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    Banned Stromnessbees's Avatar
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    Hi Gavin,

    thanks for the explanation. You might be right and this could be perfectly harmless, but I'll be very unscientific now and tell you that I just don't like it. Why can't we leave our food as it is without the tinkering?

    When you look at the oil drilling you could also say that for decades is was nearly perfectly safe and harmless, and suddenly we have an environmental catastrophy. It won't be easy to convince me that GM technology can't come up with it's own environmental disaster in good time.

    And there are other negative impacts associated with GM crops, like the licensing issues and the whole concept of roundup-resistance.

    On our farm we have now used innovative organic methods which have led to bumper crops of grass and cereals. Our animals are doing better than ever before and the whole place is buzzing with insects and birds. It is possible to feed the world with organic agriculture, but those who make their money by selling fertilizers and pesticides will deny it.

    I could post some pictures of our happy Highland cows if you don't think that's too far off-topic.

    Doris

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Hi Doris

    As to oil drilling, I've never thought it safe on so many levels. The worst one is not the devastation of ecosytems when things go wrong during drilling, but the continuing pollution of the atmosphere (and indeed the oceans) with greenhouse gases from using that oil. The planet will take a lot longer to recover from that insult.

    Why can't we leave our food alone without tinkering? We've always tinkered, agriculture developed because of it and only keeps going because we continue to do so as - for example - new forms of pests and diseases evolve or appear. It sounds like you are tinkering with food production systems too, and that sounds like it is working and helpful!

    I'm also happy to believe that your organic cows are very happy and healthy. Are they healthy - and your fields alive with biodiversity - because you follow a sometimes strange set of rules to satisfy a certification authority, or because you manage your animals and your land sympathetically? It isn't quite the same thing.

    I see no need for GM to be forever associated with corporate, industrial agriculture. It is just another tool available to make crop production more sustainable, if we were to use it for the right reasons. In a world where by 2050 we will need 70% more food:

    http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/foo...a-dfid1003.pdf

    ... and fertilisers will be either running out or generated by energy-intensive processes that themselves may not be sustainable, we will need every possible way to help produce food sustainably, unless the predicted population growth is reversed by wars, disease or something else.

    I'm not saying that GM is *the* answer, I don't believe that it is. But it is one tool amongst many that can help, and I don't think that we can afford to throw that tool away because campaigners have been very successful at raising suspicions about it. Time for rational debate about GM amongst beekeepers and beyond I reckon.

    best wishes

    Gavin

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    Oil drilling never has been completely safe. The BP disaster is on an incredible scale, and their safety plans /failsafes have never been adequate. Not all companies are the same though. At the moment almost everyone reading this forum will use fossil fuels on a daily basis, both directly and indirectly: it is near-impossible to avoid all reliance on them in the UK. We can all choose to use less (much much less) and look for alternatives, and IMO we all need to do just that.
    Will GM be the same in 2050? Something that we rely on but nobody feels comfortable with?

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    Banned Stromnessbees's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
    Time for rational debate about GM amongst beekeepers and beyond I reckon.
    Not a good time for discussion for me, am too busy at the moment.

    Just a few notes:

    There was a very good discussion about GM foods on Radio 4 on Tue:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00snmbx
    My own opinion goes along the line of Colin Tudge there.

    Regarding the new GM tests for blight resistant potatoes: we have blight resistant potatoes already, no need for GM there, and it can be grown organically:
    http://organicgarden.org.uk/?page_id=4707

    ... just a little challenge for our potato geneticists to get that resistance into our other types of spuds, the traditional way, please.

    Another problem: with GM what you might end up with could be a blight resistant poato for which you have to pay a license fee every time you plant it.

    And once the genes are out there and have spread to other plants you can't call them back.... genies out of bottles. (Which is also how I imagine the oil spilling out of the hole in the ocean floor.)

    ...back to work for me

    Doris

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Anne, by 2050 we will have had two generations of people since the GM fuss around 2000, even if youngsters like yourself will probably also be around (I doubt that I will!). I think that most people will be wondering what on earth all the fuss was about.

    Doris - I listened to the R4 programme, thanks.

    Sharpo spuds. It is almost certain that they carry the same kinds of R genes that have failed time after time over the many decades that breeders have been breeding blight-resistant potatoes. They are OK now simply because they have been grown on a small scale until now, and not for many years. The people at the Savari Trust are well aware of this and are themselves worried that the next race of blight to come along will flatten the Sarpo varieties too.

