I'm sure manure is used as fertilizers for plant based food in some parts of the world. What's the difference?

Surely making use of the manure for conversion to food is much better for the health of the planet than leaving it around to pollute nearby water sources such as rivers, lakes, and oceans.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Uberdude's "drive-by" comment was on-topic, pointing out the viability of a large population of vegetarians. I assumed that yours was likewise on-topic, and designed to highlight the fallacies in his comment. I didn't realize that in a thread about a very complex issue that you were just spouting out at the mouth.

As to the quoted article, the point I wanted to make was less about fossil fuels, and more replying to your question as to whether it's viable to replace meat protein with plant protein. Your assertion that some land is better suited to feeding protein-producing animals than growing protein-producing plants is one I can't verify. Much of the fields now used to grow plants were once forests. Amazing what can be done when people set their minds to it.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Checking in then!

I think genetic engineering is the way forward, that it provides enormous benefits, has very few downsides and is, sadly, heavily over-regulated. I admire companies like Monsanto. They do good work while putting up with an incredible amount of baseless fear and anger from poorly informed anti-science types.

I have a weakly held belief that genetically engineered crops are a good idea, mostly because I believe they can increase yields and therefore reduce environmental impacts. Monsanto's treatment of intellectual property in their products is awful, however.

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Occupy Babel!

It is? Why?

Something that I have always thought was about the vegan movement that was a-moral, is the way they anthropomorphize animals and project human feelings onto the animals. I feel it really does two disservices. 1) It prevents animals from being treated in a manner that they prefer. 2) It opens up the door to treat people like certain other animals. An example of the former is, what about vegan cats, an example of the latter are any number of lewd sayings. I say stop it, treat your animals good for the animals they are. I can list numerous examples, but I will save it for later posts.

Must be talking about the enormous benefits to the shareholders of such companies
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... rbicide-p/
http://sustainablepulse.com/wp-content/ ... Seneff.pdf
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/01/sup ... -full.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Assurance_Provision
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_a ... santo.html

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I'm sorry tchan, but this is exactly the stuff I'm talking about. Lets take them from the top:

1. A study by Eric Seralini. Seralini is widely known for his flawed and biased studies. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair
2. A bogus paper: http://www.examiner.com/article/bogus-p ... e-internet
3. See 5
4. Good law, which protects farmers and seed suppliers from frivolous lawsuits and abuse of the legal system. Basically an "innocent until proven guilty" provision.
5. Same case as 3. OSGATA sued Monsanto, claiming that Monsanto sues small farmers over accidental contamination of their crops with patented GMO crops. Except Monsanto has actually never sued anyone for accidental contamination. Really more of a publicity lawsuit than anything. Dismissed by the judge as a "transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists."

So yeah, bad links.

Actually, they did try it on. In the (actual) lawsuit where that Canadian farmer was sued over infringing with "Roundup Ready Rape" they initially attempted to get a ruling that all they had to show was that the genes had entered his crop, even were that accidental, a natural process.

They lost that <<the decision that they really wanted>>

They then proceeded to produce evidence that "this was no accident" and the jury agreed and found the farmer guilty. I must say that I agree with that since in a civil suit the rule isn't "without a reasonable doubt" but "preponderance of evidence" and the actions of that farmer did appear to be "selecting for resistance to Roundup" (the possibly accidentally introduced genes). Otherwise, why would he have been applying "Roundup" to his supposedly non-resistant crop.

In other words, Monsanto won the battle but lost the war. They were not trying to win a claim against just this farmer for his intentional actions but to use this case to win broad ownership rights even when "Nature did it" <<as was sure to happen>>

As one example, in Iceland, the most common crop that's grown is hay, because much of the country is not suitable to the large scale cultivation of grains and vegetables. Most of the vegetables on the island, if they aren't imported, are grown in greenhouses, which really don't scale. This is not to say that there are no grains and such grown there, but compared to pasture and meadows, it's quite difficult to do on a scale to feed the entire island. Unsurprisingly, the only real way to convert grass and hay to food for people is to use it to raise animals, and they have a diet that's heavy on sheep and other meats as a result, along with seafood and whatever can be hunted.

Similarly, the Inuit of the North American tundra traditionally have a diet that is almost all meat due to a lack of alternatives, and I don't see a time when large scale agriculture is viable on permafrost.

Do you have source for that? I'm assuming you're talking about the Schmeiser case, and as far as a I know all charges related to the 1997 crop (where Schmeiser claimed accidental contamination) were dropped prior to trial.

Correct.

What Monsanto actually wanted was a decision covering accidental contamination (that regardless of how their genes got there; it was theirs). They lost that part of it Was disallowed. I guess that's what you meant before the trial. There are always preliminary stages, motions presented to the judge, before the actual trial is underway.

By disallowed I mean that there was a ruling that if accidental then Schmeiser wouldn't owe them anything for the genes simply being in his seeds.

