Re: GMO Discussion

It's not quite that simple and I myself don't know all the complexities in seed production.  However, I do know that seed developing companies actually get a patent on their seed and this has been going on since at least 1930 when congress approved the process, decades before GMO.  

It is my understanding that corn has special pollination requirements (which I can't spell out) which prevent a farmer from easily producing his/her own seed for next year's crop.  That's where large seed companies have come in and created the means to do that, producing a certified seed which a farmer can't do, due to cross field pollination and other problems.  In so doing they are providing a service that almost requires a farmer to use.  Between the patents and the pollination problem, and with government help, it is easy to see how they can take advantage of price gouging and manipulation of the market.

All seeds that farmers use have been highly hybridized.  That began almost as soon as man invented agriculture.  "Landrace" corn (original wild corn) had ears that were very small and native Americans hybridized it to produce larger ears.  Landrace seed generally has characteristics that make them very hardy and resistant to disease, but most of the time they are not commercially productive.  Hybrids are very productive but, susceptible to disease.  Added to that, the longer a hybrid seed is used (crop after crop) the more that diseases mutate and are able to penetrate the resistance that the hybrid variety originally had.  That's the reason for continuous hybridization, and of course the driving force behind GMO.

Just as an aside.  I live in Tacoma Washington.  Ezra Meeker an early pioneer to the area in the 1800s, made millions of dollars in my county but growing hops.  That lasted for about three or four years until a disease killed all the hops.  To this day, hops cannot be grown in Western Washington because of disease.  Also, Eastern Washington has produced large quantities of mint, used in candy making in particular, and it too was hit with a disease that has all but wiped out the ability to grow it in our state.  Disease in farming is well known to farmers, but little known to the general public.

I did work for four years in the wheat fields of Eastern Washington so I know that a little better than corn.  When I worked wheat harvest in the early 1950s, a wheat variety had a useful life span of about three years.  After that it became susceptible to disease.  In Eastern Washington it was called "rust" - a disease that actually looked like rust and covered a good deal of the shaft and head.  The rust not only cut down on the quantity of the finished product, but if you harvested it and used a portion for next years crop, you were just asking for trouble.  In Washington State our state university works full time producing new hybrid wheat and provides the farmer (at a cost) the resulting disease resistant seed.  They are doing what the seed companies are doing in the Midwest.  WSU is doing this constantly.  If they didn't, the farmers would soon be out of the wheat business.

The three year life period for wheat was in the 1950s.  I got to know an individual who worked for WSU in their experimental station, a very large farm creating new hybridized wheat and other things, who said that now, the life span of the new wheats are about eight years, (without GMO) compared to the three years of the earlier era.

Keep in mind that potatoes have a natural "bug" inhibitor in even the landrace varieties.  The potato has been hybridized to the point that this element is at a high enough level to kill potato bugs and other predators.  This is without GMO, and has been the case for decades.  The USDA has set a limit on how high they can breed this killer into it and farmers have been fined for taking it beyond its limits.  Most people don't know about that one either.

About 15 years ago National Geographic Magazine devoted an entire issue to landrace seed.  They are extremely important in case of disaster, or, if we get to the point where hybridizing no longer limits plant disease.  There are scientists who are doing their best to stockpile landrace seeds, and even today there are new landrace varieties being discovered on occasion.  However National Geographic pointed out some simple facts.  Farmers in India used to plant well over 150 different varieties of rice and are currently down to only about a dozen or less.  This means that if these seeds go bad we have nothing to fall back on.

It is a complex problem and I personally believe that GMO is not a part of the solution.

"its part of the plan of big agri-chemical corps to own our food supply. anyone can plant, harvest, and sell corn and soy beans, etc. but once its been genetically modified, it is now "owned" by the company that holds the patent. once these GMO crops contaminate all the crops on earth (via cross pollination due to wind and animals and other natural forces), these corporations will sue anyone who plants crops but doensn't pay a liscensing fee.

its part of the urge to control, to possess, and to profit.

i do not think they will succeed."