What are peoples personal views on GMO though? I am certain that I'm not going to keel over after a GMO burger, however, I am not overjoyed at the thought of GMO (despite my name!)
My concerns are as follows. Please correct me if I'm wrong, my knowledge on this stuff is above your average punter but I'm no geneticist. As far as I understand it, a strain will be produced by inserting foreign DNA via plasmids but that's an expensive process and one you want to be sure is right in every plant so produce a field of plants, they're cloned or asexually reproduced so they have the same genetic make up. That seems like a big risk to me that we will drastically reduce genetic diversity and risk famine if a disease hits a certain strain. My other objection is it so plays into the Monsantos of the world who use it as an opportunity to make it resistant to only their strain of weedkiller. That doesn't sit well with me. They're becoming the Microsoft of biotech. The third thing is the thing that I like about food, the thing that brings me joy is the inconsistency, the small producers, the rare bread farmers.
The worrying thing is, consumers attitudes are already softening because of costs. I think it will happen and happen soon. I've heard about 2 or 3 news reports suggesting it already.
To be honest, i don't think the whole picture has been looked at. I'm going to try and keep it simple.
Husbandry of Cattle is a very complicated science.
Genetic engineering has been used in farming for years, in the form of "selecting" the sperm that you would use in Artificial Insemination, in order to improve the volume and / or quality of milk in Dairy herds, or to introduce certain traits into Beef herds.
Now Dairy and Beef cattle have totally different attributes. You require your Beef cow to put on muscle (meat) in specific areas, whilst you want your dairy cow to be high yielding (produce a lot of milk)
If you look at the genus website you can see that you can even have the option in selecting the sex of the calf. Male calves aren't worth as much as female in Dairy herds ( you can't milk them!) so by selecting them out, you can keep value with your herd.
There are very few farms these days that has a resident bull! Most farmers will now use AI straws in their breeding program.
So we've been genetically modifying cattle for a number of years, with little or no media attention!
