NYtimes article on Roundup resistant weeds

Read it here I suspect one of the journalists who wrote it (two authors) didn't know what he was talking about, he mentioned DOW working on 2,4-D resistant corn, when Corn is already 2,4-D resistant because it is a monocot, and said pesticide several times when he meant Herbicide. I'm sure this makes the tractor companies that make tilling equipment happy.

g'day ammerson,

i think you'll find that the new rules are any spray is a pestacide as they count weeds as pests, this also confuses the average person when they see the term pesticide used in stat's that say over all since gmo came in pestiacide use has fallen, it is all slight of hand stuff what we want is to know how much herbacide they use and how much insectacide so people can see gmo's cause more use of herbicides. that's about the best way i can describe this new criteria that supports gmo use.

len

That is possibly what was happening. I know that the GMO literature refers to crops like RU ready crops as Herbicide tolerant, never pesticide tolerant. Bt Crops do drastically reduce the amount of Pesticide sprayed, and RU crops do reduce the amount of spray of herbicides other than glyphosate, some of which are much nastier so it isn't all slight of hand :/ .

the slight of hand is in the "inert" ingredients which turn out to be not so inert after all.

looking for a positive in a negative is also known as rationalization

I couldn't help but to look-up Pigweed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth


Jeff

Here is an article containing reasons I worry about Roundup.

http://bestsyntheticoil.com/dealers/aggrand/roundup.htm

puffergas wrote:
I couldn't help but to look-up Pigweed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth

Exactly.  But mechanized monoculture would have a hard time turning lemons into lemonade even if there was a big market for amaranth.

The profane can keep their mechanized monoculture 

There should be a law against killing weeds........

I have no idea how true this is but I've read that no-till (mechanized) practice was worse than ploughing. Just a big money game.

Jeff

Robert Ray wrote:
Here is an article containing reasons I worry about Roundup.

http://bestsyntheticoil.com/dealers/aggrand/roundup.htm

Compare that to the other herbicides ... you will find that glyphosate compares pretty favorably. If you are the audience Monsanto marketed to then claiming that it was a safe and environmentally sensitive choice is accurate, because what they were doing before was more dangerous to the workers and the environment.

As far as making a crop out of amaranth the kind of amaranth that is a problem doesn't really produce anything that is all that edible.

Any current chemical herbicide use just doesn't fit into my view of responsible stewardship and my altruistic view of permaculture.
GMO's and chemicals are things that should be critically reviewed. 
Oregon has come out with a list of persistent chemical pollutants, nearly half of those on the short list are herbicides and pesticides.
Emmerson, no one here has come up with a strict definition of permaculture,  what would your description of a permaculture farm entail?  In particular use of chemical: fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides.
Would the use of GMO organisms (laboratory modified) be incorporated into your description of approved use in a permaculture farm?
 
If I were of the audience that Monsanto made the claim that it was "safer" might be accurate. It should not be marketed as completely safe (IMO). Let's say we are in a room and we have a choice of having someone shoot into the room with a shotgun or a rifle. The likelihood that one might be struck by a pellet is far greater with the shotgun blast than with the rifle. Yet the experience would not be one that could be called safe or the rooms occupants view a sensitive alternative.

Emerson White wrote:
the kind of amaranth that is a problem doesn't really produce anything that is all that edible.

And why might that be?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranthus_palmeri

"Palmer amaranth has a tendency to absorb excess soil nitrogen, and if grown in overly fertilized soils, it can therefore contain excessive levels of nitrates, even for humans. "

You kind of see the pattern emerging here?

My vision of permaculture is not organic at all. while I doubt roundup will always be with us (I much prefer a graze till cycle) I am strongly in favor of GMO's and think that there is even a good place for inorganic salts in limited quantities for fertilizer. Any one technique will not work for ever, rotating crops to fight disease, any pesticide or herbicide, GMO puts a lot of power in our hands, and there will be missteps, eventually someone will release a GMO that hurts humans (no, no one has yet) but the only reason this risk even makes a blip on the radar screen is because the GMO's are so useful.

I think that a better analogy than shooting into a room is fishing with TNT. People have been lighting dynamite and throwing it into the lake, then Monsanto came along with a transformer on car battery and said "hey guys this is 'safe' and 'environmentally friendly'!" Well now they are all using car batteries, and that does some damage, but not as much as before, and every once in a while someone shocks themselves just right and stops their heart but the fatalities aren't nearly so bad as with TNT.

Neither one of our illustrations show residual effects.
I hate a misstep that will send me over a cliff.

Well TNT will leave craters in the lake bottom, and batteries will kill off the baby fish that would replace those fish in a few years. Glyphosate does break down in two weeks to a year in most of the farming world. It's just cold dry habitat where it breaks down slowly (and still its half life is measured in months, not years).

As for your cliff analogy that will need more explanation before it is helpful, rather than merely vaguely ominous.

Emerson White wrote:
My vision of permaculture is not organic at all.

If you take the baggage from traditional agriculture into permaculture, then you aren't practicing permaculture.  It's some sort of hybrid.  You may be perfectly content with your results, and if it works for you, great, but I would stop short of trying to redefine what permaculture is.

Permaculture is perpetually at risk of having its message diluted and bastardized as it percolates through a society that only seems to value it as a source of a few specialty gardening techniques.

A misstep with a GMO per your previous post.

