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ate shit on live tv
Feb 15, 2004

by Azathoth
Corn gets a bad rap not because it is inherently poo poo, but because it has one of the largest lobbyist organizations in congress with the Farm Bill being a particularly large boondoggle.

It also doesn't help that by irrigating it beyond regional ability you can waste water 2-3 times more efficiently. And of course converting it to ethanol after wasting all that water, a process which requires additional water, doesn't help any.

As for another crop, why not wheat?

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Killer-of-Lawyers
Apr 22, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2020
Lower yield, and lower market value. Corns really productive, which makes it attractive.
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2002/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_033_033.pdf

my kinda ape
Sep 15, 2008

Everything's gonna be A-OK
Oven Wrangler
We grow a ton of wheat on the great plains. Soybeans too. And lots of other things.

My family alone grows probably 40% corn(~2000 acres) and 40% soybeans rotating every year, 20% wheat, and a field or two of sunflowers as a second crop after wheat. And a field of alfalfa. We used to grow a lot of sorghum but the corn varieties have been improved so much in the last 10-15 years that it's not more dependable to grow sorghum over corn so we don't. Sorghum is still fairly common in the area though.

We're on the edge of the Ogallala aquifer so only like 20% of our land is irrigated, if that.

my kinda ape fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Mar 19, 2015

tsa
Feb 3, 2014

Effectronica posted:

How do you, and I apologize if this is buried somewhere in the rest of the thread, plan to deal with the issue of lack of genetic diversity and the vulnerability this brings to pathogens?

Science. We are on a cusp of a revolution in genetics- it doesn't get much press but the achievements made in the last decade in the field have been astounding. At any rate I'm not convinced at all this is actually a problem, or that it would be difficult to fix if it did become one.


Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

How do you figure? How is modern agriculture any more likely to only grow one thing and suffer a catastrophic collapse as opposed to primitive farming? Blights were a thing in the past, after all. Entire nations starved from them. That hasn't happened to the developed world in a long time, even though you claim that modern practices should make it more likely to happen.

It's just the doomspeak that is also very popular in the climate thread- a lot of really scary scenarios painted without any real evidence for how harmful they would be even if they occurred. Reminds me of the peak oil threads.

my kinda ape
Sep 15, 2008

Everything's gonna be A-OK
Oven Wrangler

tsa posted:

Science. We are on a cusp of a revolution in genetics- it doesn't get much press but the achievements made in the last decade in the field have been astounding. At any rate I'm not convinced at all this is actually a problem, or that it would be difficult to fix if it did become one.

Agreed.

Breeders are constantly working to increase disease resistance and a big part of that is to introduce genes from wild relatives. A big thing they drill into your head in plant pathology and other ag classes is that a plant breeder's work is never done. There's no such thing as a perfect cultivar. You can make something that's extremely resistant to every known disease and next year a new or mutated pathogen will pop up that's great at killing it so you always have to keep improving them. It's just evolution.

The bright side is we have varieties that are far better than ever before and the pace of improvement has picked up dramatically.

The USDA also does a lot of work with disease control and containment. When something new pops up they study it and help farmers do their best to contain it so it doesn't spread and quickly become a huge problem.

Gunshow Poophole
Sep 14, 2008

OMBUDSMAN
POSTERS LOCAL 42069




Clapping Larry
Not to mention, it's getting to the point where if you cover/companion/checkerboard correctly, very few pest species have an opportunity to become established, so IPM has p much already taken care of macrofaunal crop afflictions. the right soil microbial communities could possibly do the same for a lot of bacterial/fungal problems. It's pretty complex but the immense leaps in shotgun sequencing over the last ten years (ridiculous leaps, really, holy poo poo is genetic sequencing hot these days) are allowing commensurate leaps in analysis of and treatment suggestions for bacterial issues.

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
sure sure we gotta straighten out how we grow the numerator

but the real solution is in the denominator: http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home/

Killer-of-Lawyers
Apr 22, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2020
People will have less kids as the world develops. The population isn't going to grow forever. At this point in time, and for the near future, population isn't the issue for food security.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:


As for steady state economies? No. Optimism. Anyone who wants the world to stop growing is pretty drat selfish and evil. We've got mouths to feed, technology to expand, and factories to build. We can decouple the modernization of the third world from our environmental impact.

