My wife and I plant alot of saved seeds, others come from peaceful valley, pinetree, or seeds of change. The strawberries you speak of are a perfect example of the trash that they call fruits and veggies at the super markets. Remember how strawberries used to have aroma, a sweet taste and a wonderful flavor. Now it's only about the size. Ya might as well pop a piece of styrofoam in your mouth. The ones we grow are about the size of the end of a man's thumb and are filled with the old time qualities.
My wife and I plant alot of saved seeds, others come from peaceful valley, pinetree, or seeds of change. The strawberries you speak of are a perfect example of the trash that they call fruits and veggies at the super markets. Remember how strawberries used to have aroma, a sweet taste and a wonderful flavor. Now it's only about the size. Ya might as well pop a piece of styrofoam in your mouth. The ones we grow are about the size of the end of a man's thumb and are filled with the old time qualities.
monsanto sucks!!!! they have tried to put decorah.iowa seed savers exchange out of business..they have also put the squeeze on many smaller seed corn co's,,and bought em out..one was 1 mile west of town here..no longer in existence....they want to control all the seeds of the world..........
My wife and I plant alot of saved seeds,
It's more then a bit disengenous talking about 100 bushel corn on 20" of rain being needed to feed a world...when we already produce so much of the damn stuff we force-feed it to our cars to get rid of it.
Glyphosate breaks down in days when it touches the soil.
The newest thing they are working on is getting a GMO that is drought resistant and can produce 100+ bushel corn in areas that see less than 20 inches of rainfall a year. Think about how that could help lessen the world's hunger problem and free up previously unusable farmland.
Agreed.
Only if it falls on bare soil. The fact that it breaks down faster than other herbicides doesn't mean it's safe.
Nothing in the world is "safe". With that argument, more people die from water than from glyphosate, I'm sure you would agree.
No one is fixing the world's hunger problem until we fix the issue of food waste in the USA. We waste 40-50% of what we grow (a small portion of that is expected, obviously), yet we want to "feed the world"? Ain't happening, not by a long shot. And we overproduce enough as it is.
I agree, less waste throughout the production of food, distribution, and consumption would be great. We don't get up in the morning at 4:00 am ready to end world hunger, I can assure you. They get up to make money off their labor, just like yourself and everyone else on this forum.
That "unusable" land you're speaking of is better left as grassland for grazing, open space, hunting and fishing, or for "perennializing" current industrial farming - perennial crops with the yields of annuals. It'll happen. People just need to stop being so economically and environmentally myopic. You know, like feeding the world.
What perennial crop are you talking about exactly? Grass for hay? You do know that hay is the most widely harvested crop that is already in production, right? More "unusable" acres in America are devoted to hay than any other crop. Grass is a versatile, indigenous plant that grows well in many areas and can do well in poorer soils that can't support row crops.
I'm gonna level with you guys on this. Farmers have to grow more food in the next 50-100 years than has EVER BEEN GROWN since the dawn of agriculture. We have close to 9 BILLION people on this planet and its growing exponentially. Glyphosate, Atrazine, BT crops, etc etc aren't the biggest problem we all are facing right now. It's declining water supplies, above and below ground. The Ogallala aquifer is declining rapidly out near us. Most of the water is pumped out of it to supply central pivot irrigation to the crops in the southern plains of Texas and Oklahoma. Look at Google satellite maps and see how many there are. Drive through the Texas panhandle and see the green fields of wheat and sorghum then look at how nothing is growing in the dry ditches along the road. How are we going to tell the next generation that live out there that they won't have any water because we need it to grow hog feed today?
That amount of land can't go back to grazing, unless you want a tremendous backlash in the prices of food. It simply is too much land already in production that the market has priced ourselves into a corner. The spot price of corn today is dependent on the future supplies coming into production. Would people benefit from having a GMO that can produce the same yield in dryland farming than in irrigated fields? Of course they would. The purpose of GMO traits isn't solely to produce MORE food, its purpose is to produce more or the same amount using less resources and dangerous chemicals, which in turn save money and the planet. Are they 100% perfect? I'm not saying that they are, we are still testing long term effects. But on the same hand they haven't been proven to be dangerous through countless tests for years. If they come out tomorrow and say that GMO causes kidney failure or something, then ABSOLUTELY, I wouldn't grow them.
