience that it's not real, pointing to some pseudoscience to make this claim. Science is messy, can be biased and we have to rely on third parties to communicate it.
The same problem for nuclear: it's not self-contradictory to be eager for low-co2 energy and oppose nuclear due to its large-scale damage in case of an incident (and with Fukushima, 3Mile, Tchernobyl and various smaller incidents it's not like this is just theory).
It's similar with GMO: there are some studies showing risks and various GMO plants have been stopped due to concerns they could be harmful. Roundup is not exaxtly harmless but rather leaves ecological deserts behind - even if you are in favour of GMOs (like golden rice) you might still oppose some of them (like roundup ready plants), specifically because of doubts about the corporate-funded science by the agri-businesses behind them. Or you might oppose them on economic/social grounds, e.g. the practice of sterilising seeds which already has driven many farmers in level 1 and 2 (aka developing) countries into economic disaster.
Trust the science? Most environmentalists will agree. Trust the science funded by and the actual implementation by Monsanto? A much harder sell, akin to trusting BP's studies on climate and emissions.
it's not self-contradictory to be eager for low-co2 energy and oppose nuclear due to its large-scale damage in case of an incident (and with Fukushima, 3Mile, Tchernobyl and various smaller incidents it's not like this is just theory)
It is contradictory if one believes excess CO2 emissions cause global warming which may cause up to a billion people to become climate refugees in 2100 . A Chernobyl every year pales in comparison - the Chernobyl incident displaced 250-300k people. One every week for 50 years starts to come close.
Nuclear isn't out only option. Solar and wind are economically much more viable, and are safer (as in: they don't produce population displacing disasters, even if they might kill more people on average). Grid scale storage is becoming cheaper as well.
Of course the belief that nuclear will be replaced by solar and wind is a bit naive: in the short term it's replaced by coal and gas, and only in the medium term can we hope for better
An exclusive solar and wind power grid is not more economical viable than an exclusive nuclear power grid, as is daily proven be the absent of such grids being developed. A power grid that combines solar, wind and fossil fuels are more economical viable than a power grid made by nuclear plants, and thus this combination is today out competing nuclear by a wide margin. Grid scale storage technology may in the future make solar, wind and storage a more economical viable solution than nuclear but no such power grid exist to date.
The economic viability of any energy source is depending on how the composition of the energy grid. Economic comparison between two sources is generally meaningless without the context of the grid, especially supply and demand.
I find this post insightful generally but I don't think the last sentence was necessary. It is possible to be an organic advocate irrespective of "listening to the scientists" on this or any other topic. Constructing and attacking this straw man doesn't really add anything to your post.
I think it's true though. The opposition to GMO foods is typically reflexive and unthinking. It's not grounded in logic or science. That's not to say throw all caution to the wind, but I've yet to hear anyone make a sound argument in this case. And there are at least good arguments to be made on both sides referencing the existing literature.
Sure. But a lot of pro-GMO thinking is also quite glib ("we've modified crops for thousands of years so what's the problem?").
I think mostly what's behind anti-GMO attitudes is the fear of unknown and unintended consequences. We've seen a lot of those ever since technology has been invented and they do seem to have proliferated in the last couple of centuries. So, it's not unjustified, especially when messing with extremely complex and barely understood systems. It's the same for weather engineering, for example. Parable of the sorcerer's apprentice and all that...
You don't really have any idea where opposition to GMO foods originates. You guess that it is reflexive and unthinking because that is convenient for you to guess.
There are strong arguments against, not necessarily GMO as a technology, but practically all existing commercial uses of it. Furthermore, each use of it is potentially an independent problem with its own dangers. Thus far the only beneficial use of it I have heard of is "yellow rice", which is not actually available, for purely capitalistic reasons.
They're all beneficial or they wouldn't have gone to this stage.
Maybe you don't think the benefits outweigh the risks, and that's a valid question.
However, the concept obviously has tremendous potential. All the variety of life is after all genetics. Improvements in nitrogen uptake could save tremendous amounts of fertilizer and help the environment, for example.
Everything is beneficial to somebody. Opium distibution is beneficial to poppy farmers, CIA agents, and, earlier, to the British Empire. Roundup-resistant soybeans are beneficial to Bayer.
golden rice is not available because activists in courts have done everything they can to keep it unavailable. This isn't capitalism, other than capitalism will not throw good money after bad fighting things out in court.
I think GMO's are disliked not just because of gene editing, but the decidedly non-organic way that GMO's are typically grown. My understanding is that GMOs are typically used on industrial scale monocrop farms, with pesticides. So it gets tarnished by association.
I find that when you do find one of these people there is no depth to their thinking. They don't even know what GMO is, or why it's done, or why it's not so different from every other crop that was selectively bred for sometimes thousands of years.
