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Comment by openrisk | Hacker News Reader

Remarkable story and a glimpse at how nasty vested interests can become as the world starts to second guess the sustainability of an entire century's worth of "growth" at all costs.

Its not black and white, without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two, but the pressure to contain the collateral damage to environment and people will not go away.

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> without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two

I'm unsure if that is true or not. Certainly it would reduce yields initially but some high yield farming in the US has already moved away from pesticides. It seems that we could probably engineer out of pesticide use if we wanted to by combination of more gmo crops and changing the crops grown somewhat.

Robotics might hold promise for ditching pesticides too. There's already laser weed killing machines. Could we target specific insects with smaller robots that can move under and between plants?

There's also just trying to use nature to help use. Beneficial fungus can be fostered to out compete harmful ones. Chickens can be unleashed in the fields at the right times to reduce the insect load. Maybe we could genetically modify sterile predator insects to hunt down the pests and then die off since they can't reproduce themselves.

Honestly this is being tried but we can't even classify emerging new pests (for lack of science funding and staffing). Many engineers have a keyboard view of how the agriculture industry works and only when they are boots on ground do they realize the actual problems faced by farmers. This is not an attack on engineers, but for every person with a weed laser idea, there's very few willing to implement it.

In the longer term various alternatives are conceivable if people put their minds to it. Politically, economically, technically this is very much like the energy transition: There is immense current dependency that cant be just switched off (and vested interests will resist for as long as possible, using every possible means), but there is sequence of low hanging fruit which in time can be expanded. The trick imho is to always apply the highest amount of pressure that wont burst the kettle.

>without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two,

I have my doubts on this. The same is true for the supposed magic of nitrogen fertilizers.

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