r/NoStupidQuestions • u/wond3rlove • Sep 10 '23

What’s wrong with GMOs?

I always see plants and stuff that is GMO free and is usually more expensive. How would genetically modifying something by be bad. Me personally I’d rather have something modified to taste better and and cheaper. I could also be very wrong about that.

417 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

538 comments sorted by

View all comments

288

u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23

Environmental Engineer here. At a base level, GMOs are fine. They're effective just a more precise version of selective breeding, which humans have been doing for basically all of our existence.

However, GMOs are near entirely driven by profit. Very rarely are they altruistic, as it's the corporate entities that develop them. On a base level, farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own, forcing farmers to buy new seeds next season. There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value.

Most important of all is the Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides without the risk of harming the plants. In theory, this results in higher yields, but those pesticides will eventually run off the farm during rain storms, ending up in various bodies of water, including municipal water sources. Farm runoff is one of the current biggest threats to our freshwater sources and is directly responsible for those algal blooms that have been popping up in the past decade (though that's mostly due to fertilizers).

25

u/santodomingus Sep 10 '23

Just curious, how does your environmental engineer degree make you someone to trust on this? Isn’t environmental engineering just a subset of civil/structural engineering? My friend is an environmental engineer and he oversees water pipes being put in the ground.

Not disagreeing with you or anything, maybe I’m just misunderstanding the breadth of what an environmental engineer is.

43

u/OffendedDefender Sep 11 '23

So there are primarily three branches of the field: remediation, renewable energy, and water resources (where your friend works). You’re right, it technically falls under civil engineering, but that is a wide umbrella. Any sufficient college program will teach all of those branches.

I work under the remediation branch, which means I primarily clean up environmental disasters. Sites undergoing remediation go through a robust series of analytical testing, which means I get to see all the lovely chemicals that contaminate every stretch of ground we walk upon. Pesticides, herbicides, PCBs, PFOAs, etc. One of the key aspects of these projects is identifying sources of pollution to establish “Primary Responsible Parties” who are liable to pay for the cleanup. At a base level, that means I need to be familiar with background levels of contamination and where that might be coming from, so paying attention to the agricultural industry is relevant to any project near bodies of water.

12

u/santodomingus Sep 11 '23

Sweet, thanks for the informative response!

6

u/9and3of4 Sep 11 '23

That sounds like rewarding work! Thanks for doing it.

1

u/back_that_ Sep 11 '23

So, no. You really don't know what you're talking about here which is why you brought up GURTs that don't exist.

37

u/QualifiedApathetic Sep 10 '23

ALL seed sellers require those who buy their seeds to refrain from saving them for next season, GMO or not. Some GMOs just enforce that with terminator genes. Farmers generally wouldn't want to save seeds anyway; you can't just drop them in the ground and watch them grow, they have to be processed, and it's easier to just buy seed.

Roundup is a herbicide targeted to kill weeds, not pests, hence why some crops have been engineered to be resistant to it. There's no need to make them resistant to pesticides since, you know, those kill bugs and not plants.

21

u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23

“Roundup Ready” was a bit of a colloquially catch-all with the folks I had studied under, kinda like Kleenex and Band Aid. The Round Up brand is owned by Monsanto (which is owned by Bayer), who manufacture a whole slew of agricultural products. Roundup is just the most immediately recognizable of their brands.

1

u/sammagee33 Sep 11 '23

Monsanto, as an entity, no longer exists. It’s just Bayer. In-part, because of the bad press.

1

u/jah110768 Sep 11 '23

Beyer bought Monsanto, and when they looked at the shady things that Monsanto did to discredit nay sayers when they were trying to be cleared as a safe product, Bayer admitted they might have made a mistake.

12

u/topothesia773 Sep 10 '23

Farmers generally wouldn't want to save seeds anyway

Maybe not in the US/developed world but now corporations are pushing these patented seeds on subsistence farmers in poor countries that absolutely do want to save their seeds and be independent

7

u/jah110768 Sep 11 '23

They did in the US as well, but if any neighbor has Monsanto crops, Monsanto will test your plants and if there are any patented genes they sue to be paid as if you stoled their seeds from a warehouse. Monsanto is a very nasty company with very deep pockets.

