Home gardeners generally can't buy GMO seeds. Most people planting GM crops are doing it with/on contract which restricts how the seed can be distributed (usually, not at all) beyond who the GM supplier sells the seed to.

There is some GMO "pollution" in some non-GM grain crop and soybean seed, but it's very minimal and nearly non-existent in common vegetable crops.

Much of what I find assumes a certain base knowledge that this group doesn't seem to have.

Yikes. Uneducated granola is even worse.

Without basic knowledge, it is hard to tear down walls erected in ignorance. Save your energy and forehead is my .02.

Dan

I know this and you know this. They don't believe me without a link to an authoritative source that explicitly states this. (Frustrating, I know.)

Just let them live in fear.

They rank up there with those that think our recent food safety/tracking bills means grandma is going to get arrested for giving away some squash or the government is going to ban everything in existence not owned by Monsanto.

I'm 43 years old and I still have trouble figuring out what people are talking about with these abbriviations. Not to be sarcastic, but where do you get these abbriviations at?

I'm laughing, nc-crm, because there WAS a thread on that. (lmao)

Normally, I wouldn't bother, but this group is surprisingly quite sensible in other areas and I get along with them so well. I just want to participate fully in the group if I can. They're a really fun bunch in general... they're just not getting it in this area. :)

Obrionusa, I'm using them in the sense that a "hybrid" is anything that has been produced through natural or controlled selection. I'm assigning the term Genetially Modified Organism (capital letters) to any plant that has had its genes messed with in the lab (anything that couldn't naturally make its way into the plant - genes from animals, pesticides, etc.). Hybrids are genetically modified, too, but in a naturally selective (lower case letters) sense. Hope that makes sense.

That is a good definition macky.As far as vegetables are concerned, there are only Bt sweet corns available. These are exclusively the product of Syngenta and are not avilable to home gardeners. I notice that whenever this topic comes someones mentions Monsanto which has not released any GMO vegetables. There is a lot of research going on in university labs (a lot of it in India)but releases have been mainly in field crops ( Bt and Round-up ready)
Syngenta markets their Bt sweet corn as Attribute insect protection. All the varieties are numbered rather than named. Not much chance of getting a GMO without going through a couple of trees worth of red tape. Big Brother is watching.

I'll take the opposite side in this debate: better living through science.

Exactly what is bad about GMO seeds besides the fact they are not natural? IMO, one is splitting very thin hairs when it comes to positing hybrids are fine, GMOs are not. So the genes the hybrid inhibits and uses are not unnaturally modified - plastic is not a natural occurrence on earth. That doesn't diminish its value or use.

I guarantee you, if I can find tomato seeds that produce 40 pounds per plant, with a great taste and the right amount of juice and are resistant to early and late blight and other infections, I will happily grow and eat them.

YMMV,

Mike

Concern about GM has a lot to do with everything from it's effect on pollinators to the unknown effect of eating the plants (and our meat supply that eats a lot of this GM product) over 60+ years of a human life.

Most of our current GM use has to do with pesticides/herbicide tolerance though there is research into making plants higher yielding or adapted to harsh environments.

The hair splitting seems to be between traditional breeding where people go through an elaborate process of introducing couples and seeing to it that they have sex; the process is repeated in an extremely orderly process through many generations and only offspring with desirable characteristics are allowed to survive. In the end, you get hybrid seed. I know, I left out a couple of steps :)

GMOs - a gene from an organism not of the same kingdom necessarily is inserted into a plant, the seed from that plant will have the gene which calls on the resultant plant to express some particular trait, like resistance to corn borers.

Neither of the above methods is even remotely, "natural", kinda like composting. On the other hand, some folks have strong reservations about sticking the genes from one life form into another, there exist a myriad of claimed reasons.

I appreciate your point, Mike. I wasn't attempting to argue bad vs good in this particular thread, though... only to help some online friends of mine to differentiate between hybrid and GMO. The fact that their bent is to avoid the GMO was beside the point in this case (only mentioned for background).

Since it was brought up, though, my own personal view is that there are far too many unknowns involved in the technology at this point. Until a whole LOT of questions are answered with certainty (via a crapload of documentation), I will avoid lab-created GMOs where I can. I don't think they're frankenfoods and realize they're already in our commercial food system. I grow a garden to eat better in general, not as some grand push against the system. If they can produce unquestionably safe GMOs that can feed the world with less inputs, I'm all for it, too.

Back to the original topic...

Those specifics are very helpful, farmerdill... thanks! I can google those names and see what comes up. Getting late now, though, so that's on tomorrow's agenda.

First of all, hybrids precede the technology (and even the knowledge of DNA) by many decades. No argument about that. Also, most quality seed catalogs state very firmly that they do not sell GMO seeds, though they do sell hybrids. Look for one of those catalogs and show them.

Morning!

