GM crops

[Moontanman]

I heard the sugar cane in Brazil has nitrogen fixing capability.

 

But it's not GMO.

 

 

Can you give us a link to that? I'd love to find out how it does it.

[JMJones0424]

I've been facepalming for a few days, but no one more qualified has stepped in to get this thread back on track, so I'll give it a shot.

 

The industrial revolution feeds people. DNA modification on the scientific basis of mapping the genome is in line with the industrial revolution. Mutating plants may have a few niches in which a real production is seen. It's not to likely you would find DNA in one species that was better at producing an enzyme, et al, than the species from which that enzyme came from in the first place. And when this organism is modified, it now occupies a place in our ecosystem that is not existent. If all corn is GMO'd, then it is as if there is no corn at all in a sense.

 

Another thing. It worries me that they have developed, thus far, only a handful of quasi-useful GMO traits. I build my own Linux operating systems from source code. This is like have a C:\ prompt and writing some PacMan knockoff. This is how bored farmer must be to find BT corn commercially attractive.

 

How about corn that grows an ear in three days? Or green beans that taste like chocolate? Or red, white and blue apples?

The first paragraph is pure word salad, but I'm more interested in the second. It appears that your understanding of what takes place when a GM crop is developed is woefully inadequate. No one is building a plant or a trait from "source code". As far as I know, that is far beyond our capability. Instead, they take genes that exist in nature, but not in the target cultivar or species, and insert it. Prior to GM, the only way to artificially spur on the development of a new trait to jump start a selective breeding program was to expose the plant to various chemicals or radiation, and even over many decades and generations, the breeder might not ever find success.

 

The analogy to coding would be as if the breeder randomly hit keys on the keyboard in order to write a new subroutine. However, the analogy for GM would be to identify a subroutine that works perfectly well in a different application and cut and paste it into what you're working on.

 

Bt corn is attractive because it reduces the need for pesticide use, which is beneficial whether the farmer is bored or not.

 

I heard the sugar cane in Brazil has nitrogen fixing capability.

 

But it's not GMO.

Neither sugar cane, nor legumes, fix nitrogen. Legumes are known for maintaining symbiotic relationships with diazotrophic bacteria, which do fix nitrogen. I was previously unaware of any diazotroph that partnered with sugarcane, but a google search led me to Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus.

[dmaiski]

true that would be simpler... but a lot less fun then engineering killer plants

and think all that you would save on insecticides

you could probably add nitrogen fixing functions to the plant as well

Edited September 19, 2012 by dmaiski

[vampares]

Bt corn is attractive because it reduces the need for pesticide use, which is beneficial whether the farmer is bored or not.

If it is a better alternative to pesticides, I think that may be a positive thing. Corn isn't known for having overwhelming number insect-pests in comparison to other crops. I have bean plants which attract a number of insects. They do eat the leaves but I still have beans. I could kill these insects but some of them are insects I've never seen before. I have monarch butterflies, lady bugs, honey bees...

 

not to mention a dozen brown bats and barn swallows. Preying mantis's.

 

It's not fair to plant corn across entire states that would kill the first insect to take one bite.

 

NEW SUB-TOPIC

 

Massive Tumors in Rats Fed Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Corn

 

The study done by a lab in France.

 

Interestingly the most GMO maize fed to the rats was 33%.

 

Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher said the company would review the study thoroughly. However, he added: "Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies performed on biotech crops to date, including more than a hundred feeding studies, have continuously confirmed their safety, as reflected in the respective safety assessments by regulatory authorities around the world."

 

Reviewing articles and links it seems that it is very difficult to get farmers to comply with any regulations (when there are any).

 

Can you give us a link to that? I'd love to find out how it does it.

 

Off the top of my head, no I can't, and I can't tell you how it does it either. The sugar cane apparently doesn't need excessive fertilizer or doesn't need any at all. This is how Brazil is able to viably produce 70% of it's combustable liquid fuel needs as ethanol.

 

Obviously sugar has less protien than does corn. You cannot feed a cow primarily raw sugar. But high-fructose corn syrup comes to mind. Fructose is very fermentable. More so than cane sugar.

 

The commodity price of corn has risen from under 200 to over 800 in the past decade. I would expect that GMO was proven to be more relevant to the market. We could blame this on ethanol but 2005 show a very stable price >200 <300.

 

"86% of the US maize crop was genetically modified in 2010"

 

2010 happens to be a year corn prices rose substantively.

 

This price increase situation would be putting the ethanol fuel concept on its head.

 

The prices are cents per bushel. A bushel is 56lbs of corn.

 

The maximum amount of ethanol would be ~4.4 gallons, realistically 4 gallons.

 

C6H12O6 → 2C2H5OH + 2CO2

 

4 gallons X $3.00/gallon = $12

$12 - 756.50/bushel (up 16.5c today)

 

It's not easy to distill 4 gallons of alcohol on $4.43. It can be done but the profit margin is stifling.