    Every time breeders and geneticists turn to wild species for more resistance genes it has taken 30-40 years to breed a decent potato from that stock. We're doing that again right now, and no doubt we can speed up that process by focusing and using tricks, but not by that much. With the blight resistant types which were trialled a couple of years ago, there were GM versions (only the gene desired was transferred) and non-GM versions (as these still have lots of genes from the wild species they are still a little mixed-up and barely useful as serious potato varieties). Do we really want to handcuff ourselves in this way? If so, why?!! Just because we are frightened of something we don't understand properly, and have had that concern amplified by scare-mongers?!

    Licence fees: well, yes, probably, but if someone has bred something significantly better, and paid the huge costs associated with the highly complex safety testing now required for GMs, then isn't there a reason for that? No-one is forced to grow any one variety, you just choose the one that has the advantages you seek and if you don't like the price, don't buy. Same thing with F1 hybrid seed.

    And as for genies being out of bottles, well, if you fear some grand catastrophe I can see the concern. But these are just essentially domesticated crops, and domesticated crops are not good at surviving on their own. But what grand catastrophe?!

    bye for now

    Gavin

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    Banned Stromnessbees's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
    Do we really want to handcuff ourselves in this way? If so, why?!!
    So how far do you/we want to go? Just transfer genes between different types of potatoes?
    ... or transfer genes between other types of plants and potatoes
    ... or transfer animal genes into plants?
    ... or human genes into animals and plants, and the other way round?

    Maybe it's all a futile discussion that we in Europe are carrying on with, while the rest of the world is just going to do it anyway.


    Re. organic/conventional farming:

    I'm as enthusiastic about using legumes for sustainable soil fertility improvement as anyone, honest. To me though, this is classic sustainable farming, not something specifically 'organic'.
    Unfortunately this classic sustainable way is hardly practised amongst conventional farmers anymore. Do you really know a farmer who is not organic and doesn't apply NPK fertilizers? Yes, the certification process is expensive and bureaucratic, but it's the only way for a consumer to find out what has been grown sustainably. If a product is not labelled organic you can be quite sure that it has had a number of applications of fertilizers, weedkillers, fungizides etc.

    a sometimes strange set of rules to satisfy a certification authority
    So which are the the rules in organic farming which you find strange? Maybe I can clarify.
    (here the link to the Soil Association Certification Standards again: http://www.soilassociation.org/LinkC...w%3d&tabid=353)

    Doris

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Hi Doris

    How far should we go? Not an easy one. The example I gave is quite easy of course, what reasonable person could object to something you can do 'naturally' if inefficiently and too slowly for the problems facing us?! At the other extreme, I sat in a conference room in Delhi about 18 months ago with my jaw dropping more and more towards the floor as I listened to a local scientist describing work putting a bovine gene into potato, in India of all places. It was almost as if he *wanted* to rouse the public against the technology, but it was clear that it was simply an example of a naive scientist pushing ahead thinking that 'his' technology was going to do good and the possible public response just didn't feature on his radar at all.

    Should we be putting animal genes into plants? For now, I think not. We need to have a proper debate on such things about what the limits should be, and when, why and on what scale to go that bit further. But given that our domesticated plants (and animals for that matter) are all now monstrous deviations from what their wild relatives were, simply by selection by man, I wouldn't set an absolute barrier there that couldn't be crossed - but it doesn't seem sensible or desirable to go there now. I also don't see how we can have that debate when everything has become so polarised.

    Try this abstract for some perspective on gene transfer as a process:

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture01743.html

    There is a lot more out there that suggests that gene transfer isn't quite the novel thing most people seem to believe.

    Sustainable farming has to move towards reducing inputs of fertiliser and other treatments. But to feed the growing population mainstream farming needs to move in that direction while maintaining and even improving production by a pragmatic approach. Being too dogmatic brings dangers of its own, and it really worries me to see that the SA often has a voice in government these days. I was at a bee research meeting in London last summer, and a SA representative was there - a nice and well-meaning young lady but totally out of her depth, and who really didn't understand beekeeping problems. I think that she may have had a hand in that appalling anti-pesticide briefing paper that the SA released to accompany their call to ban neonicotinoids (I'll post a copy if I can find it). They made a second edition with fewer mistakes, but it still wasn't right and seemed like a blatant attempt to use beekeeping problems to further their own agenda of forcing pesticides out of UK agriculture. No doubt the ends seemed to justify the means in their eyes, but it a dangerous route to go down as once you've been found out you lose a lot of credibility.