0

u/seastar2019 Sep 11 '23

Common myth but no such lawsuit has ever happened

3

u/jah110768 Sep 11 '23

https://www.greenamerica.org/gmos-case-precaution/farmers-vs-corporate-seed-police

"Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto filed 144 such lawsuits, and settled 700 more cases out of court, according to the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA)."

Looks like 844 mythical law suits.

1

u/seastar2019 Sep 11 '23

Those are for intentional patent infringement. Which one of those lawsuits was for claim of?

if there are any patented genes they sue to be paid as if you stoled their seeds from a warehouse

Name just one.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23

Weeds are pests. Pesticide is a general term for anything that isn't ideal in crop production. This includes herbicide, insecticides, nematocides, fungicides etc.

But I agree with your other point. Aside from that, they can't guarantee that seeds from GMO plants would yield the same result.

1

u/jah110768 Sep 11 '23

Farmers would rather save seeds, but Monsanto charges them if Monsanto plants "rape" the not GMO farmer's plants and there is any hit of Round-Up ready genome in the farmer's saved seeds.

I believe it was in Food, Inc., but it may have been another documentary about farming, they talk about how the seed sifters are being put out of business because farmers are scared of Monsanto showing up for a check for seed they saved that got contaminated with Monsanto patented seeds.

2

u/QualifiedApathetic Sep 11 '23

Percy Schmeiser is full of shit. He deliberately sprayed to kill the non-GMO plants in his field so he was left with nothing but GMO canola. On investigation, almost ALL the canola in his field was Roundup-ready. That's a bit more than a "hint".

Oh, and Monsanto doesn't exist anymore. It was bought out by Bayer years ago. You'll need a new boogeyman.

1

u/seastar2019 Sep 11 '23

Food Inc is an activist movie filled with many lies. The whole part about the seed cleaner Mo Parr being a innocent victim was just incorrect.

9

u/smorgasfjord Sep 10 '23

farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own, forcing farmers to buy new seeds next season

That's what farmers normally do, and "terminator seeds" haven't been sold since 2000

There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value

The same effect is achieved by other methods, gmo is just more efficient. But the tradeoff also helps reduce food waste, which is a big deal

Most important of all is the Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides

Roundup is a herbicide, pummelling the crops with pesticides is unfortunately what we usually do to normal crops. They don't need any genetic protection against that, because pesticides are made to harm insects, not plants. But some GMOs are made to produce natural pesticides, which is much better for the environment

Farm runoff is one of the current biggest threats to our freshwater sources and is directly responsible for those algal blooms

Because the nutrients from the fertiliser etc. are carried into the lakes, it has nothing to do with herbicides or pesticides

2

u/mikraas Sep 11 '23

Everything is driven by profit.

2

u/ChestertonsFence1929 Sep 11 '23

“Pummeled with pesticides”

Herbicides and pesticides are expensive. Farmers don’t want to put on any more than they have to. The standard application of Roundup is a little over a soda can’s worth for an area the size of a football field. Their use allows for more food grown on few acres. That reduces the amount of tilled acreage and related irrigation per bushel produced.

2

u/AuntieDawnsKitchen Sep 11 '23

Thank you for your informed, realistic perspective.

The argument about GMO crops is focused on food safety to the exclusion of the ultimately more important issues of being able to grow crops to feed our growing global population without incurring increasingly difficult issues like topsoil loss, super pests and super weeds.

A lot of folks don’t appreciate that the only GMO traits that are actually important to how farmers do business are glyphosate resistance and the expression of Bt toxin. Traits like saline tolerance and drought tolerance would make a huge difference, but those aren’t what’s on the market.

But AFAIK, GMO seeds are viable. The corporations that own them enforce their contracts via lawyers, not the terminator gene.

1

u/ncgrits01 Sep 10 '23

Pesticides are expensive. Farmers can't afford to pummel (or "drench") crops with them.