However the case went on over Scheiser's using the patented genetic property and in fact (re)selecting his seeds for it. He would have no liability for simply growing his rape them just like any other rape seeds that were not resistant to "Roundup". But he was spraying with "Roundup".

Gee, my rape field next to my neighbor's who is growing Monanto's seed is going to have some flowers fertilized by that pollen and so some of the seeds will carry the genes. OK, I collect those seeds and plant in a test plot and when they come up I spray with Roundup killing off the plants that don't contain the "Roundup Ready" gene. When the surviving plants of this test plot go to seed I collect that and use that as my "saved seed" and so now I have Roundup resistant rape without paying Monsanto for it.

Thank you for the info on the bogus paper, I wasn't aware of that.

Discounting the scientific paper about the harm of Roundup, there are still issues which need to be considered.

We all should know that the seeds provided by Monsanto is a neutered seed which cannot reproduce itself in the hands of the farmer and must be bought from the company season after season.
It is also a fact that there are patents which have been nicknamed "Terminator" which go beyond just neutering the seeds. http://nature.berkeley.edu/srr/Alliance ... terile.htm
You may say that these measures are used to ensure the profitability of such companies, but the implications go beyond this.

1. If a giant company controls the seeds for food crops and other plants, it can use it's financial power to crowd out non-neutered seed food crops which are less competitive. Once the competition is crowded out, it will try to be the only source of food crops. Everyone will depend on their seeds. Let's say that these seed use the patents which require chemical inducers to turn on desirable genes. What if such genes were such that if it were not induced, the crop is basically not usable as food? This means people MUST pay for their patented chemicals to make food. What happens if the company has a supply disruption which causes the required chemicals to be unavailable for a season? Would it mean worldwide famine since everyone depends on those seeds for food?

2. You say it is a good law which prevents frivolous lawsuits and abuse of the legal system and that it's basically an "innocent until proven guilty" provision.
That's very nice for the companies indeed. But what are the possible unintended consequences of the law? What if the company makes a mistake and introduces an undesirable gene into the plant which causes slowly destroyed human cells but is difficult to prove as a cause. What would be required by the opposition which only theorizes the case but cannot prove it? If it is so difficult to legally ban a product which is known to cause cancer such as tobacco, how much harder would it be to force the company to take their product off the market when much is not known about it's long term effects? Meanwhile under the law, it can continue to market the crop as it has not been proven to be harmful.

In a perfect world biotechnology could be used to provide humanity with an abundance of food, but in a world of profitability the goal is mainly to provide profit for the company to ensure it's growth, wealth and power. And as I said before to provide enormous benefits to the shareholders.

The part I worry about is unintended consequences which could go out of control. Perhaps you think of Monsanto and similar companies as saviors of the world. I think of what could happen when a company cannot handle the demon in the bottle such as in Fukushima.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Monsanto is large multi headed conglomerate with a really nasty history(from pcbs to Asian orange), make no mistake. In my opinion the genetic engineering gets a lot of criticism, and no one looks at what they(Monsanto and Others) do with good old fashioned breeding, take trans-fats for example you don't need genetic splicing to optimize the dry weight of corn by producing poor nutrient food.

Furthermore the genetic engineered trait that I like is the BT trait, pesticides are much worse than glycosophates(round up), so eliminating those isn't horrible, furthermore Monsanto's patent on round up has expired so they are moving away from round up as a business model anyway, and for the most part round up was just a way to monetize their breeding of traits, sell the seed make the money on the chemical, because as you can see they can't really prevent certain beneficial traits from being reseeded, except for corn which is a infertile hybrid cross.

I wanted to weigh in a little bit on this general point. Probably a shift away from meat production would *not* worsen the above problems to that great of a degree.

There is a well-known rule of thumb from basic ecology. Namely, the "10 percent rule", which refers to the phenomenon that as you go up each approximate "level" in a food chain or food web, the amount of biomass supported at that level is typically only on the order of one tenth of that below, owing to the fact that the amount of energy transferred up to that level by organisms consuming other organisms is only about a tenth of that below. This is one of those things that's totally obvious when you actually think about it. Pretty much any animal, humans included, consume far, far more calories than they themselves are composed of, with the vast majority being exhausted as waste heat rather than being available to the next animal up in the food chain.

Some brief searching around suggests that the "10 percent rule" is in fact the right rough order of magnitude for livestock and other animals raised for food - the exact number varies a bit, but animals raised for food generally need to be fed on the order of 10 times as many calories in animal feed as are produced in meat. This rule would suggest that quite a bit of the impact of current meat production is not actually in the "raising animals part", but rather in the "having to grow more plants in order to feed the animals" part. And in the absence of further evidence, given the factor of 10 here, I would be strongly inclined to believe that reducing meat consumption in favor of more grains, beans, and other major plant-based calorie sources would reduce our environmental impact by a fair bit, at least on the margin.