Glyphospates, I don't think break down as rapidly as you propose. Its migration to groundwater is only now being investigated in heavy use areas since it was initially thought to break down more rapidly. It's ability to degrade prior to harvest is sometimes an issue if a user applies too late in the season. It can persist for up to two years in food products.
http://www.poptel.org.uk/panap/pest/pe-gly.htm

Our versions of permaculture are definitely at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Like Kermit says "It ain't easy being green".

I would like to think that all discussions in these forums are:

A)  far, far beyond the discussion of any chemical pesticides

B)  more about building good things, than about wagging one's finger at people doing bad things.

If you wish to grow GMO's and you are CONVINCED that they will not harm humans, then why don't you try eating them? Eat them like the starving impoverished refugees in Africa are FORCED to by America's vicious and pathetic excuse for humanitarian aid.

There are many studies linking GMO's to harm in humans and animals, why don't you do your research before you go waving someone else's flag around.

If GMO's really were safe, then the companies that own the pattents would allow peer reviewed studdies to take place.

Now that I'm reading this thread again ...  how did I miss the part where somebody on these forums actually supports GMO. 

This is definitely outside of my comfort zone for these forums.  And I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it yet. 

There are lots of forums where the debate goes on and on about GMO stuff.  Or herbicides or pesticides.  Or a variety of non organic practices.  These forums are for those folks that are definitely on the organic side of the discussion and now we can optimize our choices without having to get into that debate.

This makes for a rather awkward situation.  I'm going to be watching this thread closely while I try to figure out the best path to proceed.

I do eat GMO's. I've even eaten experimental GMO's and had blood drawn for serological work.

Many of these GMO's have also been reported to harm animals, you do not make a claim against that? What about how wild animals won't eat GMO's? About how any domestic animal given a choice between GMO and hybrid they would eat hybrid. Finally, if you defend BT it does kill insects and clearly not just those insects that eat it, many kinds of insects that comes in contact with the pollen dies and bees come to collect water from a dew in the morning from corn plants that are BT or ROUNDUPREADY die.

of course I must regress that these things are only things I have read, I have not first hand GMO experience, except I can remember eating a bag of chips not that long ago that had conventional soybean oil and getting very ill for the rest of the day, mostly dizzy and lost my lunch...

I am a really big guy, but if I eat a huge bag of chips with crappy oil like that, but I feel like total shit after, but fine if it were say corn chips with less oil.

Frito Lay vowed to be non-gmo, probably because GMO has such crap flavor compared.

Wild animals do eat GMO's. In the studies I have read the animals who are harmed eating a GMO product that has been released are always harmed either (A) eating something that is drenched in roundup or another herbicide, which on its own will kill animals or (B) Eating something that is not a food species and will not make it into the food chain (like industrial strains of E. coli) or (C) both. I have not gotten my hands on the aberdeen snowdrop Lechtin potato rat study, just haven't felt the urge to look into that mess.

The thing about the wild animals is patently false. If planting GMO soy or Corn was protective against deer they would have 100% market penetration. Yes there are anecdotes about cows escaping and walking past a crib full of GMO corn to eat the regular corn (always a friend of a friend, these farmers never seem to give a first hand account) but there are a million factors at play, something as simple as the placement of a garden hose or flagpole or mirror can make animals choose one feeding site over another, and no one would ever report animals eating their GMO crop and skipping the conventional because no one would ever be surprised or care.

Actually the BT does only kill the insects that eat it, the BT toxin only works on special receptors inside the digestive tract, if they don't make it into the digestive tract they cannot harm it. Yes the pollen does have the protein in it, the pollen causes the same result, but luckily the pollen doesn't travel for hundreds of yards like the mist off of the pesticide sprays. Also BT is pretty selective One knocks out Lepodoptera one for Choleoptera, and one for Mosquitoes (not used in GMO's yet), unlike the pesticides that are used BT can never harm a bird, or a bee, or a people, or a lacewing fly. The Bees definitely do not die, that was tested pretty extensively and found to not be a factor in any known ailment in bees, or reduce bee fitness.

That dizziness could have been psychosomatic, that is fairly common in people who are afraid of GMO's, or it could have been from many other things, it may surprise you but those GMO's were tested out for health effects on hundreds to thousands of people, however the recipe in the chips never was, just checked for taste. To my knowledge the difference between the BT toxin in the GMO and the one in the Bt that gets sprayed onto the organic crops comes down to one formyl group on a methonine that's no where near the active site.

Frito-lay vowed to be GMO-free because customers demanded that they be GMO free, because there is so much disinformation and unfounded fear over GMO's, its a self fulfilling prophecy.

I will try to word this in a way that keeps everyone in that comfort zone of perfection.
We could cite link after link of studies that support either of the claims of safety or danger in the science of GMO. I prefer to err on the side of caution.
Emmerson, your knowing which side of the fence I stand on (a non GMO guy) can you say with any certainty that all GMO's will be safe and have no lasting detriment?
Your previous premise that the eradication of rats would be a good thing through GMO's is well, actually frightening to me. Not that I have any particular love of rats or some Buddhist leanings but find such a personal view is for lack of a better description, omnipotent.
The rapidity of what is possible through laboratory genetic modification is fascinating but just because we can doesn't mean we should.
If one farts under a blanket it is contained, but if they throw the blanket over my head after the fart I would have to react. I prefer that farters keep their farts to themselves.
Not being a religious guy this may sound odd but I still am not  ready to turn that spark of life or death over to the finger of man.

I am tempted to just delete the whole thread and be done with it.

Instead, I'm going to leave the thread here and lock it. 

These forums are for discussion of stuff beyond the GMO/pesticides debates.  If any of you feel like you have a whole lot to say one way or another on these topics, I would like to suggest another site.