GMO's why can't they

modify the genetics of elm trees, ash trees and others that have insect and disease problems like they do corn and soy beans? I always thought the elm trees were beautifully shaped shade  trees. Just a thought I had while sitting here waiting for the rain to stop.

ac hunter wrote: modify the genetics of elm trees, ash trees and others that have insect and disease problems like they do corn and soy beans? I always thought the elm trees were beautifully shaped shade  trees. Just a thought I had while sitting here waiting for the rain to stop.

My guess would be as for trees, the ‘turn around time’ to witness any result is many years if not decades. Annual crops you can witness the result quicker.
As for gmo crops in general, that light we see at the end of the tunnel is not an opening, it’s a high speed problem that is going run humankind over if we don’t reverse course mighty quick. Sorry guys, but Dow, Monsanto, Bayer, ADM, and the others are not our friends. Don’t send that row cultivator to scrapper just yet. We are gonna have to learn to get back on that tractor and cultivate those crops.

By Gabriel Popkin

Photographs by Audra Melton

Feb. 16, 2023

On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees.

These weren’t just any trees, though: Some of the seedlings being nestled into the soggy soil had been genetically engineered to grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air.

The poplars may be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard. Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters on Monday hope to transform forestry.

Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change.

Edited by steve(ill) - 13 May 2023 at 4:11pm

I know they are doing gmo work with american chestnut trees

bigal121892 wrote: Best thing that ever happened to our soils was to cut up the cultivator.

That may be true for the soil, but sure not for human health. The past few decades have seen human digestive, and neurological issues skyrocket. As true as President Eisenhower warned the world about ‘The Military-Industrial Complex’, he would have been just as accurate warning the world of ‘The Agri-Business/Pharmaceutical Complex’.

tillage works "NOT"   just ask the mississippi river delta system!

D14, 2nd gear high range looks like 3.8 mph, 31 HP at the drawbar according to tractor data.com.

You were “subsoiling” ground that didn’t need it by the sounds of it.

Your comparison is accurate, just pointless.

Show me the economics of your “organic compost” plan on a large scale and I’ll be all over it. Include where I can get enough to farm 500 acres, what it will cost, what the nutritional content will be, and of course yields. Should also consider not just supply for me, but for everyone else in the surrounding counties because they’ll see and hear how awesome my crops are. Oh, and I’ll still have weeds to kill, after all this was a topic of gmo that somehow became a tillage and fertilizer debate. By the way, corn leaves A LOT of organic matter behind, wheat does too depending on your overall strategy, beans not so much.

Dang it Jay, you’re late! Just spent another $16k on fertilizer

Now, if you want to really cause some hard pan that will make your D 14 unhappy, try plowing this type of soil year after year. Your top 8-9 inches might be nice and loose (probably too loose) and have a rock hard layer under it. In the spring you’ll have 8 inches of applesauce to drive through and the water won’t go anywhere.

Edited by Tbone95 - 18 May 2023 at 10:21am

Good grief! The Glencoe won’t even touch it!

Where I grew up, most farmsteads(not all) had the house and buildings in a corner of farm, and close to the road.
Back when my dad grew up on the farm, grandpa raised hogs, and milked cows. Farmland was divided somewhat equally between 4 fields approximately 30 acres per field. 1 field was corn, 1 field was oats w/alfalfa ‘underneath’, 1 field was the ‘hayfield’, and 1 was the pasture, for that year. Every spring the field that is as the pasture planted into corn, the previous years corn field was sown into oats, the previous years hayfield b came the pasture, and the previous year’s oat/alfalfa field became the hayfield. Grandpa followed that the 40 years he worked that farm. Never bought insecticide for planting corn, very seldom bought chemical fertilizers, but did ‘lime’ every year.