My Nightmarish Future: Agriculture

[james_davis_nicoll]

A California biotech firm claims a gene that makes plants use nitrogen more efficiently can transform agriculture, make lots of money -- and slash greenhouse-gas emissions.

Nicked from Charlie's Diary

Comments

[maruad.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I am interested to see how well Chinese farmers will respect copyright. If their product is a good as they say and it reproduces without any special breeding program (unlike many hybrid-seeds) I suspect a huge black market will develop featuring their product. I think it will be a little more difficult to spot cheats than those using Round-up resistent canola. This product could be close to ubiquitous by the time they are ready to market it.

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Black market Chinese genetically modified grain. Just when you thought carcinogen tainted milk was bad enough!

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I suspect the same variety (or varieties) will end up in the markets via normal channels. I just expect some will end up being grown illegally (outside of patent) and will likely be sold to whatever food industry is buying rice. The purchasers would not even need to know there was anything special about the rice. It would just be more input for their factory.

I am not really knowledgable about rice cultivation but I am used to farmers and their disdain for rules/regulations that may prevent them from increasing their profits.

[hattifattener]

I think genes are too functional to be subject to copyright. Usually they're patented.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

You are probably quite correct. Commercial law is not one of my strengths. I often confuse patent, trademark and copyright. In my mind they all mean the rights theoretically belong to someone and that is as far as I go with it.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

They could make it up on the carbon trade.
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070503005068&newsLang=en

Arcadia Biosciences announced today that it has agreed with the government of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (Ningxia) of China to establish the groundwork for a carbon credit methodology applicable to rice crops. Such a system represents a novel way to significantly reduce greenhouse gases through the adoption of Nitrogen Use Efficient crops by growers. Arcadia will work with the Ningxia Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences (NAAFS) to develop the methodology.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I doubt that it can actually live up to that claim though - it should actually release more methane when it decomposes than regular rice plants because of all the nitrogen it's leeching from the soil - and I'm kind of wondering how they're going to get the nitrogen back into the soil without using more nitrogen fertiliser each year, which should eventually increase the amount of greenhouse gases produced by farms using this stuff compared to regular rice.

Actually I'm a bit confused about why they're even bothering with the whole carbon credit angle at all - as it stands it seems like a quite good high yield crop, something which on its own makes it a Not Bad Thing unless its nitrogen sequestering somehow interferes with the rest of the local ecology in a destructive fashion.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

If it's nitrogen fixing gene tech, it's sourcing it from the atmosphere rather than the ground.

I figure they see a future in carbon offsets for tar sands and tar shale extraction.

[soon_lee]

Out of interest, why is the prospect of crop plants that use nitrogen more efficiently nightmarish?

Disclosure: I don't subscribe to the idea that genetically modified plants are botany's equivalent to gray goo.

from an old post

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

[My] nightmarish future includes things that go right against all that is good and decent in SF, a bleak vista where the rising cost of petroleum causes people to turn to altenative fuels (like coal liquifaction), where in general even the Third World's economies converge on that of the First World's, where even if there's no grand scale colonization of space, the Earth turns out to be fairly large and supplied with enough raw materials to keep even civilization supplied for geological ages, where for some bizarre reason both death-by-famine and death-by-war are steadily dropping (one on the scale of centuries and one on the scale of decades), where the long term trends for socially acceptable violence is downwards, where our brains are not eaten by pocket calculators and so on. It's a nightmarish realm where a small elite of the Right People do not take over and yet the Earth does not collapse into post-technological squalor, a world where people live longer, better lives than their grandparents.

Re: from an old post

[soon_lee]

Not getting enough Peter Watts in your reading diet?

Re: from an old post

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

Giggle!

Re: from an old post

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's not just Watts. And it's not just the right, left or other. Apocalyptarianism has been popular in SF for ages, at least as far as the undeserving masses go.

Re: from an old post

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's half of a penchant for "cusps" in all forms of futurism: for better (Extropian, Singularity, Dow 36,000 (heh)) or worse (apocalypse), the most important change EVAR is right around the corner... and (optionally) here's how to embrace/forestall it.

It does make better fodder for writers than what history suggests: (1) most things will kinda muddle along longer than you'd expect, and (2) there will be discontinuous surprises, but they'll come where/when we least expect them.

Re: from an old post

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I demand a documented schedule for all unexpected surprises at least two weeks in advance of the events in question!

Re: from an old post

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Here you go.

Re: from an old post

[tamahori]

So you're saying that Steve Jackson Game's Transhuman Space is a fairly good example of the nightmare in question?

I'm going to assume you've run into it before.

-- Brett

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"nightmarish future of peace and prosperity"

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784

[julesjones]

That's somehow not as funny these days. :-/

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Have the annotated version! And that's from 2005, I think.