Yep.

Sugar is basically rocket fuel for your body, it's insanely useful for burning large amounts of energy quickly, and since we evolved in a low sugar environment, your body is trained to want it.

But these days we live in a sugar saturated environment where most people don't do anywhere near as much physical work, so the sugar is never burnt off. It's not meant to be a staple food.

Also, your liver basically treats sugar the same as alcohol. Not only does it make you fat, but it also suppresses your bodies natural "I'm full" reaction. Worst of all are high fructose corn syrup soft drinks.

Basically, if you wouldn't give your kid a beer... don't give them coke either. Coke = beer without the drunkenness.

**EDIT**
I'm finding other sources that say that sterile "terminator seeds" are a patented technique, but that Monsanto has promised not to use it. Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx

So it appears that my info below is wrong. I will try to talk with my family and get the full story. That being said, I'll leave my original comment and the followup below unaltered.
*********


My firsthand knowledge of this stuff was from more than 10 years ago, and also when I was pretty young (early 20's). So I did some web searching to try to get updated since your question is a very interesting one:

http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/about.html

According to that, Monsanto is the company behind "Roundup Ready", and their corn (and other crops in the line) do use sterile "terminator seeds". It also mentions that farmers "must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto" each year.

I was never in the decision-making structure of my family farm, but I did remember that we couldn't just buy the Roundup Ready seed *once* and then hold a small amount back as seed for the next year and continue to get the benefits.

I'm not 100% sure exactly how the modification for sterility works -- I don't know if the plant will sprout if you plant the sterile seeds and just fail to produce any ears / fruit, or if it just won't germinate at all. I do remember that we had to be quite careful to fully clean out the corn grown from the GM seeds from our storage bins, and better yet to store our non-GM corn to be used for future seed in entirely different bins. That was done to make sure that we didn't end up planting any of the sterile stuff.

I'm sure that the seed dealers that sell the GM stuff really push farmers to buy and plant it every year, as hinted to in that link. But you certainly don't *have* to. On the other hand, if you go back to non-GM seed for a year or two or more, you can't use a strong herbicide like Roundup if you have an unexpected outbreak of weeds or other pest plants -- the Roundup would kill the non-GM crop along with everything else.

Basically, I don't specifically begrudge companies like Monsanto for their practices concerning these GM crops. The "terminator seeds" are controversial, but don't seem like a big deal to me. If you could buy GM seeds once and then just hold back some of your harvest for next season's seed, they'd only get your money once AND we'd probably lose the original strains. So I see that as kinda win-win, especially if you don't 100% buy into their sales department urging you to use GM seed every single year.

I don't want to sound like a shill for Monsanto -- some of their other practices are pretty shady, particularly political lobbying. But from the perspective of my family farm, the GM corn that we use was/is a real beneficial thing. Significantly less pesticide/herbicide use over time, and it allows for expanded low/no till farming. Before herbicides, tilling was one of the only ways to kill off pest plants. But, it also makes the fields lose some moisture and nutrients. Expanded farming and ubiquitous tilling was largely the cause of the "dust bowl" dirty 30's. Anyway, I'd say that a lot of good has come out of modernized techniques and technology like GM crops.

I think many people don't realize how GMOs have made farmers' lives so much easier.

I'm surprised to read what you said about your family's GM seeds being modified to be sterile though; the video states that terminator seeds were never commercialized. Since you're talking about corn, maybe it was just hybrid?

Some additional notes based on growing up in a wheat / corn farming family:

My family uses GMO herbicide/pesticide-resistant corn seed (Roundup Ready). It's a tradeoff, because:

1) Roundup Ready seed is somewhat expensive, especially compared to just holding on to a small amount of your own harvested crop as next year's seed.

2) Like the video mentioned, the GM seeds we used have been modified to be sterile, so the grain they produce can't be replanted. Part of the justification for that is not wanting the GM version to intermingle with unmodified strains. But, most is pure profit motivation -- they want you to be forced to buy that GM seed. I don't really see that as nefarious, just business -- but opinions differ.

3) My family discovered that for corn, we could us the GM Roundup Ready seed roughly once every 5 years while still benefiting from drastically reduced insect / plant pests. If corn is within pollination range of another less known crop plant called milo, the plants can hybridize and produce a plant called shattercane. Shattercane is essentially worthless as a food crop, but is very hardy, and can spread and in many cases outcompete the corn or milo that you really want.

Getting rid of it was a very difficult and intensive process -- until the GM seed came along. Now if we see shattercane starting to make incursions, we can plant the GM seeds the next year and then hit the field with a herbicide that kills the shattercane. It works so well that the field remains clear of the pest plants / insects for several years after that without having to use much if any herbicides / pesticides.

4) In our situation, we found that we used way less herbicide / pesticide per year on average once we started rotating in the GM seeds once every several years. That would be close to a wash, but still likely a net savings even if we used the GM seeds every year (seed companies will try to sell it to you every year). Factor in increased crop yields because of the reduced/eliminated pests, and it is a clear win.

5) I'm sort of worried about the potential for a "superbug" effect, similar to overusing / misusing antibiotics. If farmers buy into the GM seed thing 100% and use it every year, I think it will increase the chances / rate of the pests becoming resistant to the pesticides / herbicides used. That's a long-term concern, and in my opinion doesn't even come close to outweighing the "pro" side of the GM argument (at least from the perspective of my family's farm), but it is something to think about.

