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Of course they do. The problem is that neither of those descriptions fit Trump, and even if they did, he's a fucking sociopath. The rest of us exist solely so he can harvest resources (primarily money and adoration) from us.

OK, sorry to spam here, but I found another relevant link:
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/12/14/gmo-patent-controversy-terminator-genes-seed-piracy-forcing-farmers-buy-seeds/

That confirms that "terminator seeds" are a technology that does exist -- in practice as well as theory -- but isn't commercially sold or otherwise available.

More importantly, it mentions that there is a legal sort of "license agreement" that farmers sign when they buy the GM seed stating that they won't replant harvested stuff in the future, and that they can inspect your storage areas etc. if they suspect you are doing so. That would explain why my family worked hard to clean out storage areas that had grain resulting from GM seed. I erroneously thought that was because that grain was sterile.

Those agreements are for a single crop / harvest, so it is definitely possible to use a GM seed one year and then go back to non-GM seed in other years, as my family does. I guess that we just have to keep good records to show that we're not holding any back for future planting / sale.

Sorry for the several LONG posts, and thanks to @Hastur for asking the question that got me to figure out the misconception I had!

**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.

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.

Ok, in the interest of fairness I did some further research on this issue.

He was fined a total of 42,000 dollars. This does not count his accrued court and legal fees which are estimated to be around 100,000 dollars at this time. I won't bother converting that to USD, but he is going to be out of pocket 142k as a ballpark figure.

This is the joke:

“Everyone said he sucked, but I defended him,” Ward says. “They said he was terrible, but I was like, ‘He’s dying but he’s living a dream, leave him alone.’ ” The niceties end when Ward figures out Gabriel isn’t actually dying. “He’s unkillable! I saw him at the water park, and I tried to drown him, but I couldn’t. Then I went on the Internet to figure out what was wrong with him, and you know what it was? He’s ugly, goddammit!”

That is all. He was making a joke that he thought the kid was being given a 'make a wish' type thing because he was dying, but that he was just ugly.

I listened to it and it wasn't really funny. However, it wasn't 142k worth of court costs and damages either. The kid, disability or not, is now a public figure and should not be protected from jokes at his expense. The fact that a comedian called him ugly does not mean he should get 42k in recompense because it made him feel bad. Fuck, if I got 42k every time someone called me ugly in jest, I wouldn't be posting here. I'd be on a damn Yacht in the Mediterranean.

People say hurtful things. How many people looked at this kid and made fun of him when he was trying to sing the Canadian anthem at a Hockey game? Does he deserve 42k from each of them?

One of the talks I listened to as part of this research brought up a salient point. The commission that was created to address hurtful speech has clearly ran out of 'real' hate speech to go after. To save their jobs, they need to start going after the next level of 'hate speech'. Where better to look than blue comedians?

This brings me back to my original point. If you create an organization and give it power to control what people say through punitive measures, it may work great when your group is in power. You will probably have no issue with it, as long as it goes after speech you dislike. But, no group is in power forever and organizations don't just disappear when a new group of leaders come into power. Suddenly you might really come to regret your choice to create that organization, especially when they decide it is 'YOUR' words that need to be penalized.

That said, my only dog in this fight is that I think it is idiotic to limit what people can say. They don't stop saying it, they just stop saying it around people they don't trust. This sows the seeds of dissension and the harvest is never a good one.

For those that don't know (I had to Google it) they take the tops off to strengthen the bulbs which are harvested in the summer and sold.

This is the point of thought experiments. They're not supposed to be unsolvable zen koans. They're supposed to help you identify and examine the fundamentals of your whatever philosophical model for a given topic. This one is obviously doing its job, because when you can construct statements like 'perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action' then you already have a richer understanding of ethics than say 95% of the population.

Many people give the opposite answer to yours; they don't think you should take an innocent life deliberately, even if it is for a greater good. Now, are these stupid people? Yes. And you'll find more and more of them when you recast the question in increasingly uncomfortable terms: Should you shove a fat man in front of the train to slow it down, knowing the five will then have time to escape? Should a doctor harvest the vital organs of a perfectly healthy patient to save five otherwise healthy people who happen to be in need of various organ transplants?

Real world solutions and complications to these questions are irrelevant. Petri dishes don't exist in nature but you don't slap them out of biologists hands and yell at them to do real science in the real world. And isn't the fact that so many people would decline to assassinate baby Hitler informative in itself?

As a person who actually grows much of my own produce, I can say definitively that many of their numbers are WAY off. They require one to pay one's self $100 per month for produce shopping to come up with their $1400 per year 'savings', but claim 5 minutes a day for 'harvest time'...good luck with that if you're not living on just lettuce and cauliflower...peas and beans will take 3 times that. They claim $6 for seeds, but the seeds I buy are over $3 per packet, so that's only 2 vegetables at a time...not much variety. I also note they have no cost for soil, the bed, fertilizers, pest control methods/time, disease control, etc. They also arbitrarily put the maintenance time at :30 min per month...that doesn't seem really realistic for an outdoor robot. Keep in mind that a single break down can mean the loss of an entire crop, depending on how it malfunctions. They also don't give an expected lifespan...or guarantee/warranty, so there's little way to know yet if it will last a single season, much less the 4-5 they say it takes to pay off.