That and the world itself is not steady state in the slightest.

Guy DeBorgore
Apr 6, 1994

Catnip is the opiate of the masses
Soiled Meat

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back.

I think this is a very naive view of development- the wealth of the global North is owing to the success of liberal capitalism; the poverty and failures of the global South are just an unfortunate legacy of the past that can be solved through development and progress. This was the dominant view until pretty recently but I think most international development academics would disagree now.

The rich North and the poor South are just two sides of the same coin. The North is rich because the South is poor. Call it "capitalism" or the "global political economy" or whatever, but there's a consistent pattern for hundreds of years of a certain group of countries enriching themselves at everyone else's expense. It's no coincidence that the rich countries today are virtually all former imperial and colonial powers. During the North's industrialization they polluted freely and in vast quantities; today, we've effectively exported our pollution to the global South, at just the time when huge global emissions cutbacks are required. During the North's development they made extensive use of protectionist measures for developing infant industries; today WTO rules make all that illegal, and Southern countries have much less leeway in terms of economic policy than their Northern counterparts. For most of history the North dictated the terms of trade and ensured that, even after the end of colonialism, they captured most of the value-added. Heavily indebted Southern countries send hundreds of billions of dollars per year in interest payments on debt to the North, maybe 10% of which flows back in the form of development aid. In terms of % of GDP, debt payments are often much much higher than the reparations Germany had to pay after WW2.

This is a really broad argument that's been articulated in many different ways and I can't really do it justice here, but the point is that you can't just replicate our pattern of development in the South, nor can you copy-and-paste our economy into theirs. A closely related point is that there's no a priori reason to think that the lifestyle we enjoy in the developed world would be sustainable or even possible for everyone to enjoy, since in large part we got to where we are through a combination of (1) stepping on the backs of others and (2) borrowing against the future (e.g. burning fossil fuels).


quote:

So you brought coke up, and found your statement indefensible. Fantastic, we're making headway.

The point with the Coke example was just that in many parts of the world, water supplies are horribly mismanaged by governments and private companies colluding together for their own benefit, at the expense of the large majority of poor/disenfranchised people who depend on that water for their livelihood. I'm guessing you agree with that claim, in which case there's no point in us squabbling over Coke.

[quote]

Killer-of-Lawyers posted:

I don't think that I ever advocated the world only growing a few strains of crops. I advocated growing food where it's efficient to do so, and letting the rest of the world remain fallow. That doesn't mean everyone's growing the same thing, at all.

As for steady state economies? No. Optimism. Anyone who wants the world to stop growing is pretty drat selfish and evil. We've got mouths to feed, technology to expand, and factories to build. We can decouple the modernization of the third world from our environmental impact.

Haha, you very confidently assert that, considering it's a major topic of academic debate. And as with most topics in the climate change literature, the pessimists have the preponderance of evidence- the only way we avoid disastrous climate change is if we severely cut emissions, and the only way to do *that* is to take a major hit to world GDP, unless there's some miracle technological breakthrough around the corner.

I don't think 0% GDP growth should be a goal in and of itself, like some people do, but to deny that there's any tension at all between perpetual growth and addressing climate change is ridiculous.

Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Mar 20, 2015

Slow News Day
Jul 4, 2007

tsa posted:

Science. We are on a cusp of a revolution in genetics- it doesn't get much press but the achievements made in the last decade in the field have been astounding. At any rate I'm not convinced at all this is actually a problem, or that it would be difficult to fix if it did become one.

Is there a place where one can read about these achievements? (Asking out of sheer curiosity.)

Killer-of-Lawyers
Apr 22, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2020
Like I said last page. Obviously we need to try Full Communism (TM). I've posted links to actual research papers, your response is "It's obvious that companies are the problem, and in 2 pages I can't cite a single source because it's self evident."

This is why the thread erupted into one line jokes. There's no sense in continuing a discussion that's just going to be one side repeated spouting off political rhetoric.

Guy DeBorgore
Apr 6, 1994

Catnip is the opiate of the masses
Soiled Meat
^^^^ Maybe you cited a bunch of articles earlier in the thread but you haven't shown me any. And if you did I wouldn't read them; I do enough of that already. It's a debate forum on a comedy site, why get so academic about it? If you actually want to get caught up on the international development literature I think Amartya Sen's a good place to start.

tsa posted:

Science. We are on a cusp of a revolution in genetics- it doesn't get much press but the achievements made in the last decade in the field have been astounding. At any rate I'm not convinced at all this is actually a problem, or that it would be difficult to fix if it did become one.