Laceyvail, it's precisely those catalogues that feed the confusion. The group has no trouble finding seed companies who proudly advertise that they don't sell GMO seeds; they just fret because "they're so much more expensive." The problem lies with the fact that these people then decide that any company who does not advertise the same MUST be selling GMO seeds and are trying to hide it. Meanwhile, I'm sure the long-standing breeders and suppliers are throwing up their hands in frustration because they know very well that it's a statement that's just not necessary to make because NONE of them sell GMO seeds to the home garden market. It's like stamping "Plutonium FREE!" on each packet... makes no sense. On the one hand I'm sure, they don't want to lose even the naive backyard gardener because they must make up a certain portion of sales, but on the other hand, they probably don't want to lose their market/commercial customers to raucous fits of laughter for putting such a blatantly useless and patronizing stamp on their products.

Its very simple: plants bred thru sex are natural. Plants bred thru modifying the genes in the lab are a GMO. If they can't wrap their heads around that, then save your sanity and drop it - who cares.

Dan

How about:
http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetable1/f/Heirlooms.htm

It's not exactly UC Davis or Cornell, but it's also not a blog with an axe to grind.

I know where you're coming from Macky. I too noticed a lot of confusion on the part of otherwise thoughtful people when it comes to understanding hybrids vs. GMOs. It seems obvious to those of us who plant gardens and save seeds, but to those less versed in agricultural arts and science, it's not obvious at all. I attempted to address this confusion in one part of my book Garden Imperative. I have a whole chapter devoted to the GMO debate, the opening paragraphs of which are copied below. I hope this is useful:

"As if the worries over chemical toxins and pathogenic microbes aren't enough, consumers are faced with a new concern about the safety of the food we eat. That concern is genetic modification, and it has been garnering a lot of headlines in recent years. The background explainer on the whole GM conversation as it relates to fruits and vegetables is this: Gardeners, farmers, and plant breeders have been subtly toying with the genetics of food crops for thousands of years, by selecting specimens with desirable traits and using those to produce seed for the next generation. Mutations are fairly common in nature, common enough at least that every once in a while a plant spontaneously updates its genetic blueprint with a trait that we humans find appealing. Ever since the Agricultural Revolution roughly 10,000 years ago, when human beings finally started to settle down in large numbers, leaving their nomadic traditions behind them and for the first time raising their own food, human selection of plants has resulted in a vast and deep food-crop gene pool with tremendous variety. For hundreds of generations, the process went something like this: A farmer or gardener, having saved seeds from year to year or perhaps having bought or bartered them, plants his fields in the spring. Occasionally, natural mutations occur, and this farmer may discover that something he planted did not grow quite as he expected. In fact, it may have grown better than he expected. Perhaps it was a certain squash that resisted the onslaught of mildew when all the other squashes failed. Perhaps it was a single tomato plant which produced better tasting fruits than the others. Maybe it was an onion that lasted in storage until March, when all the other onions had rotted by January. Whatever the case, this farmer decides to save seeds from this particular specimen and replant them the following year. Thus a new variety is born. These genetically unique strains of plants are commonly referred to these days as "heirlooms" or "open pollinated" varieties. The only Genetic Engineer here is God; the only forces at work are those of the natural world. Man's only role has been to recognize the gift and preserve it by saving seeds for the next generation.

Mutations don't happen every day though, at least not obvious ones with market value. Growers couldn't depend on regular mutations to deliver them all the characteristics they desired in their fruits, vegetables, and herbs, so they had to get more creative. Hybridization is the process of crossing the genes of one parent with those of another in the hopes of getting the best attributes of both. This is typically done simply by playing match-maker to two different plant parents, transferring pollen grains from one flower to another and then letting nature take its course through the plant's own methods of sexual reproduction. Hybridization is sometimes confused with genetic modification, but they are two very different processes. There's nothing any more objectionable about hybridization in plants than there is in humans, which is to say it's not objectionable at all unless you object to your parents' genes crossing to hybridize you. Hybridization allowed growers to combine disease resistance with improved flavor, larger size with better shelf-life, consistent time to harvest with better performance in droughts, interesting colors with interesting shapes. Seeds from hybrid plants often don't produce plants with the same traits as their parents, but that inconvenience was overcome by simply making more hybrid seed. Human selection of plants with desirable mutations and the subsequent practice of hybridization have, over the millennia given us the vast array of selection we now have among fruits and vegetables.

Yet human ingenuity in tinkering with nature didn't stop there, and the new frontier in plant breeding is now genetic modification. When scientists discovered that they could take a portion of the genetic code from one organism and transfer it into a completely different one, and that the host organism would subsequently take on some of the traits of the parent, new commercial applications including exciting new possibilities in agriculture began to take shape. Recombinant genetics quickly caught the attention of big business too. Companies recognized potentially enormous profits, not just in the abstract science of tinkering with genes, but in the applied science of creating new organisms that had commercial value. No longer was agriculture limited to the gene pool shared by any one particular species. With recombinant DNA technology, the gene pool got a whole lot larger. Genes could be spliced and diced into food crops to confer pest and disease resistance, extend shelf life, improve flavor and nutrition, and make crops immune to the effect of chemical herbicides. Science and industry together touted GM foods as the answer to world hunger, a miracle that would make crops easy to grow even in impoverished nations, while at the same time reducing dependence on toxic pesticides. While some began to question the safety of these new products, corporations charged forward, pouring huge amounts of money into their continued development."

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Imperative