by Steffan Browning
I was interested to hear Landcorp Chief Executive Chris Kelly’s thoughts on National Radio last week about how they get the best out of their farms.
The genetic gains that have been made (without genetic engineering I might add) in breeding means that production rates keep improving.
He very clearly said that “farmers will find that by reducing stock numbers they can actually increase production.”
Reducing stocking densities will have all sorts of good spin offs for the environmental impact of the industry too so we need to be continuing down this path of research.
What we don’t need to be continuing down is the path of genetically engineered crops, as we are finding more and more reasons not to. I am currently travelling around the country with two Australian farmers who are revealing the realities of living with GE crops in their communities. Join us at one of our North Island stops on the tour, the details are here, and here is some more information.
Have a look at some photos from the tour so far:
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Steffan Browning on Wed, August 8th, 2012
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Genetic engineering is all well and good, as a research topic. The problem I see is that it still is, research.
Once it’s released, it’s almost, if not entirely impossible, to take back. It has the potential for a small farm that grows a GM crop to contaminate the entire world, with a strain which could be devastating to us all.
It’s also not needed, as it’s not, unlike what some people might suggest, a silver bullet to our problems. We have solutions already that work that aren’t GM.
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A one way street that GM grain, and not one I care to travel until I am convinced it is not a dead-end as well.
What the world needs is to control itself. We are good at kicking the can down the road. We are not good at actually doing what needs doing. The ever growing demand for planets (how many earths do we need if we all consume like the bankers wish us to?) ought to give us pause, but it does not.
“Homo-Sapiens” – an oxymoron, a tragedy and a comedy in one poorly chosen name.
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I heard something interesting on the radio today, in Talking Heads (Sunday 4pm; no link yet):
- Chinese consumers love Fonterra, for blowing the whistle on melamine in milk
- Chinese consumers hate and fear GE, because they can’t inspect whether it’s bad
- it’s beginning to be hard to sell US food in China, because they won’t disclose whether it’s GE
There’s a problem with making instrumental arguments for ethical positions, which is that, when the instrumental basis changes, people have forgotten the ethical reason; but it’s *sooo* tempting.
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