And even when you do find someone who does they are making arguments like "the modified genes will break loose" ... which is absurd ... and that was a very smart individual, perhaps not where it comes to biology, but it's not like this requires much debt. (GMO is about transplanting genes, so any gene used has already "broken loose" before it is ever transplanted into any GMO crop).
The same accusation of shallowness can be leveled at the opposite camp. Including your comment.
Yes, GMO is a refinement of crop modification techniques humans have employed throughout history. So the argument is that since those were "good", this can't be otherwise. But it's not that simple, a lot of the consequences of these modifications are at a closer inspection not that beningn. For example, the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural ones came with severe detrimental impact on the health of those populations.
There is such a thing as something being more or less natural, that's why we have this concept. It's just that it's not easy at all to formalize. Maybe even impossible. But it won't go away, because it actually correlates to an essential aspect of reality.
>GMO is about transplanting genes, so any gene used has already "broken loose" before it is ever transplanted into any GMO crop
you can however transplant genes across species, which just doesn't happen in nature. The fear that these improved crops would outcompete native grasses outside the farm wouldn't be unjustified if it weren't for Monsanto doing everything they can to prevent farmers from replanting their harvest.
Gene transplantation across species does occur in nature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfers). Apparently our genome contains traces of viral DNA, and species of bacteria can swap genes using plasmids.
While that's correct, it doesn't alleviate any of the fears. Virus->Something transfer isn't relevant unless Anything->Virus transfer is also common (which doesn't appear to be the case?). Plant->Plant or Bacteria->Plant transfer are really the ones relevant to GMOs, and neither seem to be common. So we really can't say that genetic modification is just like what nature does, except for uncommon edge cases.
I'm no expert here but from what I've read bacteria can be used as vectors in genetic engineering. I think this is an important point to mention since GMOs are sometimes seen as playing god, while I'm not sure if they are really so different from traditional selective breeding techniques. In the end, we should evaluate these techniques based on how safe they are, rather than thinking about "naturalness".
Whilst this is recent enough knowledge to not be included in what most people here would have learned in high school, we have found many genes that have been transplanted laterally. We are technically not sure this was by viruses (perhaps it was by bacteria or even somehow directly).
Genes do spread without procreation. This is a certainty at this point.
This is the sort of scientific illiteracy and ignorance masquerading as "reasoned response" that makes this whole exercise futile. Literally NOTHING in your comment was true. Not one single bit of it.
It's often the other way. The GMO doesn't need to be sprayed with pesticides. That is the case with Bt corn for example. Bt corn has a protein that stops caterpillars from eating.
Organic stuff is normally grown on industrial scale monocrop farms, with pesticides. Yes, really. All sorts of toxic pesticides are on the list of chemicals permitted for organic labeled foods. Many of them are worse. Go read the list if you doubt this. Simply put, "organic" is a marketing ploy, and the certification is a racket.
Yes ,@knaq is correct. Organic production systems _do_ spray chemicals and oftentimes those chemicals are clearly more dangerous than the chemical applied to modified crops.
Its been mentioned in this thread but Roundup is actually safe compared a whole host of chemicals we were spraying in the <1970s. There is currently not a world where crop production doesn't use herbicides (but it is coming thanks to drones and autonomous robots that can manually remove weeds)
What I tell people that are railing against Roundup ready crops and other GM crops is this: say we decide to stop using these types of crops today--pick the millions of people that get to starve in the upcoming year. Just point to an Indian state or an African country and say 'those people get to starve' and we'll stop using GM crops.
That's just because we didn't drive the pests to extinction and we didn't make the massive long-term investment in greenhouses. Had we done either, all-natural crops would be able to feed the world.
> We've replaced some insecticides by letting the plants produce their own.
So, you traded insecticide application to it being pre-aplied into the plants. That isn't reducing the amount of them out there.
Yes, there are some gains, like in there being no environmental contamination due to the application. There are also some losses, like in there being long-term environmental application due to contaminated bio-matter.
> We've eliminated some herbicides (weed sprays) by producing resistance in the plant to first Roundup and later other herbicides.
No we didn't. We traded larger amounts of less effective herbicides into lower amounts of incredibly effective ones.
On both cases, there are plenty of details, gains and loses that could be weighted in a public argument and settled down into policy. But the fact is that Monsanto didn't want public arguments, so they got their goals written into laws by the dirtiest possible procedures (really, on my country the entire legislative process was completely illegal) and got the public argument shut down with claims of it being "anti-science" or similar things. Those are not markers of socially positive actors.
Insecticides and herbicides are famously trouble for stomach bacteria, among many other things.
And yet that's getting ignored here...
