SunnysideTroll wrote:
Wayne Stollings wrote:
Many mutants have made transnational impact on increasing yield and quality of several seed-propagated crops. Induced mutations will continue to have an increasing role in creating crop varieties with traits such as modified oil, protein and starch quality, enhanced uptake of specific metals, deeper rooting system, and resistance to drought, diseases and salinity as a major component of the environmentally sustainable agriculture.
If these mutants you're talking about are of the GM variety, then any organic farmer will tell you, that in the long run, that's just not true.
Telling me it is not true if they have not raised the crops themselves means nothing. The fact there has been genetic manipulation of crops for about 80 years indicates otherwise. If it were not successful it would not have continued.
Quote:
GM crops do not produce higher yields. In fact, over time, it's the organic farms that have always produced the higher yields.
Saying it means nothing. Where is the data to support this claim?
Quote:
Also, the GM crops that are often grown on the majority of today's modern farms have led us to a system of agricultural mono-culture. This system is making our real food go extinct.
The modern farms have been a monoculture crop for quite some time. That makes for an efficient operation. As for the "real" food. That is an opinion and one you cannot support because people can and have been eating genetically modified crops for generations now.
Quote:
"In the last century, 94 percent of vintage, open-pollinated fruits and vegetables vanished. By 2005, the United Nations reported, 75 percent of the world's garden vegetables had been lost." -- excerpt from page 35 of 'The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food,' written by Janisse Ray
I would have to see some real data rather than a quote from a book for a targeted audience.
https://garden.org/learn/articles/view/293/Open-pollinated vegetable varieties reproduce themselves in one of two ways: cross-pollination between two plants (via wind, insects or water) or self-pollination (between male and female flower parts contained within the same flower or separate flowers on the same plant). Beets, brassicas, carrots, corn and squash are cross-pollinating, and so require isolation in the field to keep varieties true. Beans, lettuce, peas and tomatoes are self-pollinating, do not require isolation and are the easiest for seed-saving home gardeners to sustain year to year.
So long as plants of an OP variety are kept isolated from different plants with which they can cross, they will produce seed that will come "true to type." In other words, the plants in the following generation will resemble the parent plants.
Many of the older strains of OPs, often refered to as "heirlooms," are not so much varieties as they are populations. In other words, individual plants within an older named variety can possess a great deal of genetic variability and may even vary in size and shape.
Up until the early 1900's, almost all cross-pollinating OP varieties represented this broad "gene pool" kind of population. But as plant breeders worked to develop new OPs, they began learning various new techniques to create more uniform varieties of plants.Quote:
We should be alarmed by this because nature depends on diversity for its very survival. You can find a thorough explanation of why this is the case @
http://www.seeds.caThere was no such explanation at the link perhaps somewhere in the assorted pages, but if not I waste time. If there is no link to the explanation the explanation must not be very important.
Login
Register
FAQ