    You asked me to comment on the SA certification rules. OK, compare the issue of neighbours being conventional or GM. In the case of a neighbouring farm, a windbreak separating his/her field from yours is OK. The pragmatic approach. It isn't anything like water-tight as spray will drift over, around and through the windbreak and you *will* have some pesticide contamination in your otherwise pure organic product. There will also be that 'diffuse pollution' that gets everywhere. I'm happy to accept that the organic farm will be producing products with a lot less in the way of traces of pesticides, but I'll bet that you could identify them if you wanted to. I think that people have.

    What about GM? The various rules about GM seem silly to me. Here the assumption seems to be that this is an evil abomination and the more complex and difficult it becomes to meet the rules become, the better. If in the process, by chance, you end up applying pressure stop any kind of GM growing over wide areas by farmers who would like to give the new technology a shot, too bad (or perhaps, if you are a SA supporter, good).

    Is this appropriate and balanced when places like America are happily eating GM maize and soybeans on a large scale?

    3.6.7
    You must not use fertilisers, composts or manure or other nutrient inputs
    containing GMOs or their derivatives. This includes:
    • manure from animals that have eaten feed containing GMOs or their
    derivatives within the previous three months, and
    • manure from non-organic grazing animals that have eaten feed containing
    GMOs or their derivatives within the previous three months.

    Three months?! Or this?

    3.6.14
    You must not use veterinary and health care products containing GMOs
    or their derivatives. This includes the use of medicines, hormones, vaccines,
    bacterial products, amino acids and parasiticides.
    3.6.15
    If there is no alternative but to use a GM derived veterinary product, you
    must treat the animal. If you do not treat a sick animal we may withdraw ...

    So it is accepted that medicines can be made via GM routes but in the case of veterinary medicines if that is all there is you *must* use it, then you can come back to being organic afterwards. Pragmatism hits dogmatism big time. Now that we've established that GM is just an evil thing that has to be excluded at all costs (except when the organic farmer needs it him/herself) what about diabetics using insulin. Are you allowed to employ them? Are you allowed to be an SA-certified farmer if you are yourself dependent on insulin?

    I also found 3.6.20 rather interesting. 'The wind may carry GM pollen much more than six miles, but this has been taken as a reasonable and practical cut-off point to identify potential contamination.' Hmmnnn, right. What GM contamination are you expecting to find from a GM potato crop over that windbreak that is keeping out the pesticide sprays?

    I have to say that the nanoparticle section after the GM one was equally ... well ... interesting and well worth a read! 'There are many cases of naturally occurring nanoparticles, for example from volcanic eruptions or in wood smoke; these fall outside the scope of this standard.' Just as well, eh? Organic farming in the UK would be in crisis. :-)

    I now have visions of the heir to the throne turning up at SA committee meetings to offer his advice on what to tackle next.

    Before I stop this ramble, I should say that, OK, there is a lot that is good and wholesome in the SA document. By all means use it as a bible to make your food production wholesome and more sustainable than it may otherwise be. Feel free too to use it as a marketing tool to tell your customers about the care you take in ensuring excellent food production practices. But for me it is still dogmatic, and we should be wary of dogma when considering how to feed the planet.

    best wishes

    Gavin

    PS I'm absolutely certain that I'm speaking neither for the SBA membership not the SBA Executive ... and perhaps I should add that I'm not speaking for my employer either. Eric seems to believe that because I am broadly supportive of technologies he doesn't like then I must be in the pocket of agro-industry, but that isn't the case either.

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    Banned Stromnessbees's Avatar
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    One more quick reply:

    Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
    ... and fertilisers will be either running out or generated by energy-intensive processes that themselves may not be sustainable, we will need every possible way to help produce food sustainably, unless the predicted population growth is reversed by wars, disease or something else.
    There is a way to fertilize the ground in a perfectly sustainable way, driven by solar power and without any nasty by-products: let the legumes do it for you! Actually, there's a very pleasant by-product: honey from the flowers! By growing clover you feed the bees while you feed the soil. That's what organic farming is all about, it's a lot more than a
    strange set of rules to satisfy a certification authority
    .

    Doris

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Stromnessbees View Post
    There is a way to fertilize the ground in a perfectly sustainable way, driven by solar power and without any nasty by-products: let the legumes do it for you! Actually, there's a very pleasant by-product: honey from the flowers! By growing clover you feed the bees while you feed the soil. That's what organic farming is all about, it's a lot more than a .
    I'm as enthusiastic about using legumes for sustainable soil fertility improvement as anyone, honest. To me though, this is classic sustainable farming, not something specifically 'organic'.

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