Making the plants produce them directly just makes the plants a lot less safe for human consumption.
(I've a bunch of related allergies and intolerances and am tired of the IBS and pain related)
I don’t see how burning huge rainforest areas for monoculture corn plantations that now produce part of the insecticides that you use on their own and that you use tons of herbicides on to keep everything else out is in any way leading to more sustainability.
Is it a strawman though? It's all tied together, the fixation with using our technological prowess to increase yield at all costs leads to these types of solutions: monocultures, GMO crops, weather engineering. Even though our understanding of the "solutions" is many times ridiculously poor. But it seems to work... somehow... for now. And by "work", what's meant is that it maximizes a metric which is ultimally chosen to maximize the wealth of an economic agent. It's what got us into this climatic bind. We need to take a step back and look at the root of the problem.
Yes. Correct. Thank you @evgen. Brazil == soybeans mostly. Those slashed rainforest acres are being chopped with safrinha corn in mind. Those statements by the parent are an easy filter to someone not knowledgeable
Very exciting. As an outsider looking into the world of academic science, though, I am genuinely curious as to what about this paper took 13 years? The article mentions research by the team began in 2005, and only finished in 2018. Was it just the time needed to watch multiple generations of the corn grow? Anywho, fascinating stuff.
There's a better way to add nitrogen to soil and it's through the nitrogen cycle. The US Midwest (which grows a lot of corn) used to be highly populated with ruminants who did exactly this.
We killed them all (well, most) and now grow corn which we use most to finish off cattle, which is also a ruminant.
Maybe a better solution would be to feed the ruminants off the land now used by the corn? Imagine what that might do.
This IS a nitrogen cycle. Sure it would be great to utilize waste nitrogen as well but that doesn't take away from this.
Btw this is how lagumes fix nitrogen. This nothing new but since it is already in maze it can probably be crossbred into production corn lines without that toxic GMO label.
This would seem like a good candidate for regular old cross-breeding.
People in the past would select which seeds and plants to cross breed by hand.
You could imagine an automated system which could cross breed 1 billion (1e9) plants at once by using cameras and ML techniques looking for good traits on each plant, using just 3% of US farmland. It doesn't need perfection - a 10% error rate simply requires 10% more plants, so it's a perfect application of ML.
The same plants you're using for breeding can still be producing sellable corn, so the cost of this selective breeding program on a per-plant basis is nearly zero.
These days people are doing selective breeding by simply sequencing genes. It can produce the same results as transplanting genes in a matter of months for a lot of plants (because they don't use normal procreation).
It's not cheaper or faster.
And of course, now there's a massive debate whether this is GMO or not.
It does. This landrace grows in areas receiving high rainfall, and with high ambient humidity -- and in my experience it only produces the mucus in those conditions, which sadly is likely to limit its potential, at least without very significant extra breeding work.
I've skimmed this and will dig further (it's certainly interesting stuff) but one alternative needs considering is that it's there to attract animals which somehow leave nitrogen by other means - perhaps droppings? Or that eave offal? or are killed by other carnivores? Something else?
This seems like it would lose an appreciable amount of water, but perhaps not nearly as much as transpiration. But in most places water is a cheaper input than nitrogen.
I mean, why can't we live on sunlight, or purely on carbohydrates and trace elements? Organisms evolve for their environments; if something in your diet or the environment is producing enough of (whatever) for your needs, there's not much evolutionary pressure to produce it yourself. Or even keep the machinery for producing it in working order, if you have it.
Vitamins are a good example, we need them, but we don't produce them (except for D, but there are practical problems producing that in the environments and latitudes in which humans now live).
Apparently it is not making nitrogen at all, but splitting aerial nitrogen and binding it into bigger molecules.
Making nitrogen would be an impressive achievement for anybody, never mind a plant. Probably easiest is to make a lot of hydrocarbons with deuterium substituted for the regular hydrogen, and pack that around a source of free neutrons. The neutrons would lose energy to the deuteriums, and end up slow enough to be absorbed by the carbon nuclei, which would become nitrogen after a few steps. Also the deuterium would become tritium and then helium. Plants probably could concentrate deuterium. Where plants would get free neutrons is a poser; some plants will concentrate radionuclides from soil...
But of course there's already plenty of nitrogen in the air.
It's the science of GMO's. We've replaced some insecticides by letting the plants produce their own. We've eliminated some herbicides (weed sprays) by producing resistance in the plant to first Roundup and later other herbicides. It's truly one of the scientific miracles of the past thirty years.
Yet it has had strong opposition by the very people, organic advocates, that it benefits the most. This saddens me greatly. The very people who run around advocating 'listen to the scientists' on some issues, then selectively don't listen to them on others.