[ecoli]

 

NEW SUB-TOPIC

 

Massive Tumors in Rats Fed Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Corn

 

The study done by a lab in France.

 

Interestingly the most GMO maize fed to the rats was 33%.

 

Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher said the company would review the study thoroughly. However, he added: "Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies performed on biotech crops to date, including more than a hundred feeding studies, have continuously confirmed their safety, as reflected in the respective safety assessments by regulatory authorities around the world."

 

 

The statistics on this study are particularly bad, which is getting some coverage in the blogosphere. With 9 treatment groups and 1 control group being the most obvious 'no-no' since over half of the mice in the control group developed tumors anyway.

 

the problem of multiple comparisons: http://xkcd.com/882/

 

analysis of this study: http://michaelgrayer.posterous.com/in-which-i-blow-a-gasket-and-get-very-uppity

[CharonY]

I have not scrutinized it properly but I feel it is a bit similar to the Lancet article in the late 90s, I think. Except that one ended prematurely. This one seems to abandon typical tox-study design to something more exotic. In these cases there is always the suspicion of data arrangements to find and over-emphasize weak effects.

[jeskill]

I may have said this before, but I feel like this argument that "GM crops are unhealthy for humans" is a bit of a red herring that detracts from the real concerns about GM crops. I have no problem with genetic modification as a tool, but am wary about the socio-economic and ecological ramifications of our current industrial agricultural system, which relies heavily on hybrid and GM monocultures.

 

EDIT to say:

I don't think it's implausible that a GM crop could cause long-term health impacts. Especially if the GM crop is one that produces a pesticide -- we all know there are many pesticides that are hazardous to our health and so this shouldn't stretch the imagination. Currently, the evidence on this is weak, meanwhile, there are clear issues (other than human health) with GM crops that we should also be discussing.

 

JMJones0424,

while it's true that at the moment, Bt has seemed to decrease the amount of pesticides used in the world, it's also true that every year, more pests evolve resistance to Bt, even with the refuges that are supposed to "delay the evolution of resistance". (I do find it ironic that industrial ag is reduced to using ecological concepts to solve problems that they always seem to argue can be fixed with more technology.) And there's already a significant number of weeds that have evolved resistance to glyphosate, which has increased the amount of herbicides being used by keeping us on the "herbicide treadmill". (Pesticide treadmill -- same concept)

 

IMO, we should be putting more of our effort into improving ecological agricultural techniques, and learn how to manage the populations of insects and competitor plants through complex ecosystem interactions and crop diversity.

Edited September 20, 2012 by jeskill

[JMJones0424]

while it's true that at the moment, Bt has seemed to decrease the amount of pesticides used in the world, it's also true that every year, more pests evolve resistance to Bt, even with the refuges that are supposed to "delay the evolution of resistance". (I do find it ironic that industrial ag is reduced to using ecological concepts to solve problems that they always seem to argue can be fixed with more technology.) And there's already a significant number of weeds that have evolved resistance to glyphosate, which has increased the amount of herbicides being used by keeping us on the "herbicide treadmill". (Pesticide treadmill -- same concept)

I couldn't agree more, though it should come as no surprise that even industrialized agriculture is finally realizing that an appropriate approach to integrated pest management should include ecological concepts. The only thing that's surprised me is how long it's taken to reverse the mechanistic thinking. I did not intend to blindly promote Bt crops. My intention was to combat FUD.

[vampares]

Bt corn and company would defeat FUD by presenting the technology on a more open basis. The fact is most of the corn presented to human consumers will not be Bt corn or it will be an industrial extraction of the corn that will no longer contain the Bt portion.

 

This also seems to me to be a really good way to get something off the ingredients label.

 

dl-methionine for instance is never an ingredient in human food, at least it is not listed as one. But in animal feed it is very common. It is common in pet food despite the otherwise nutritionally rich product. It may be a unspoken veterinary secret as to why it is there. Why it is not ever an ingredient in human food is another question to ask. They tell you they use it because it is cheap, then they charge me 6 times the price for organic eggs. AND THEY STILL USE DL-METHIONINE.

 

SO if dl-methionine gets into food-for-human-consumption inadvertently, what happens now? Perhaps it is a minor concern until you find out otherwise.

 

And with Bt corn, which has no "good" studies, what makes me think the rational isn't the same? Food is usually produced at high standards. Right?

 

 

FYI

I can buy bottled and tableted l-methionine on the consumer market for roughly twice/thrice the price of the wholesale commodity dl-methionine powder. dl-methionine goes for about $8 a kilogram. One kilogram produces more than a tonne of chicken feed. SO we are talking about a $10-$20 increase on more food (equivalent) than a single person could eat in 2 years.

