March Against Monsanto

I love it when catut posts in these threads, because he actually knows what hes talking about.

Its like i have said all along, GMO equals less pesticide use, not more

 

 
Agreed.
 
It is also comical how people -- in typical herd behavior -- will grab on to something like "GMO," (or pick your latest First World problem) and knowing nothing about it will automatically assume it's "bad" just because that's what they've heard.
 
Why doesn't anyone ever assume it's "good?"

 

Lol so true. Like the people who don't give their kids shots or buy only gluten free shit.

 

 
I have refined my ability to detect this type of group think, and I get very suspicious when someone calls anything wholesale evil, whether it be GMO, vaccines, whatever.
 
Basically, the harder someone tries to get me to believe something the less I want to believe it

 

I don't have allergies. I was quoting yuri who said gmo's gave him allergies to tell him that I don't think that that is true. I don't believe gmo's cause allergies cause I haven't been presented with any evidence to base that conclusion on. I think we agree with each other that gmo's may cause slight issues but overall haven't been proven to be that detrimental to our health.

 

That's fine you don't have to believe me. As the previous poster said there isn't "peer reviewed" "science" "proving" that gmos cause allergies.

There are however testimonies of doctors who warned about allergy potential before gmos even came out. Its obvious that adding foreign proteins to food can potentially cause allergies.

I think its more than a coincidence that I just happened to develop corn and soy allergies after those gmo crops hit the market.

Its also not a coincidence that people who eat non gmo corn often no linger have allergies to it.

You are right. But my opinion isn't based just on personal experience. I know a lot about the science of allergies because I have bad allergies and have studied it.

Its not just my opinion either.

How can you say it doesn't seem likely. It seems extremely.likely it just hasn't been tested.

There are definatly reasons to be suspicious

Keep telling yourself that.

The people in power are always corrupt and this is true in the scientific community as well

Other than alergies I didn't make any accusations

And yes there are many studies showing gmos are bad they just aren't "peer reviewed" and are usually discredited by the industry.

Yes and if you've red all.my posts you'd know I support gmos just not irresponsible safety practices.

I love gmos and want to study genetics when I go back to school

That's good. I don't either. I never said "gmos are bad" I said I have some problems with gmos on the market

You don't need to take my word.

Fact is even if I'm right it doesn't matter because not everyone has allergies. I just think we should know. I fully support gmo lableing llaws

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This is because you don't understand allergies.

Forgive me for saying it wrong. Gmos don't CAUSE allergies, they add foreign proteins that people CAN be allergic to. This doesn't need to be proven. We already know this. We know a lot about allergies.

Some people are just allergic to things

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Well.

I can't divide up my answer like I would like, since I'm on my phone. But I'm going to address your points in order, as much as I can.

I'm not a monsanto apologist. I simply don't think they have the evil agenda that some claim. If they are negligent...well that's possible. How do we know, Yuri? Maybe they see what they are doing as attempting to make it possible to fed the world. Maybe they only care about a fast buck. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...

Yes, the BT toxin is throughout the plant, and can't be washed off. Did you more that bt is a naturally occurring toxin? It was discovered in other plants, and then transferred to corn. Who can say if corn would have naturally obtained this ability, the same as the original plants?

No, it's not illegal to plant seeds that were produced by inadvertently cross pollinating non-gmo crops with gmo crops. There has never been a case like this pursued by monsanto or any other company.

You can purchase non-gmo crop seeds. I can too. You cash purchase food items made from non-gmo crops. You certainly can do it in a place the size of Vegas. Most people don't want to...because they cost more. I will gladly raise non-gmo food for you...but it's harder, takes more work and money, and my risk of crop failure is larger. So, I need to be compensated more for that risk. But trust me, the only reason monsanto would ever get a "monopoly" on our food supply is because consumers let them.

As far as your allergies...yes, it's possible you have an allergy to gmo crops. You can test for that by doing what the doctors do...cut them out of your diet. Otherwise you will never know for sure. More to the point, many people are discovering gluten allergies. Ironically, gluten is made wheat, and there is no gmo wheat on the market. So, I'm not sure that we can point to gmo's as the cause for these increasing allergies.