Where exactly do you think the genes in GMOs come from? Biologists aren't stringing nucleic acids together by hand, they copy them from extant species. The fewer the extant species, the smaller the genetic library we have to draw on for engineering. Wild species of potatoes, corn, and other staple crops are still out there, and they're hugely useful sources of potential new modifications to make to domesticated varieties.

Which is why actual biologists are the ones crying loudest about the loss of biodiversity, not blithely shrugging it off because "we have science now, who needs nature?" as if one can substitute for the other.

Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Mar 20, 2015

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Guy DeBorgore posted:

Where exactly do you think the genes in GMOs come from? Biologists aren't stringing nucleic acids together by hand, they copy them from extant species. The fewer the extant species, the smaller the genetic library we have to draw on for engineering. Wild species of potatoes, corn, and other staple crops are still out there, and they're hugely useful sources of potential new modifications to make to domesticated varieties.
Genes also don't have to come from similar species though.

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

computer parts posted:

Genes also don't have to come from similar species though.

If you're coding for resistance to a parasite or pathogen that attacks this cluster of species, they presumably have some way to survive it, which you can look for without knowing the exact mechanism. On the other hand, ripping out genes from widely different organisms requires a much greater understanding of what they will do in order to make them effective. So preserving biodiversity is good at the very least because it provides an easier way to do things than assembling smut resistance in corn out of first principles.

ghetto wormhole posted:

Agreed.

Breeders are constantly working to increase disease resistance and a big part of that is to introduce genes from wild relatives. A big thing they drill into your head in plant pathology and other ag classes is that a plant breeder's work is never done. There's no such thing as a perfect cultivar. You can make something that's extremely resistant to every known disease and next year a new or mutated pathogen will pop up that's great at killing it so you always have to keep improving them. It's just evolution.

The bright side is we have varieties that are far better than ever before and the pace of improvement has picked up dramatically.

The USDA also does a lot of work with disease control and containment. When something new pops up they study it and help farmers do their best to contain it so it doesn't spread and quickly become a huge problem.

So in other words, the way is to have what is effectively a biodiverse set of crops, which is what I was saying was being overlooked. Glad to know that people are working on that.

my kinda ape
Sep 15, 2008

Everything's gonna be A-OK
Oven Wrangler

Effectronica posted:

If you're coding for resistance to a parasite or pathogen that attacks this cluster of species, they presumably have some way to survive it, which you can look for without knowing the exact mechanism. On the other hand, ripping out genes from widely different organisms requires a much greater understanding of what they will do in order to make them effective. So preserving biodiversity is good at the very least because it provides an easier way to do things than assembling smut resistance in corn out of first principles.

Correct

Effectronica posted:

So in other words, the way is to have what is effectively a biodiverse set of crops, which is what I was saying was being overlooked. Glad to know that people are working on that.

We could certainly do better biodiversity wise but I would say the likelihood of a disastrous plant plague wiping out an entire crop nationwide is essentially zero. A big part of it is that plant pathogens tend to be spread much more slowly than human or animal diseases simply because plants are immobile. If something is really nasty the USDA sets up quarantines on infected fields to prevent its spread. On the other hand once an area is infected it's often difficult or impossible to remove the pathogen and some can live for decades in the soil without a host.

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/downloads/PPQ-Strategic-Plan-2019.pdf
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wps/portal/aphis/ourfocus/planthealth

my kinda ape fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Mar 20, 2015

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene
NGS is getting cheaper every day. We just need a massive sequencing project for the Amazon. Then we can burn it to the ground.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Shbobdb posted:

NGS is getting cheaper every day. We just need a massive sequencing project for the Amazon. Then we can burn it to the ground.

Yeah gently caress oxygen, who needs that poo poo?

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Rent-A-Cop
Oct 15, 2004

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

Shbobdb posted:

NGS is getting cheaper every day. We just need a massive sequencing project for the Amazon. Then we can burn it to the ground.
Burn it and sequence the smoke. Much quicker than finding all those tiny frogs and poo poo.

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