It would have made much more sense to me if they had compared it to growing a home garden by hand, as that's what it's replacing, not the grocery store.

Don't get me wrong, I love this idea and would take one in a second if someone offered, I just don't see it as cost effective at $3-4K. Once the bugs are worked out so it lasts 10 years and the DIY cost is down to $1K(+-), then I'll think they have something pretty good that could also save people money. Being totally open source, I have hope that it will evolve quickly and be clearly viable in the near future. The time is coming when I won't be able to do the home farming I do today...it would be great to have a metallic yard slave to take over for me when that time comes.

In first world countries....yes, or close to that much. Agreed. Not world wide.

Mechanized harvest is accepted in "natural" old school farming. Agreed, it would fall under the "industrial farming" methods, but is one of the least damaging.
>1000 acre farms do not count as "family farms" in my eyes, even if they are owned by a single family. So is Walmart, but it's not a mom and pop or family store.

Again, mechanization is not the same as industrialization, but does still do damage by over plowing, etc. I'm talking about monoculture crops, over application of man made fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Grain was farmed "by hand" since farming existed with few problems, but more work involved. The work it takes to rehab a river system because industrial farming runoff contaminated and killed it is FAR more work than the extra work involved in farming using old school methods (which does not mean everything is done with hands, tools and machines have been in use for eons).

Roundup doesn't "break down" completely, and doesn't break down at all if it's washed into river systems and out of the UV light.

Once again, machines aren't all of "industrial farming", they are one of the least damaging facets, and they are not unknown in old school, smaller farming techniques. BUT....overuse of heavy equipment either over packs the soil, making it produce far less, or over plows the soil, making it run off and blow away (see the dust bowl). If it was ONLY about machinery, and ONLY industrial farming used machines, you would have a point, but neither is true.

No, actually overproducing on a piece of land like that makes it unusable quickly and new farm land is needed to replace it while it recuperates (if it ever can). Chemical fertilizers add salts that kill beneficial bacteria, "killing" the soil, sometimes permanently. producing double or triple the amount of food on the same land is beneficial in the extreme short term, and disastrous in the barely long term. (See 'dust bowl')

Man power is far less damaging to the environment than fossil fuels for the same amount of energy. Also, the people would use no more resources because they're in the field than they would anywhere else, so there's NO net gain to the energy used or demand on the environment if they farm instead of sit at a desk, but machines don't use energy when idle, so there is a net loss to the energy required if you replace them with pre-existing people.

Yes, you quoted it directly, buy your characterization of what that meant was insane. You claim they said Monsanto worked on the project (and other things) because they're evil and want to do evil and harm. The video actually said they do these things without much care for the negative consequences to others, and that makes them evil. I hope you can comprehend the distinct difference in those statements, and that your portrayal of what they said is not honest.

@newtboy,
Some, (very few) still grow grain using old school methods, some even using old school grains (thank goodness, we will have them to thank for still having grains when/if the Monsanto grains fail). It's not even 99%, but it is 'most'.

If you count your numbers by production it's probably more than 99% fall under your idea of 'industrial'. If you want to count old school methods as no chemicals for pest control and harvesting by hand then you need 20 some old school farms to match the quantity of food produced on one thousand acre family farm.

Clearly, natural farming takes more effort, and costs the consumer more, but does not require major ecological mitigation, so if you count ALL costs involved, it's not that much more expensive.
Can you explain the ecological mitigation costs you imagine are associated with farming a thousand acres of grain by hand versus using modern equipment and some round-up? The round-up breaks down within days of application and the equipment doesn't impact the land any more than having 20 some people marching through on foot. For bonus points include the ecological foot print of everybody required to work the land in both scenarios. Including that makes it glaringly obvious that the efficiency of what you class 'industrial' farming techniques is on the whole much better on the planet. Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise producing double and triple the amount of food from the same land with a fraction of the manpower means less overall demand on the environment.

As for the propaganda in the vid, you claimed I misrepresented the Manhattan presentation, I quoted the video verbatim. I'm not interested in doing the same for every point they ran. The video is propaganda of the purest form and I stand by that.

I don't have a particular channel or video style I hate, mostly the only ones that grind my gears are those that try to distort the truth. Like those ones where they cut out specific parts of the interview with the planned parenthood lady so that they could say they were harvesting babies on purpose so they could sell them.

Well, since most sci-fi says the invaders are coming for our water, they start from a huge mistake. If aliens wanted water, they would certainly harvest the rings of Saturn first...they're nearly pure water, they're already in space, and there's no violent species to eradicate before you can have them.

That said, I think any galactic travelers would have to be planetary parasites to exist. With inter system travel taking tens-thousands of years, replenishing ship stores at every opportunity would be a necessity.