If you are serious about wanting to deal with allergies caused by grain products, consider doing what I'm doing. Move away from those products and add more natural proteins, and more natural fat. Instead of raising cereal crops, I'm using animals to convert crops to natural, wholesome protein. But as long as there is demand for cheap cereal based food...that demand will be filled. Your option is not to eat it.

Ya right. Not sure anybody listens, and I really get tired of beating my head against the same wall, but I guess I'm a glutton for punishment. Thanks tho.

Edit: excuse the spelling errors. Doing this in a tractor, on a phone that is fucking up, pisses me off, and makes me not want to fix them, even though I'm as much a grammer Nazi as anybody.

 

The main problem with GMO's are too many people assuming, GMO's are in your food whether you like it or not. The worse problem is they won't even tell you what is and what is not GMO.
 
Monsanto crops are not feeding the world, they are not cheaper, so who is the benefactor in all of this? Not the farmers that feed generations of Americans;
 
\tAre GMOs worth their weight in gold? To farmers, not exactlyHarn Soper has a real-world laboratory to test the benefits of farming with genetically modified (GM) seed. Soper's family owns seven farms near Emmetsburg, Iowa, with organic crops on 410 acres and GM crops on some 300 acres. The farms are all in the same microclimate: If a torrential cloudburst hits one farm, it hits them all. So Soper can compare the economics of one farming style against the other. And it's clear, when the numbers are tallied, that he's making a lot more money farming organically than farming with GM seed.

Last week, I looked at GM farming from a 10,000-foot perspective and found that big farmers in the U.S. seem to have benefited from biotech crops. Now I'm looking at a couple of these farms from the six-foot perspective (that's eye-level for me), and trying to understand what leads an individual farmer to choose GM seed. I emailed or chatted with farmers until I started to hear the same explanations over and again.
For the sake of concision I'll just focus on a couple people here: Soper and Brian Scott. These guys aren't intended to be perfectly representative of the big picture (the 10,000-foot view is better at capturing that) - I'm just going to present their decision making in more fine-grained detail.
And looking closely reveals something surprising: I'd thought that there would be an obvious financial advantage in biotech, making it impossible for conventional crops to compete. But that's not the case. In the race toward profitability, GM traits don't give seeds a jet-pack - it's more like they provide an umbrella.
Before I got in touch with Soper, he'd already been going over his books and comparing the economics of his GM and organic land for the past few years. In the spring, the GM crops start out way behind, mostly because the seed is so expensive: It costs about $200 an acre to plant and fertilize corn. For the organic land, by contrast, seed and manure costs about $100 an acre. At harvest the organics slipped a bit: The GM corn produced 200 bushels an acre, versus 180 bushels on an organically farmed acre. But in sales, the organic land surged ahead again.
“Our GM farm rides a roller coaster where grain traders play the system betting long or short on the value of our crops,” Soper wrote in an email. “As of today (8/22/13) the swing in September corn is between $5.27 and $4.47 a bushel. Welcome to Las Vegas. This compares to our contracts for our fall delivery of organic corn at $12 a bushel.”
 
The organic land makes less money in the off years of the typical one-year-on, one-year-off rotation, when the farmers grow alfalfa and oats, instead of the soy they grow on the GM farms. Soy is clearly more profitable, but not so profitable as to erase the lead from organic corn, Soper said:
“On a two-year average, organic is still way ahead. The bottom line was that our organic farms have 30 percent higher profits.”
There are a lot of costs, however, that Soper ignores in his calculation. That's because the Soper family is an absentee landlord: The Sopers contract with farmers who work the land. The farmers and the Sopers split the costs of seed and fertilizer in the spring, and then split the profits in the fall. That means that Soper's books don't include anything on the amount of extra labor farmers have to contribute, and he doesn't see the costs of dealing with insects (whether through conventional pesticides or organic treatments) if there's an infestation.
That's a big omission. For a farmer who actually gets dirt under his fingernails, like Brian Scott, the extra time and money to get a crop to harvest make a big difference. And that's where GM crops seem to prove their worth to farmers: They're a bit more predictable and easier to manage. They're a convenience.
Scott lives (and blogs) on a farm in northwest Indiana, where he and his family grow wheat, corn, soybeans, and popcorn. He recently paid $119 an acre for his GM corn (for the seed alone) as opposed to $87 an acre for conventionally bred corn. The yields, he said, are “pretty well equal.”
“All right,” I said, “walk me through your other input costs.” I poised pen over notebook to jot down all the extra costs that would be unnecessary in the biotech fields.
“Well, all the other costs are the same,” he said.
That didn't make any sense. If everything is the same but the seed cost, I asked, why not just buy the cheaper non-GMO seed?
With a little more number crunching Scott estimated that cheaper conventionally breed corn seed would actually make him $11 more per acre if nothing goes wrong. But something always goes wrong. With GM seeds he's less likely to have a devastating loss - so much so that his insurance company gives him a lower premium.
Another Indiana farmer, Troy Rausch, concurred: “If you use GMOs it takes a lot of the risk away. When everything is ideal non-GM seed is probably better. But when you are delayed by a couple weeks by rain like we were this year, the GM traits come in awfully handy for weed control.”
 
