I can tell he has something you can’t teach or fabricate, a genuine passion for gardening and teaching, blended with authenticity. He’s right up there with David the Good as my favorite YouTube gardeners.
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Cool channel. Interesting added thought- modern plant breeding is now tapping into ancient/wild varieties as sources of single resistance genes to insert into highly inbred commercial lines to speed up the process. This also makes it easier to patent the variety and monopolise the market. The end result is that the pests and diseases end up overcoming the resistance gene within a short period of time (the kind of phenomenon outlined in Raoul Robinson’s “Return to Resistance”) and the whole high tech rube Goldman machine of genetic engineering has to start again (which the scientists don’t mind since it keeps them employed).
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I admire your response and learned something. Therefore, I put some thought into mine.
Maybe one day humans will get the economics, regulations (or lack of) and protections (or lack of) combo right. Such a combo would provide a fertile foundation for companies to make money while also creating net positive for food security, plant diversity, and humanity at the same time.
If such a layout has been already designed, it would probably encounter heavy resistance from those entities who have risen to the top of the current system and are benefiting from the status quo.
One aspect of this situation is no one is looking out for the survival and prosperity of a random company. And the company is not looking out for the survival and prosperity of others either. I can’t blame the company for the pursuit of profit within the perimeters of the law. Likewise, I can’t blame the individual seed buyer for wanting to take advantage of the benefits of the seed and it’s genetics.
Anyone who claim’s altruistic motivation raises a big red flag for me. Nature, by and large, requires competition for resources. The strong survive and the weak die. Selfishness was bred into us by default.
It’s perfectly normal, believable and acceptable to be motivated by personal gain blended with altruistic reasons. But I think altruism alone as a reason for doing something is probably BS. Some Ayn Rand is coming out right now.
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A good example of modern genetic engineering is the creation of a virus resistant strain of papaya. The work was funded by a collective of small farm papaya growers in Hawaii, using a clever trick of adding a viral coat protein gene expression to the crop. This prevents the virus from completing its lifecycle, and saved the industry from collapse. That sort of collective ownership gives incentives to create cost effective solutions. Megacorps like monsanto have incentives to make crops that rely on constant chemical inputs that the same company sells.
One thing that bothers me about companies engineering in single gene resistance is that the gene was not invented by them, merely scraped from nature. The way they exploit the trait means it quickly becomes useless. The original gene/trait belongs to everyone and to nobody, but the way they use it breaks it for everyone.
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