| joeatdawn - 2/8/2014 20:47
I actually think we may end up in a world with organic plus GMO farming but I digress
I actually hope this will happen, but it probably won't until these GMOs are engineered by public ag universities for some real helpful purpose instead of by Monsanto... ;)
Organic farmers could really use some of this technology since their arsenal of pesticides is limited. Say we for instance identify a natural stem rust resistance gene in Australian wheat. African subsistance farming wheat is currently decimated by this disease in some places. Why would you cross Australian wheat with a local wheat adapted to African soil and climate just for this one gene, and then regress the other undesired traits through many years of further selection, when you could just insert the stem rust resistance gene into the African variety?
I am sure I am simplifying, and there are other ways to fight stem rust than a resistance gene, but I don't see why organics and GMOs are incompatible. The genetic engineering technique itself is safe and neutral, it's what you do with it and how you do it that creates and justifies the debate.
I will pose one thought experiment. If you could genetically engineer cover crops that would be much easier to mechanically kill, and integrated them into an organic system using no other chemicals etc, would that still be organic?
I think this particular example would be just as short-term as the R/R crops that introduced herbicide resistant weeds. It would cross-pollinate in the wild, with unpredictable consequences. It might even introduce the fragility trait into cultivated crops. I would much prefer a mechanical robotic weeder: No chemicals, no herbicide resistance, no labor intensive weeding and no extra labor cost, no soil compaction if the device is light enough. The hardware is also extremely simple to design and has been around for many centuries, the complexity resides mostly in the software, which is usually cheap. Cameras for the weed/crop ID add to the cost, but not that much. The biggest challenge is the power source. Probably has to be electrical and "green" for sustainability, maybe a solar charging station.
But drought or pest resistance seem to be logical traits that would be welcome in organics. I also think organic farming is more likely to drive increased flavor, nutrition and colors, because that's what they tend to grow already, although this happened via natural selection so far. For instance, there's probably a lot more organic than non-organic vegans, so you could imagine that wheat or some other crops could be engineered to produce the B12 vitamin, the only one that vegans lack, unless they gorge on seaweed! ;) |
Organic/non-gmo farming
