this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
511 points (94.3% liked)
Asklemmy
42520 readers
1301 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While companies are bad, that doesn't automatically make things a company produces bad even if the company is trying to price-gouge or otherwise make the most profit out of it. You can oppose the latter while not pushing bullshit about the former.
In this regard, I'm referring to things that people generally try to push anti-science views on and use "company bad" as their purposefully bad argument to conflate the two things.
So, medicine and pharmaceuticals are not bad, even if the companies are bad.
Same goes with vaccines, obviously.
Biotech crops are not bad (and people really need to learn about how all crop cultivars have patents, including heirloom and organic cultivars).
Cultivars are clonal and biotech crops encourage monocropping, which both create problems with ecosystem health, disease and climate resilience, and soil degradation.
Good and useful crops encourage monocropping because why would farmers want to grow inferior options that will produce less overall and be less desired by consumers?
So monocropping is the natural result of consumer demand and the agricultural improvement of seeds.
That doesn't make monocropping not a problem, but it doesn't mean purposefully using worse seeds is the solution.
A lot of consumer’s buying habits for products with inelastic demand is driven by cost. If companies weren’t driven by ever increasing profits then there might be more of an incentive to offer a wider variety of crops to consumers. Certain crops are already subsidized by the government to make it profitable for farmers. If other crops were subsidized then perhaps farmers would be more encouraged to grow them and if people see these at normal prices they might also be more interested in buying them. Of course, this would rely on multiple parts of farming being overhauled. For example, there’s a lot of cost sinks, one I can think of is the locked down maintenance of farming equipment (once again driven by the need for increasing profits via fiduciary duty). Eliminating these and other overheads would not only lead to more cost efficient farming, but also cheaper crops and increased variety offered to consumers.
Crop types are subsidized, like corn in the midwest, but that doesn't have any special connection to biotech seeds. Outside of you're more likely to get research done on and biotech seeds made for the more popular crop types than others.
Purposefully using “worse” (different) seed is a solution as crop rotation, cover crops, and allowing land to go fallow helps with soil health (and reduced erosion and runoff and waterway pollution…)
Maximizing yields through subsidized monocropping and biotech seeds is unsustainable resource extraction.