Thread by @eatcookwrite

Where to start?
At the beginning of this period, I was anti-GMO in the "They are 'safe' but I have issues with monoculture, pesticides, patents, too much corn, Big Agribusiness, and technophilic hubris" version of anti-GMO.

https://twitter.com/jennysplitter/status/1205460776993067008

None of that held up to scrutiny regarding GMOs. Of those issues that have stuck with me, though in different formulations than I had in 2009, none of them are tied to genetic engineering, simply adjacent in some cases.

Post-pro-GMO conversion, what have I changed my mind about?

I still am enthusiastic about open source biotech breeding, but have come to see it as much harder to pull off than I originally thought. The mechanics are trickier once you start pulling on the yarn.

Through R. Ford Denison's 'Darwinian Agriculture' I've become much more skeptical about some of the moonshot projects –– new C4 crops, nitrogen-fixing grains.

amzn.to/2suaXSf

He makes a good case that traits that would be useful in natural environments are going to be really, really hard to get to without serious trade-offs or evolution would have engineered them by now.

Better focus on traits that are useful in domestication, but not in the wild

For a long time, I agreed with the idea that the Bt and Round Up Ready traits were something to be talked around, diverting to more 'virtuous' biotech crops like Rainbow Papaya and in development crops like Golden Rice, Golden Banana, drought resistant maize.

I think that's wrong. I won't make excuses or downplay the two most significant innovations in sustainable agriculture.

fafdl.org/blog/2018/11/1…

I had come to think of Monsanto (now part of Bayer) as a company with garden variety ethical issues, as the typical bill of goods turned to out to be mostly false, and I got to spend some time around HQ for a few days as a judge in their Sustainable Yield Pledge Awards.

The glyphosate ghostwriting episode was disappointing, if understandable.

The Dicamba Debacle and the way it has been handled really put a major dent in the company's ethical profile as far as I'm concerned.

I think the major change in my thinking over the last 5 years has been realizing just how stubbornly difficult it is to move products through the pipeline. And it's not just regulatory hurdles. It's just really hard to create new, useful stuff.

I wrote this 5 years ago and I was still too optimistic about what might be happening 5 years later. Maybe not optimistic in the piece, but in my general outlook at the time.

fafdl.org/blog/2014/09/3…

~fin~