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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Other methods have been used in the meantime, for decades. But they are only so effective. Vitamins, other foods, and other methods have been in process. But they each have their own limitations, both on supply to remote areas and getting local peoples to take up those methods.

    The latter is the biggest issue, especially with trying to introduce alternative foods like carrots. If they aren’t a part of the local cuisine, many of the individuals, who are often subsistence farmers who have limited land and only grow explicitly what they need to survive, aren’t interested.

    Hence why golden rice was developed, because rice is a main part of the local diet in these areas and so it is much easier to get them to adopt growing a different cultivar of something they already eat than it is to convince them to grow a completely different food.








  • Oh hey. I didn’t realize anyone was still pushing that long since debunked canard.

    The guy in question was a lying hack, who purposefully set up his fields next to a farmer who grew the GM crop and then purposefully harvested the crops that were along the connecting edge of the field so he could replant them without having to have bought them. When he was called out on that, he lied and blamed cross-contamination, but there was no way for his subsequent harvest to be 99+% the GM crop from cross-contamination unless he had collected and planted them on purpose.

    So, yeah, he was sued. Including by his neighboring farmer for theft.




  • They’ve been doing that for two decades. Golden rice could have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives by now. Especially the later versions we’re on now. Hopefully it doesn’t violate the self-promotion rules for me to link an article I wrote a long, long time ago on Golden Rice 3.0 and its improved benefits.

    I haven’t kept up with the project since, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re on 4.0 or beyond by now, the scientists involved have been working tirelessly for years to make the rice even better and more beneficial for the people who need it.

    And anti-science idiots like Greenpeace have been fighting them every step of the way.











  • See, I was good with the article up until it started pushing long since debunked pseudoscience claims about glyphosate. The chemical biochemistry of it is clear and, yes, there have been dozens of studies over the years, which have shown that it is actually one of the lower impact pesticides used out there. Anyone using IARC as a source (when that’s not even what IARC is for or about) is betraying their own anti-science stance.

    And then they bring up nonsense about organic farming. Organic farming, on average, ends up having to use more pesticides because they use non-specific “natural” ones that are less effective against targeted weeds and thus have to be re-applied more often, such as pyrethrins and spinosad. Furthermore, the use of manure instead of options like drip irrigation causes more nitrogen leaching into the water table than conventional farming methods. If all of our farms were organic farms, this issue would be way worse. Example source: https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/18/333/2014/

    And that’s without counting the higher land usage requirements for an equivalent amount of food production from an organic farm compared to a non-organic one. If all our farms were organic, the amount of farmland would be way higher and there’s be way less wilderness areas.