When you see stuff like this, or like Tuesday's "Ah, the Swiss: 'Nestle Finds a Reliable Supply of Brain Cells'", you know how sharp Churchill was (in a slightly different context) with his "Finest Hour" speech:
...Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.So there you go, either it's broad sunlit uplands or perverted science with the the Ag/food giants.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science...
From Modern Farmer:
Is Fungus the Next Frontier for Monsanto?
A new corporate alliance has ag giant Monsanto looking to the complex network of microbes beneath our feet for their next generation of products. The partnership will shape the future food production, but can it change the public perception of the company?Monsanto’s partner in the new BioAg Alliance is Novozymes, a Dutch company which knows a thing or two about putting microbes to work. They already offer farmers products like JumpStart, a strain of bacteria that grows along crop roots to help the plants take full advantage of phosphorus in the soil. Other agricultural biologicals – the umbrella terms for all living things that could protect plant health and productivity — include fungi that parasitically kills pests and bacteria that promotes root growth.
Each company has something to offer the other when it comes to making biologicals. Nozozymes has the experience and facilities to mass produces single microbes; Monstanto has the infrastructure to field test those products, which is crucial. Many microbes work great in the sterile conditions of the laboratory only to fail in the complex soils of real farms. Novozymes also gets a nice $300 million dollar bonus for opening a joint R&D pipeline with Monsanto.
Such living pesticides and crop enhancers hold enormous promise for worldwide agriculture. A report from the American Academy of Microbiologists (A.A.M.) estimates that engaging the living world in and around plants could increase yields 20 percent in the next 20 years while at the same time reducing pesticide use by 20 percent. Right now, biopesticides only make up a 2.3 billion dollar industry — only 5 percent of the 44 billion dollars supporting chemical pesticides.
Such facts have Monsanto and Novazymes promoting their new collaboration as a step toward sustainability, with diagrammed fact sheets full of happy-looking drawings of wind turbines and barns (see one such diagram above). The project, according to one such document, will “significantly increase the output from our land while at the same time making sure we use our resources most efficiently to protect our environment.” Sounds pretty good. On top of that, the Bio Ag Alliance will only derive microbial products from naturally occurring fungi and bacteria — no GMOs to be found here.
In fact, the plan Monsanto and Novazymes present sounds a lot like what the A.A.M. advocates. The scientists write:
The potential applications of beneficial microbes in agriculture seem boundless, but progress will require advances in basic understanding of plant-microbe interactions coupled to practical attention to the process of moving discoveries from the lab to the field, as well as technical, regulatory, marketing, and end-user education issues. An integrated approach to addressing these challenges — in other words, an approach that acknowledges the multi-faceted nature of the challenges — is most likely to succeed.
The BioAg Alliance will help the technology over regulatory and scientific hurdles. The better question is whether Monsanto and Novazymes are ready to create products that acknowledge the complexity of “plant-microbe interactions.”...MORE