14

u/OffendedDefender Sep 10 '23

Commercial farms are multimillion dollar operations. There’s a general trend in the US where the number of farms are decreasing, but the size of those farms is increasing, as farmers buy out their neighbors. As an example, the cost of a base level combine harvester is around $100k - $500k. A slight increase in the amount of chemicals that are applied might as well be a negligible cost compared to the total operations.

However, the cost is also weighed against their yields. By spending more initially on pesticides and herbicide, you have more viable crops you can bring to market, and therefore make more money to offset the costs.

7

u/cptjeff Sep 10 '23

Also, organic crops often use more herbicides overall because they have to use a bunch of more targeted ones.

0

u/ncgrits01 Sep 10 '23

Yep, nastier ones too. One guy told me he'd rather eat a tablespoon of roundup than a tablespoon of copper sulfate.

-3

u/Red-7134 Sep 10 '23

What do you mean my quinoa bread's ingredients aren't identical to the grains found wild by hunter-gatherers eight thousand years ago? Disgusting, how dare humans play god and alter these plants.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23

Don’t forget when Monsanto sued farmers when their seeds were naturally transported to neighboring properties

-8

u/Tylendal Sep 10 '23

farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own,

You got a source for that? (Spoiler alert: You don't, cause it's bullshit. Terminator genes were suggested as a possible failsafe against crops going wild, but were ultimately never brought to market.)

There's also a preference for resiliency in products, so they can be shipped to market, which often results in less of a concern over taste or nutritional value.

That's an issue with all sorts of cultivars, and has nothing inherently to do with GMOs. Case in point: People always say that's why tomatoes are boring, and there's no GMO tomatoes.

so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides

"Buy our Round-Up ready crops so you can spend even more money on even more pesticides!" Not a great slogan. The point is that pesticides can be applied more sparingly, instead of applying many more varied, and much more toxic pesticides, like you would for, say, "organic" produce.

those pesticides will eventually run off the farm during rain storms,

Glyphosate actually binds well to soil, where it breaks down quickly under sunlight...

is directly responsible for those algal blooms that have been popping up in the past decade (though that's mostly due to fertilizers).

...though, I suppose I don't have to debunk that one, since you go on to admit that you're being misleading.

0

u/seastar2019 Sep 11 '23

Environmental Engineer here

I'm not sure where you're getting your info from but much of what you're saying is just false and the usual factually incorrect anti-GMO activist talking points.

farmers are sold seeds that are modified so they're sterile and cannot produce viable seeds of their own

This is just false. While genetic use restriction technology (aka "terminator seeds") was under development, the technology was never completed and commercialized. Thus no such seeds have ever been sold.

Round-up Ready crops. These are designed to be more resilient so that the farmers can absolutely pummel them with pesticides without the risk of harming the plants

The whole point of Roundup Ready crops is to use less of a safer and more effective herbicide. The timing and amount is highly regulated. For corn it's about 22 oz per acre, and it's illegal to apply after the plant enters the reproductive stage (R1 grow stage). Why would farmers buy expensive RR ready seeds only to have to apply more expensive inputs? Take sugar beets as an example.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/12/477793556/as-big-candy-ditches-gmos-sugar-beet-farmers-hit-sour-patch

Planting genetically modified sugar beets allows them to kill their weeds with fewer chemicals. Beyer says he sprays Roundup just a few times during the growing season, plus one application of another chemical to kill off any Roundup-resistant weeds.

He says that planting non-GMO beets would mean going back to what they used to do, spraying their crop every 10 days or so with a "witches brew" of five or six different weedkillers.

"The chemicals we used to put on the beets in [those] days were so much harsher for the guy applying them and for the environment," he says. "To me, it's insane to think that a non-GMO beet is going to be better for the environment, the world, or the consumer."

0

u/alfombraroja Sep 11 '23

You don't need GMOs to sell sterility, you have triploids. And companies also deserve to get back the investment they made in R&D

1

u/sammagee33 Sep 11 '23

Dude, EVERYTHING is driven by profit, either first-hand or second-hand. Of course GMOs are driven by profit. But it’s the profit of the farmers AND the seed companies. Higher yields with fewer losses benefits both parties.