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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Water is a very California problem at the second... Not every part of the USA is in drought, but CA sure has. Nearly all of CAs water goes to agriculture. It's a shame there's so much snobbery and false information around GMOs... Having crops that could be grown with less water would be a huge benefit to the world. Amazes me that people will take the scientific highroad to global warming, but a witchcraft based approach with GMOs. That's where I'd put my focus

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The problem most people have with GMOs is not that they have been genetically modified per se, it's the pesticides and herbicides which are then flooded on those GMO crops. In fact, everyone I know who eats organic is not doing so to avoid the GMO component, but they are doing so to avoid the biocides.

And by the way, those biocides get into water supplies too.

Isn't the point of GMO to reduce reliance on pesticides?

Both methods are used. I recall (but am probably wrong out of date)

- Monsanto's "roundup ready" line of breeds is resistant to their pesticide, with the idea that nothing else will be.

- GMO crops on average (world-wide? nation-wide?) are sprayed with less pesticides, implying "roundup ready" as an anomaly.

The takeaway is GM is a tool. I'm 100% for it, but like most tools it can be used for good or ill. Let's be careful, without implying the risks here are anything special compared to other powerful technology.

Assuming you mean herbicides as well as pesticides the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. The classic example of a GMO crop is "Roundup Ready" corn, developed by Monsanto. It makes the plant resistant to glyphosate, so the crop can be sprayed, killing weeds &etc. without killing the corn.

I guess as a lay person, I meant both. Makes sense, so does that effectively reduce the volume of pesticides/herbicides, or does it just allow you to lay it on with less precision?

I had to look it up to check what I was about to say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops#Gly...

In the case of roundup ready crops, it sounds like it's both more effective as an herbicide and less toxic. The Wikipedia page didn't say whether that was toxicity towards humans. So in that sense roundup ready crops seem to be net better for the consumer anyway.

Jury seems to be still out on whether roundup is actually harmful, leaning on the no side at least according to the Wikipedia article on Glyphosate.

For many crops the GMO component is designed to resist biocides.

If you're interested in the topic, I'd encourage you to read about the most common GMO crops encountered by consumers, the primary biocides used on those crops, and then read in vivo studies on those biocides.

Do your own research and be discerning about the sources and data, there is an immense amount of astroturfing on the subject matter.

http://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-0...

https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2016/Glyphosate_V_glycin...

http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVol...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=glyphosate

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=2,4-d

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/tests-show-monsan...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/17/pesticid...

Of course it could all be wrong, biocides could be super healthy and amazingly great for human consumption.

Aren't many GMOs designed precisely to fight off insects and pests and weeds without needing as many pesticides or herbicides?

Some are designed to reduce the need for pesticides, but many are made by the pesticide companies to be more tolerant to the sprayings. This results in less insect/fungal damage and weeding (though the weeds seem to be able to keep up even without the GMO help).

What's a GMO made by a pesticide company?

Water is a very California problem at the second... Not every part of the USA is in drought

Water is a problem in many places. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies and have worked on a bunch of water well projects (and have in fact been working on a water project today). They're much more interesting and technically sophisticated than you might imagine, and water tables have been dropping in much of the country. Wells are also easily fouled. Fracking has been a problem for water wells in many parts of the country.

USGS has much of the better and more useful data about water quality: https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/studies/domestic_wells.

Right now, wells cost a lot of money to drill—often more than $10K—and are easy to screw up. That may be part of the reason YC is looking for water-related startups.

Very true.

Besides California, and staying in the US, water is also an issue everywhere in the Southwest (Colorado River basin, a quarter-million square miles), and throughout the agricultural midwest, from Nebraska to Texas, where water is being over-drafted from shallow portions of the continent-scale Ogallala Aquifer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Aquifer_water...).

Too much water can also be just as devastating as too little water. As our climate warms, more energy will be stored in atmospheric and oceanic waters, creating more powerful hurricanes and storms. On top of that, sea level rise will cause storm surges to be more destructive and costal erosion will gradually sink major costal cities. Climate change is water change.

> Amazes me that people will take the scientific highroad to global warming, but a witchcraft based approach with GMOs.

Doesn't seem that amazing when you consider that in both cases people are trying to protect themselves against a perceived threat - the science has little to do with it, other than as a tool.

Also, to be fair, most of food science is hardly worthy of the name. We can barely tell what makes a healthy diet in general. How can any scientist worthy of the name say that all GMO's are safe for long term, regular human consumption when they can't even say that about non-GMOs? (see disagreements about whether something as simple as refined sugar or meat should be a regular part of a healthy diet)

The United States is the world's largest user of GMOs in agriculture. Here are the top agricultural commodities produced in California:

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/

Are water-thrifty GMO variants of those crops commercially available? Have they been rejected in California due to GMO-fear? The answer to both needs to be "yes" to blame GMO fearmongering for California's water problems. (I don't disagree that fear of GMOs is overblown, but original comment gave no evidence it's causing the CA water problems.)

There are much simpler solutions than GMO. Besides most water (not sure of exact figure, would have to look it up again) used in industrial agriculture runs off the land. GMOs won't change that.

Is GMO fear unfounded? We're talking about grafting in genes from other species. We don't know how that might affect safety. We, in the USA, don't require testing for safety. How do we know that such changes is not like biological asbestos? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now we know that it's terrible.

Imagine doing that to your food population all the while enforcing draconian IP laws on farms not using such products, but caught up in the wind.

Mutation Breeding[1] has been in use since the 1930s and has exactly the same risks in terms of creating unexpected attributes (allergens or whatever) in plants. GMO is little more than a vastly more efficient kind of Mutation Breeding; this is not a new risk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

Excellent! Obviously this is just itself a speadup of older means artificial selection, but by employing the nuclear boogeyman is a better counter argument.

Kinda. This is qualitatively different because we are purposely injecting into a plant a poison that is from another source. Can we eat that poison? All I'd like to see with GMO is a label so I can make an informed decision to purchase. In the US, such labeling is fought.

A lack of fresh drinking water is very much a world wide problem - you should think bigger than the US.

http://water.org/water-crisis/water-sanitation-facts/

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