Edited October 2, 2012 by vampares

[overtone]

The genetic modification of crops to incorporate Bt toxin production will almost certainly - odds on basic Darwinian principles - destroy the efficacy of Bt as an insecticide within a few decades, possibly within a few years. It has been a very valuable pesticide for a long time, but its days are numbered now.

 

The situation created is all but ideal for breeding resistance in pests, eliminating natural predators of these pests, and creating serious problems in by now familiar Darwinian ways. It is also set up to be at high risk of spreading the engineered genetics into the wild - the content, methods, and locations of insertion abet cross-species or even higher taxon transfer (which is of course how and why they were developed and used in the first place).

 

So the long familiar and effective practice of using that essentially benign insecticide in spot applications, in place of more dangerous and harmful chemicals, is likely to be ruined. The profits will have gone to Monsanto et al, the costs will be borne by others.

- - - -

Another: the genetic complex inserted in several crops to create herbicide resistance (glysphophate is the common intended resistant) works by creating modules in the plants cells that chemically bind and sequester the herbicide in organelles. Two things: along with the active ingredient code, comes a complex of other code abetting the transfer, insertion, and activation of the sequestering code - this abets gene transfer of the whole complex to other plants; and the sequestered herbicide is not magically made to vanish: its sequestering compound builds up in the plant. We now know - discovered years after we allowed 4/5 of the US soybean crop to be fitted with this single genetic uniformity - that it is sometimes found in the food made from parts of the plant not supposed to be expressing the genetics. We then recently discovered, years too late to do anything about it, that bacterial digestion in the small intestine can break the herbicide complex down, and release various parts of it to be absorbed as digestion products into the body. No one knows whether this is harmful, and no one will know for many years if it is - by sheer good luck - safe.

 

Meanwhile, as a side note, herbicide resistant and other GM crops are usually somewhat lower yielding per acre than the same breed without the modifications - for the obvious reason that resources diverted into expressing a string of alien genes are unavailable for other plant purposes. But they're higher yielding per dollar in the short run, for a variety of reasons some political, at least for the corporations selling them.

- - - - -

A couple of examples of the kind of obliviousness, or arrogance, or heedlessness, or whatever one wants to call it, that characterizes the actual commercial employment of GM agricultural tech in the real world. Its theoretical benefits are one thing, but its real world applications are a more immediate concern - and they are worrying, so far. They are not being handled carefully. They are not monitored, regulated, curbed, or well studied for the many and complex and varied effects both economic and ecological. They appear to be doing harm, for the profit of a couple of agribusiness concerns.

- - - -

A more general point: the recurring assertion, or theme, that GM technology is somehow the same kind of thing as traditional breeding, is flatly and disturbingly dishonest. The whole point of this stuff is that it enables manipulations impossible by ordinary evolutionary means, and dramatically different in their nature, consequences, and potentials. Different in kind, not just quantity. Ordinary recombination does not bring in code from completely different phyla or even artificially assembled, does not set that code up to make it easily transferred across taxa, does not set up a situation in which we cannot even guess well what all the effects of the new code and its expression will be over time.

 

And over it all, the fact that this code reproduces exponentially - if it gets loose, there's no getting it back. It's not like some chemical or radiation leak, some pollution in an ordinary sense. It can grow. It can spread itself. It's explosive.

Edited October 12, 2012 by overtone

[Essay]

- - - -

Another: the genetic complex inserted in several crops to create herbicide resistance (glysphophate is the common intended resistant) works by creating modules in the plants cells that chemically bind and sequester the herbicide in organelles. Two things: along with the active ingredient code, comes a complex of other code abetting the transfer, insertion, and activation of the sequestering code - this abets gene transfer of the whole complex to other plants; and the sequestered herbicide is not magically made to vanish: its sequestering compound builds up in the plant. We now know - discovered years after we allowed 4/5 of the US soybean crop to be fitted with this single genetic uniformity - that it is sometimes found in the food made from parts of the plant not supposed to be expressing the genetics. We then recently discovered, years too late to do anything about it, that bacterial digestion in the small intestine can break the herbicide complex down, and release various parts of it to be absorbed as digestion products into the body. No one knows whether this is harmful, and no one will know for many years if it is - by sheer good luck - safe.

 

Meanwhile, as a side note, herbicide resistant and other GM crops are usually somewhat lower yielding per acre than the same breed without the modifications - for the obvious reason that resources diverted into expressing a string of alien genes are unavailable for other plant purposes. But they're higher yielding per dollar in the short run, for a variety of reasons some political, at least for the corporations selling them.

- - - - -

...fascinating information, and quite persuasive too!

 

Do you have any PubMed citations, or other good sources on that info?

 

Thanks!

~

[overtone]

Do you have any PubMed citations, or other good sources on that info?