What I am saying is that we don't have many options with this expanding population to be throwing good technology out the window, for no other reason that we just don't understand it. People in the 1600's would burn medicine men at the stake for sorcery if they came up with some healing potion that actually worked.
As a corn farmer here in Texas for 36 years, I believe I've said all I need to say on the topic. If you still disagree and think Monsanto is the worst company on the planet then that's your problem. Barring some unforeseen event, GMO's are here to stay, so you might as well get used to it, maybe even learn a little more about it. I for one have no problem with their products and I enjoyed some of our first Bt , Round-up Ready sweet corn of the season last night and it was delicious. It was a joy to pick pesticide free corn in a completely weed free field.
You proved my point. I'll expound below.
Humans don't eat hay. I'm talking about grain crops that have been hybridized with perennial grasses - this gives us the yield of grains but the root system of perennial grasses (this is exactly what they mean when they talk about getting to the "root" of the 10,000 year old farming problem). Those crops aren't fully here yet, but they will be. Annual crops are headed for the wayside in the coming decades, and good riddance, they do nothing for soil fertility. Yes, I'm aware of soybeans and their ability to fixate nitrogen - but that won't fix the problem of bare soil.
And on the subject of the Ogallala Aquifer, it is well established in many circles that a good sized portion of it are going to lose all their water within the next 50 years if they keep farming as they are now. Better start dryland farming today, with every other row held in place by perennial native grass. Annual crops are a huge part of the reason for the decline in soil fertility in the Great Plains - adding fertilizer is just a cute little band aid. And if you want clean water, that is able to get back into the Aquifer, you would be wise to unfarm and plant more grassland - it is perennial, native grasslands that cleans our water and recharges the aquifers - cropfields do not. Which is more important, yields of crops and cash in hand, or stabilizing the water supply of the Aquifer?
Every summer I drive through the Panhandle of TX on my way to cooler climes and I see those crop circles, those big fancy pivot irrigators, and all that water gettin' blown away by the West Texas wind. Common sense tells me, if somebody has to artificially water what they are growing, and on such a landscape scale, they probably shouldn't be growing that in the first place. Water is way more important than cash crops. What else do I see? Bare soil. All those planted windbreaks and crop residue (in which there's still bare soil showing) are just band aids for looming and larger problems. The Dust Bowl will repeat itself and only a fool will think it won't, because most of the Great Plains, the Southern parts especially, are only going to get drier in the coming decades. Healthy grasslands are the only option for saving the Ogalalla Aquifer - that plant community is adapted to the harsh climate of the Great Plains, it has 12,000+ years of evolutionary history there and it rightfully belongs there. Leave the farming to the more mesic areas in the East.
As an added note on groundwater depletion, in my home county in Texas, oil companies pulled 1.8 billion gallons of groundwater out of the Trinity Aquifer in 2012 for the sole purpose of well fracturing. That's something else that needs to change, too. Once it's mixed with those nasty fracturing chemicals, that water is useless. And it was perfectly good to begin with.
“The trouble with water – and there is trouble with water – is that they’re not making any more of it. They’re not making any less, mind you, but no more either. [...] People, however, they are making more of, many more – far more than is ecologically sensible – and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives, for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly, their industry. Humans can live for a month without food but will die in less than a week without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and relentlessly change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences; too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.” – Marq de Villers
Industrial farming has an ego problem, basically. They think the more they produce, the less hungry people there will be. Kinda like praying, not really helping but thinking that you are. Again, with 40-50% of the annual US food crops wasted, no American farmer is making a dent on world hunger. So, if they are so concerned about the subject, why don't they volunteer their time or money and go to those places? Don't get me wrong, I'm not against farming, especially the small healthy-soil oriented family farms - they're the ones that give farming a good public image. But industrial farming? Meh. They can keep shooting themselves in the foot and ask for more subsidies.
“The human gluttony gene, bolstered by the very real images of starving Africans, pushes us to grow tons more food than the world economic system can absorb or deliver. Federal farm policy, out of fear of hunger and of the farm lobby, continues to encourage overproduction through subsidies and support programs. The significant irony is that the scientific term for the stuff that is killing the Gulf of Mexico is “nutrients”—fertilizer that feeds the growth of microorganisms in water, whose dead bodies poison the ocean downriver. And it is the overproduction of food, the staff of life, that actually threatens the life and health of our planet.” — George B. Pyle
You can't just harvest and pull nutrients out of the field and put nothing back in year after year.
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