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Great Country Farms

Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, Produce Farm, U-Pick, Field Trips in Loudoun County, VA

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CLOSED for the 2019 season.

Winter Office Hours: Tuesday-Thursdays 10am-4pm
540-554-2073
18780 Foggy Bottom Road, Bluemont, VA 20135

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Twice as Much Food

December 11, 2014 by Mark Dewey

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Three take-aways from the Intelligence Squared debate on GMOs:

Robert Fraley

Robert Fraley

1. Thirty-six years from now, we’re going to need twice as much food as we produce today, Robert Fraley said, repeatedly. That sobering projection comes from an article by Jonathan Foley called “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World,” which is part of a recent National Geographic series called “The Future of Food.” Fraley, who is Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer and thus has much to gain from the success of genetic modification, agreed with Foley’s assertion that the either/or approach to the biotechnology debate will lead to mass starvation.

“Those who favor conventional agriculture talk about how modern mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, and improved genetics can increase yields to help meet demand. And they’re right,” Foley asserts. “Meanwhile proponents of local and organic farms counter that the world’s small farmers could increase yields plenty—and help themselves out of poverty—by adopting techniques that improve fertility without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. They’re right too.”

From National Geographic's series "The Future of Food"

From National Geographic’s series “The Future of Food”

To feed the nine billion people who will live on Earth in 2050, Foley suggests, we have to stop trying to prove that one of those rights is wrong. And to his credit, Fraley agrees. That’s good common sense.

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Charles Benbrook

2. Charles Benbrook pointed out that some GMOs, such as Bt corn, are already in their fourth or fifth generation, meaning that before enough time has passed to measure long-term effects of a particular modification, it has already been amended three or four times, which means any results available now are irrelevant because the current products are no longer the ones that were studied.

“None of the GE corns that have been on the market have had a dominant position for more than five or six years,” Benbrook said. “So, we are moving from one generation of GE crops to the next to the next before we’ve even begun to understand what the impacts of the first ones are. So, I would like to have the ability to at least do two crop rotation cycles, which might be six or eight years, to see how the farming system has responded, but in that time period, just that time period, the technology has changed. So, you never really get a handle on what has happened.”

3. Half the people in the audience changed their mind about the issue during the course of the debate. Intelligence Squared functions like an egg-head version of American Idol: audience members and the remote audience watching at home get to register their position once at the start of the show and again at the end. It’s a way to judge who won. In this case the winner was clear: 32% of voters favored GMOs before the debate, and afterwards that number jumped to 60%, with most of the converts coming from the undecided camp.

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Alison Van Eenennaam

If I had seen the event live, I would have been one of those vote-changers, for two reasons: because, like Foley and Fraley, I think the world needs a variety of food-production methods, not just one. I realize that one argument against GMOs is that they may effectively foreclose on their competition, which is one of the reasons I still distrust the genetic modification movement; but Fraley and his partner Alison Van Eenennaam seemed less dogmatically entrenched than Benbrook and Margaret Mellon. And also because the pro-GMO team was better prepared for the contest. Both of them spoke in long, free-flowing sentences which created the impression that they had thought about their position thoroughly enough to see how different pieces of information connected to each other. Benbrook and Mellon, on the other hand, often spoke haltingly, as if their thoughts resembled the bent scraps of paper that Mellon fingered on the table in front of her.

Margaret Mellon

Margaret Mellon

I guess presentation makes a difference.

 

Filed Under: Big Pictures Tagged With: A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World, Alison Van Eenennaam, Benefits of GMOs, Charles Benbrook, Dangers of GMOs, GMO debate, GMO seed, GMOs, Intelligence Squared, Jonathan Foley, Margaret Mellon, National Geographic, Robert Fraley, The Future of Food

A Civil Discussion about GMOs?

December 10, 2014 by Mark Dewey

“Nature has many unknowns,” said the well-combed man in the black glasses and the 1cb87e15d06c18034fbb631f14d2c6f3_Lavocado/boysenberry tie, “but one certainty is that tomatoes and fish do not have sex with each other.”

He paused to let me digest that statement. Then he said, “They never have.”

If that doesn’t make you swallow your caramel corn and sit up straighter in your chair, then I don’t know what will.

The man assuring me that bass do not deflower Brandywines is John Donvan, host and moderator of the Intelligence Squared debate series, and he’s priming me to watch an exhilarating 90-minute argument about the dangers and the benefits of Genetically Modified Organisms. Donvan leads with the fish-tomato sex idea because it drops your jaw — and also because, as he explains, “one of the most famous, or some might say infamous, feats of genetic engineering was the development of a tomato whose DNA was mingled with the DNA of a fish, which gave it longer life on the vine.”

John Donvan moderates Intelligence Squared debates.

John Donvan moderates Intelligence Squared debates.

I came across that debate thanks to an article in Grist entitled, “Finally, a GMO Debate Without Shouting,” and since that seemed almost as unlikely to me as a fish making moves on a tomato, I clicked on the link.

I have my own attitudes and inclinations on that issue, and I know from experience that explaining them to someone who inclines otherwise causes my voice to rise and my face to flush with blood. That’s because I don’t know why I think what I think well enough to explain why I’m right once the discourse shifts into capital letters — I JUST KNOW THAT I AM!

“The moderator, John Donvan, pulled off a small miracle in crowd control,” writes Nathanael Johnson, “cutting off participants when they strayed from the point. The result was that each side actually had to concede those points that their opponents had gotten right, rather than making a swift lateral move to another subject.”

It’s an issue that seems to encourage entrenchment. “One view, especially prevalent in Europe,” Donvan writes, “says we are crazy to be doing this.” That is, crossing tomatoes with fish. “The other view says: humans have been fiddling with food genetics forever, and this route to improved food products represents only a slight variation on an old practice. The core questions are: is this food safe, is it beneficial, and is it necessary?”

If you think those questions are important — I do — and you have some open viewing time, maybe you’ll watch this debate. I plan to watch tonight and report on what I learn tomorrow. Maybe we can use the comment section under this post as a forum for discussing what we learn.

Filed Under: Big Pictures, On Foggy Bottom Road Tagged With: Benefits of GMOs, Dangers of GMOs, GMO debate, GMOs, Grist, Intelligence Squared, John Donvan, Nathanael Johnson, tomatoes with fish genes

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