Dang it I go and work on painting my house and I miss a good ole fashioned discussion like this? Man alive I gotta paint faster so I can visit TEG more frequently!
Anyhow I'm with Seedcorn on this. While not working specifically with plants I've had my own breeding projects that I've worked on and know the headache and heartache of trying to make progress with your efforts. I can relate its tough.
If you want to keep your lines pure then your going to have to take the effort and isolate blossoms, and pollinate yourself. Now do you need to do this with all the blossoms? Absolutely not, just some so you have a good crop to save seeds from.
That way your planting pure brandywines, or Black Krims or straight 8s or whatever you want to keep pure so the next years seeds will continue to be safe from GMOs. It takes work but that's the price if you want that purity.
What land produces the most food per square foot? Surprisingly, it is the family garden. Small farms come in second and huge farms lag way behind.
The smaller the area being farmed the more productive it is. If they want to increase the food supply small farms are the way to go.
Compared to what? Sorry but I don't buy that in the least. If that was the case there wouldn't be the big scale operations that we see today. We consume (and I say consume because we are extremely wasteful with our food) so much that I don't think the small farm model would be able to produce enough corn, soybeans etc to meet demand. I believe that per square foot the home garden may grow more total lbs of food but that's based on a diversity of food. The weight of a single pumpkin or a single watermelon is how many ears of corn? How many soybeans does it take to weigh against a cucumber or tomato?
Hunger in America exists for over 50 million people. That is 1 in 6 of the U.S. population including more than 1 in 5 children.
How's that for a statistic? That's the single statistic that just infuriates me. And why when I see all this crap about eating better and how we need to get away from mass produced food I get angry.
How many heirloom tomatoes does it take to combat that kind of hunger? How many grass fed beef cows? How many free range chickens? With an average class size of 30 GMOs and selectively bred food helps keep the food prices low enough by volume to make feeding those 6 kids at lunch possible. A lunch which could be the ONLY meal they get. And that's just one class. Think about how many teachers are at your local school. Each with a class, I bet we could easily fill a whole classroom of hungry kids with those kinds of numbers. So what are you going to pay more in taxes to feed them? Or are we going to cut the music program? No more theater classes? No more art classes? That money has to come from somewhere. Those things are nice but don't hold a candle to starving children.
Are you going to donate more money if you can't grow crops year round to the shelters and soup kitchens so people can eat? GMOs make the shelters dollar go farther.
I've seen hungry kids. I've seen hungry adults. Veterans, single mothers, addicts, people who had a real bad run of luck, and the those people who are locked up in their own minds. They don't give a 500 acre field worth of organic cucumbers if their foods from GMOs or not. They are hungry. They need to eat. And the shelters and soup kitchens need to stretch every single penny the can to make as many meals as they can.
Sure they'll take every donation they can but I have serious doubts that there are enough people growing enough food to keep the shelters pantries stocked.
Its about priorities. I hear it all the time. GMOs are bad for the body. They cause damages etc people who eat them are going to die. If they don't eat they'll die a lot sooner. So which is worse?
pssst............pssst! Wanna know a little secret? We've been slowly dying since the day we were born.
