29 Nov 2004
Study finds benefits in GM crops

How depressing ... no, not the study, or even it's results, which are perfectly valid. It's just that the scientific community is missing the point: again.

Why would they test a hypothesis that GM crops would reduce weed diversity? Spraying herbicides reduces weeds - not GM crops, although the latter will allow the former to be used in greater strength/quantity. I'd never heard of this concern about GM crops.

The problem with GM crops isn't that they produce poison food, either. That's been pretty conclusively proven. The problem is cross contamination - and this has been conclusively demonstrated in court, of all places. It's not rocket science, it's simple common sense. Once GM crops become the norm, they take over by default. How their success will effect future crops of non-GM'd seed is anybody's guess: but you can bet that the companies responsible for them will be there enforcing their "intellectual property".

Another thing you can count on: when the twenty year patent on these plants expires, they'll get tweaked, like prescription drugs do when their patents face expiration. Or perhaps, if the modification makes the use of herbicides possible, the company will change the herbicide once the patent on the plant expires: they do manufacture both, after all.

This could potentially be the death knell for the small, non-corporate farmer, as well as the naturally developed plant breeds developed over millenia of farmer experiments and plantings. Is this what we really want or need? I don't think so.

A major UK study of genetically modified plants finds no evidence that they harm the environment.

(link) [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Mad cow takes bite from exports

One could logically ask "Dave, you don't export any beef, right? So how does the collaspe of the export market hurt you?"

All that beef that isn't going to Europe and Japan has to go somewhere, eh? And that means somewhere locally, forcing prices paid in markets way down. Mercifully, most of the saving have not been passed on to consumers by the big packing houses, but some of them have. And the law of supply and demand is pretty inexorable: more supply = lower prices. So I've had to lower my expected prices on my beef, and step up my efforts to get consumers to know the difference between naturally raised, grass fed cows and feedlot beef. Which means additional advertising, which raises my costs in a time of declining prices. Wonderful stuff.

In the year since the first case of mad cow disease in the U.S. was announced, the nation's $3.4 billion beef export market has virtually collapsed, taking with it more than $272 million of Colorado's largest agricultural export market.

(link) [Denver Business Journal]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link