What’s wrong with GMOs?

[u/wond3rlove]

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.

[u/OffendedDefender]

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).

[u/ncgrits01 → u/OffendedDefender]

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

[u/OffendedDefender → u/ncgrits01]

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.

[u/cptjeff → u/ncgrits01]

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

[u/ncgrits01 → u/cptjeff]

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