We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide.
To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections.
We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.
>We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all
Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus).
As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational.
Genetically manipulating our food sources has precisely no effect on the outcome other than the patent encumber the food we eat.
There is no evidence whatsoever on this planet to the contrary. I've dug through EVERY damn academic paper in the last 15 years and found nothing independent, unbiased and not in the pockets of corporations with self-interest at heart. Take the Cornell paper - half the academic staff have part time positions with Monsanto...
To be honest, 99%+ of the crap I've read are like Microsoft writing white papers comparing SQL Server to MySQL.
Find me a paper that isn't sponsored by industry shills or academic shills funded by industry that says otherwise.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a topic of faith, not science.
Technology can and should aid us, but education is far more important.
As for 9 out of 10, I'd rather they were growing food than shoveling high fructose corn syrup into fat Americans in fast food chains...
Here's a simple test to see if genetic modification does anything: buy seeds for one crop (e.g. soybeans) in both "Roundup-ready" and non-modified varieties. Plant both varieties and let them grow. Spray Roundup on both; see which one dies.
I'd like to point out that it's also a false dichotomy that we have to switch back to "archaic" modes "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" or embrace GMO. We can still use modern machinery, we can still use our knowledge of alternative pesticides (such as introducing a natural predator of a certain pest), we can still use proper irrigation and crop rotation, we can still use proper greenhouses. Even without modern "industrial" methods, farming has come a long way in the past 150 years compared to it's multi-thousand year history.
edit: I'd also like to point out that cross-breeding seeds with desirable properties (as farmers have done for thousands of years) is also "genetic modification" in some sense, but at a slower and controlled pace, with a large timeframe to observe potential unwanted side effects.
That's as much a straw man as Monsanto is to GMO. Just because some attempts failed doesn't mean it doesn't work.
And besides, that's not even the only way to control pests. Neither do we have to not use pesticides, anyway. That is just one example of how farming tech has improved.
Roundup is a herbicide. There some problems with it:
1. Some plant life has developed natural resistance to it so it's not going to last forever. At that point, the non-roundup supported ecosystem will be dead so there will suddenly be a fallout from using it.
2. The surfactant it's mixed with is toxic to humans and wildlife so you're going to kill everything with the run off and poison the water supplies all over the place.
It's a shitty solution to the problem.
GMO will feed idiots for a profit for a few years and kill the rest of us.
I'm not really against hybrids, but I'm also not sure how much of this is a hard resource limit versus a current economic one. In the latter case, there's considerable headroom for production to ramp up if economic realities made it viable to do so (e.g. if domestic food prices returned closer to 1980s levels). There's a lot of former cropland that's currently fallow in the U.S. because we don't actually need it; prices for staple crops have been driven so low by oversupply that it's just not commercially viable to farm a large portion of formerly farmed land.
Considering first the US alone: given surplus production and low utilization of potential resources means efficient use of existing resources. This is empirically validated by US farm output growing 1.63% annually from 1948 to 2009; input use over the same time grew only 0.11% [1]. Using less land for farming is logistically and ecologically sound.
Expanding to the world, why are low income countries, in aggregate, exporting agricultural products (but not raw foods) while the local population starves [2]? I do not understand the nuances of the global grocery supply chain to answer this definitively but my background in finance intuits me to believe it is a distribution rather than agriculture problem - witness how "it costs more to truck a container from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, than to ship the same container from China to Djibouti" [3].
To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections.
We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.