PubMed? No access , and not the first place to look – AFAIK no one has found a medical problem with that particular aspect.

 

Here is a decent description of the mechanism of resistance, as it is currently understood: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165874/

 

And a quote from its abstract:

However, the RRS plants accumulate much higher levels of glyphosate than the sensitive line, and this is associated with enhanced cellular oxidation and specific enhancement of proteins associated with photorespiration.

 

This accumulation of glyphosate is what I was referring to, above – that it happens occasionally in unexpected (food) parts of some individual plants , can survive the stomach and reach the bacteria in the small intestine, and can be digested there, I leave to your own Googling (IIRC I ran across it in Science News several years ago).

 

It was just an example. Here are some more from casual web search hits, from the first page of my efforts (I'm lazy), actually more threatening:

 

Stuff about the gene transfer problem in the gut , and the extra spraying accumulation, and the auxiliary chemicals employed in real life, and so forth, with traceable sources :

 

Intro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

 

http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/authorisation/docs/soybean_40_3_2_public_comments_en.pdf

 

http://natureinstitute.org/nontarget/reports/soybean_006.php

 

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_geneticfood24.htm

 

the assessment that it is safe comes from research like this: http://cera-gmc.org/docs/articles/09-215-002.pdf

 

and this is the best case I can find for the assessment of safety of glyphosate (pardon my earlier mental spasms spelling) resistant GM crops. http://www.kehoe.org/owen/soybean/

 

Notice the description: the expressed modified protein (and therefore all – all, always – of the effects of the introduced genetics) is naturally present only in chloroplasts, and therefore never – never, at all – found in the soybeans harvested for food. The enzymes and so forth likewise introduced (and their genetics) do one thing and one thing only, after which they are cleaved perfectly and their parts completely disassembled by cellular machinery, in each and every plant modified, without exception and without side effects. Auxiliary chemicals and genetics and so forth are largely ignored, however necessary or unavoidable in real life. The fate of the glyphosphate that is incompletely bound by ESPS is ignored.

 

By this description, bacterial uptake of active (culturable) resistance genetics in the human small intestine would be extremely unlikely. The genetic string is squelched, the transfer and insertion enzyme(s) is not present, there is no glysphosate to defend from and no threat from the herbicide anyway, digestion would cleave the genetics at random rather than in complete and active chunks, and so forth.

 

These are some of the presumptions underlying the assessment of safety by the industry regulators.

 

Here is a pretty decent description indicating the tech complexity of the procedure. Read critically and with a paranoid eye, some of the holes are visible. http://www.biotech-info.net/felsot1.html

 

 

[vampares]

Glyphosate carries a reputation of being relatively safe and short lived in the environment. Seeing that it is NOT an alkyl halide, I don't think it posses a clear and present danger to the environment (other than its herbicidal potential).

 

The genetically modified versions of regular crops appear to over-express the target enzyme. The same biological trait is selected for in weeds when field-wide spraying is done. It is a very poor management practice. It is the sort of thing that might be done regularly if the farm was rented or purchased with intent to sell.

 

Anyways, resistance isn't the worst thing in the world, it just makes the product useless. But over-expression also implies vulnerability to insatiable promoter of the enzyme. This leads to way to much of the enzyme in a cell for it to live and it wastes energy.

[overtone]

Anyways, resistance isn't the worst thing in the world, it just makes the product useless.

If the lack of resistance was useful to others, they have suffered uncompensated harm. This should, at a minimum, be assessed to the costs of the GM product. The risk, even, should be included in the balance sheet. (Especially, if the resistance mechanism is easily both generalized to other products and spread to other places, as antibiotic resistance and herbicide resistance and insecticide resistance commonly are).

 

If the product was instrumental in the creation of an economic dependency - as is clearly the strategy in the international marketing of GM crops, which are proprietary and used to drive out competitive agricultural practices and infrastructure - when it becomes useless one of the possible consequences is hardship among those deprived of the benefits but still shouldering the costs and without good alternatives.

 

As noted above, herbicide resistance to glyphosphate alone, in weeds, is not the end of the resistance concerns: there is also antibiotic resistance in the human gut and general environment (from the marker genetics used in the engineering), generalized herbicide and antibiotic resistance via small modifications of the engineered complex, and so forth.

[vampares]

The herbicidal carry by microorganisms is large. Unfortunately, the microorganism make the herbicide more effective than it ever was before. It is not plant specific. The carry distance is exceedingly greater than the any dimension of the application area. The amount of harm done is something for another topic.

 

Remember that the average age of a farm superior or chief or boss, ect., is over 65 years of age. 75% of them are male.

 

Glyphosate is about as paradigm as phosphate fertilizer to these folks. I'd prefer it over 2,4D which is a nerve gas from WW2 that was slightly modified. This is the "Agent Orange".