Certainly, it seems unlikely that it would worsen the problems currently involved with growing crops, pesticides, etc, since the above would suggest that reducing meat consumption in favor of, say, consuming more grains would *also* reduce the amount of grains that would have to be grown.

This is even accounting for things like meat being more protein-rich as a calorie source than most plant-based foods, and for the fact some land might be far more suited to growing feed for animals than other production, and similar such things. It takes quite a lot to beat a factor of 10, and it's implausible that this would be case for all or even nearly all of land currently used this way, so one would still expect a significant reduction on the margin.

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However, there is another point I know of that moderates this and makes it less clear-cut, although it does support some aspects of it:
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-20 ... esity.html

What charts like the one in that link indicate is that calories in general are already extremely cheap. Primarily what people pay for in food is not calories, but rather something like "quality", and "quality" appears to be expensive regardless of whether it comes from plants or animals. Which loosely suggests that switching away from meat might not reduce environmental impact or might actually increase impact if people simply replaced it calorie-for-calorie with "high quality" costly-to-produce vegetarian foods. (One hopes that despite all the other complicating and unrelated factors involved in food prices, food prices are still at least somewhat correlated with the resource costs of transporting and producing the food!). Granted, for most vegetables measuring things by cost per calorie is particularly unfair, since they're grown and eaten not for the calories, but for other nutrients. Things like meat and grains and beans typically form the "main" calorie sources for people, where vegetables and fruits typically do not.

The particular chart linked doesn't show the cost of things like ground beef, but googling around for typical prices per calorie (hard, because prices vary a lot!) finds things like ground beef often are slightly more expensive than various grains/breads/beans. And while the absolute difference is usually small, it is often a decent relative difference (sometimes a factor of 2 or so), which does support the earlier argument that the environmental cost of growing grains and consuming them directly should be less than the cost of growing animal feed and feeding then to animals in order to consume the animals, at least in calorie terms.

Absent deeper research into the matter, it seems extremely reasonable based on the above to conclude that reducing meat consumption a little from current levels in developed countries in favor of things like plain grains/rice/beans probably would result in a lower overall environmental impact, although arguably not significantly enough to matter relative to other things, and possibly not if the reduction were accompanied by a significant enough increase in consumption of things that were more expensive and difficult to produce. But it seems unlikely that it would result in a significantly *greater* environmental impact.

I think the other 90% of the energy isn't 100% wasted! consider free range cows in the high desert of New Mexico, what happens to all the animal waste products, they go back into the environment, and in a form that is in more fertile than it was before. It may sound weird, but there are people out there genetically engineering animal feed to produce more usable animal by products.

To me, the disappointing thing here is the ease with which otherwise intelligent people uncritically believe and spread such misinformation. It took all of 30 seconds to find out that that paper was bogus.

And now you immediately go and write another thing which 30 seconds of research would have told you is false. Neither Monsanto, nor any other bio-engineering company, has ever sold terminator seeds commercially.

And the thing is, within two posts you post claims that Monsanto's seeds are sterile and that they contaminate neighbouring non-GMO fields. How can sterile seeds contaminate other fields? These two claims cannot both be true. It seems to me that that should have set off your bullshit detector.



This is a thing to worry about, but at its core this is not really about GMO. This is about monopolies and anti-competitive behaviour, and the risks that that brings. This is what regulation is for. But the entire debate around this is poisoned by all the misinformation around GMO.



Suppose someone claims that learning go stunts the development of the brains of children. They cannot prove this, they only theorize it. Do you think we should then ban the learning of go? Just to be sure?

We are talking about a situation where extensive testing has proven a crop to be safe, to the best of our knowledge. If someone then sues, they must prove the opposite. The only thing this provision does is say: As long as the lawsuit, and any appeals, are still running, and there is no final verdict, we shall maintain the status quo. Farmers can continue to plant and sell the crop until there is such a final verdict. This is similar to saying "we do not execute someone convicted of murder until the appeals process has run its course". And really, it is sad that such legislation is necessary, but there are a lot of people out there that are convinced that any GMO crop is bad, and that will sue regardless of whether they have any specific evidence of harm.



I don't think of Monsanto as saviours of the world. I think of them of a company that provides a product and tries to make a profit doing so. No different from, say, Google or Walmart.

And I think there is an interesting and legitimate debate about what we should and should not accept in the pursuit of profit. And there is an interesting debate about the pros and cons of various goals that GMOs can accomplish. But sadly, when it comes to GMO, all such debate almost immediately gets poisoned by all the lies and the bullshit.

You have really been brainwashed by the media, haven't you Herman?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Ah yes, the inevitable personal attacks that also always plague GMO debates.

Nothing personal at all. 95% of the world's population is brainwashed by the media.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).