It probably is mostly corn starch.

Vacuuming flour can end quite badly too

I instantly thought of coal and corn dust. You would expect coal dust to be explosive, but corn? Yep, sure enough, it's also explosive. Apparently so is talc.

That site is conservative run and compiled, and even so, just do the math, divide by population. Start with Alaska, firmly red.
But, much better, look at REAL numbers instead of that rabid Trump supporter's totally unverified numbers, these with the math already done for you at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spending_by_state
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state

California spends $8,967 per person while taxing $7690 (honestly worse than I thought),
New York spends $9,940 and taxes $10,279.27,

Alabama spends $11,743 taxes $4,330,
Alaska spends $14,375 taxes $6,697 (I think only DC is worse),
Arizona spends $10,157 taxes $5,318,
Arkansas spends $9,635 taxes $8,578
(and because you mentioned them, Texas which spends $8,865 and taxes $8,421.59, not so bad)

....and that's just comparing the A's to what you would expect to be the most social service friendly firmly democrat states. Clearly, looked at per capita (the only way it makes sense) red states take far more than they give on average, then complain that they're supporting the inner city with their farm taxes, it's just not correct.

EDIT: and as mentioned above, I also know Texas, and the country folk are just as big welfare queens as the city folk, they just convince themselves that a corn subsidy isn't welfare, putting some pet goats on the property so you don't pay taxes isn't welfare, getting free water for their crops paid for by the government isn't welfare....it's just bullshit. If you take what you don't need, or don't pay your fair share, you're a taker, and that describes a HUGE portion of the right....largely your country folks.

Every social program is taken out of people's checks (unless those checks come from investments or inheritance), that's how they work, otherwise they would be called charities.
Yes, people have paid into those programs, some for a long time, but they want to contribute at 1970's rates and collect at 2016 rates, while defunding the programs. You see the problem, right? They were social insurance programs that now everyone wants to have pay out for them....this type of insurance is for those in need when they need it, not for the rich to use to pay every day expenses, it simply doesn't work when used that way.
Speaking of solar, how did the government programs we tried to keep all solar production from going to China work....not so bad. You can find a few failures, but there were far more successes for a net gain.
Again, if everyone takes from the social safety net as if it had been a savings account, it doesn't work. It's for the poor, there really needs to be a means test to collect, or it's doomed to fail.
In my experience, they like to say that, but then they raise goats for tax breaks, not for any product, and grow corn (or don't) for government handouts, and expect free or near free water at government expense, or use government land without paying (stealing from us all), etc. They are not nearly as reliant as they claim...and I come from Texas where we raised cattle and goats for exactly those reasons, not as livestock but as tax dodges, and that was the norm not the exception. Of course, my family would never in a million years have admitted that that was a handout, but it was.

And the argument is hilarious when paired with the accusations that 'others' that get government assistance are "takers" and welfare queens, but not them, they're just taking back what they think they put in (with interest and inflation added) when in reality they put in far less than they think and take far more than they admit.

Midwest here: other than the plate of turkey, stuffing, and cranberries, this is utterly unlike Thanksgiving to me. Also, I'll echo the "regular" vs cornbread stuffing. If we have cornbread it's as a chunk of cornbread, not stuffing. My wife and I handled our family's meal this year, and we had scalloped corn, dinner rolls, two types of mashed potatoes, a rich mac and cheese, and several types of (non-pecan) pie.

Dannym3141 is so right!

"Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?"
"No, have you?"

"I don't know which species is worse-- you don't see them fucking each other over for a percentage."

"I guess she don't like the corn bread either."

I think corn would be doable, but the advantages would be less efficient compared to short plants.

At some level of efficiency, there is a break even point (which can also take into consideration shipping costs and fossil fuel usage to major metro areas). I'm pretty convinced that vertical farming could be a significantly good / efficient idea for those plants that it is best suited for, but I do think there would be some early-adoption issues that would make it less practical for tall stuff like corn. At least until it has been done enough to work out the kinks and economy of scale kicks in.

So at least for the time being, I think we'll see it first be applied to leafy plants and tuber / root plants. But I could definitely be a biased opinion since my family revolves around conventional corn farming on irrigated fields...

Think about it this way. Stack the corn trays just once and you just doubled your output for a given area.

You're right about getting less mileage from taller crops. But every vertical layer would in theory still double the area you have to work with each time you added one.

Scale this up to a skyscraper sized building and you could supply any city with all the food it could need locally.

It probably could start to skew the market towards squatter plants as you say, but I can't see why most if not all of the things we grow now couldn't be viable. (doubly so if they ever nail the process of growing meat)

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

This looks really promising. So what kind of vegetable can they grow? And what about strawberries? Can that system accommodate for that as well? And corn?

If governments are serious about the obesity epidemic, they need to encourage people to eat real whole foods by any means necessary. It would certainly help stop the spiraling health care costs that many governments(and insurance companies!) pay for.

I'm not sure whether this strategy would work, but since poorer people are now more obese than richer people, it tells me that the price of certain foods has a lot to do with what people consume. So my solution would be to subsidise healthy foods such as brown rice, whole meal bread / pasta, potatoes, corn breads, legumes/beans, and of course vegetables and fruit so much, that they cost almost nothing, while at the same time taxing foods that are clearly associated with obesity and illness. That way people still have a choice to eat unhealthy foods, but they are paying for their healthcare costs upfront, while having easy access to healthful foods.