“I think there will be a big shift to organics in 15 to 20 years. Input costs for GMO farming just keep rising - seed costs, pesticide costs. I just don't think it's sustainable.” He chuckled: “There you go - it's all about sustainability. Economic sustainability in this case.”
 
So why do farmers buy GM seeds? Basically, GMOs make things easier. Instead of rushing to spray herbicide in the busy spring planting season before the soybean sprout, they can wait until things calm down. That means one farmer can do more in less time.
 
There's a problem with this efficiency: GM seed can enable irresponsible farmers to work fast and dirty across huge stretches of land. A farmer could make a lot of money by simply planting GM corn every year and spraying liberally with glyphosate. On the other hand, a responsible farmer can use GM traits sparingly as a tool for land stewardship. I'll explore that in my next post, where I'll look at the effect GM crops have on the environment.
Source.

 

 
I have read the book.  I don't believe for one second that the author approached the subject with an unbiased mind.  When an investigative journalist looks at a subject like this with her mind made up, she will generally "find" the information that she is looking for.  I'm not sure that makes it true.  Regardless, the real reason I'm responding to you is the part of your post that I bolded.
 
We fuck with mother nature all the time.  Back in the 1970's, part of the land I now farm was busted for a pot growing operation (I shit you not).  Pot was destroyed, but some went to seed.  Now, wild mj is nothing unusual in my part of the country, but this stuff that is still growing down there is different from the typical ditchweed.  It is clearly descended from the cultivated stuff.  However, over the years, in my environment, nature has selected for the plants that produce smaller buds, because they are less likely to die during the not-so-infrequent periods of drought we experience.   
 
Mother Nature wants those more moderate plants.  However, in this industry, we select for plants that yields big, fat buds.  I grow indoors, hydroponically, and I can assure you that I don't want what mother nature selects for.  The amount of bud produced would be substantially less if we did not select for higher yielding strains. 
 
The same applies to most crops. It's all fucking with mother nature.  Before GMO's, as my previous post illustrates, we used a lot of chemicals to raise crops.  Non-gmo does not automatically make them better for the environment.  For example, the insecticides I would have to use to raise conventional corn scare the hell out of me.  I would only do it if I'm compensated for the risks I'm taking to handle them. 

 

you obviously didn't even read the ppost you quoted. Try again

You also don't seem to know how allergies work.

as I said. Gmos did NOT "cause" my allergies any more than shellfish "cause" shellfish allergies

Some people are just sensitive. They have allergic reactions to some random things.

An allergic reaction is when a person has an overactive immune response to a harmless allergen. Its usually a specific one. For example some people are allergic to shellfish.

It was well known in the scientific community that gmos have allergy potential long before they were created. This doesn't even need to be proven. We already have TONS of scientific literature on allergies.

If you introduce a foreign protein into an organism (like a gmo duh) there will be a chance some people are allergic to that protein. this is obvious. Do you REALLY need a source for tthis?!

If you out walnut genes into corn, there is a chance people with walnut allergies will be allergic to the corn. Obviously. I never claimed anything more than this.


What's this buisness about legal stuff? I can't Sue a farmer for selling me a melon in allergic to. I wouldn't expect to Sue Monsanto just because I'm allergic to gmo corn aand soy. My argument is that because of allergies, all food should be labled even gmos

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