I’m not suggesting you have an opinion here but when I see this I always want to mention the following: I have no issue with GMOs per se. But what I have a real issue with is when companies make herbicide resistant plants and then suggest we dump herbicides in to our soil. These poisons have a serious deleterious effect on the environment and it’s something we now have plenty of evidence for. We’ve also seen plenty of data that this increase in herbicides is causing cancer in farm workers.

GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.

The GMO debate is one of the great "we lost the message" moments. I feel like there was a time, probably right after WWII or so, when we tended to feel like science was actually moving us forward as a species, and in the last few decades, it's slipped away to the point where we can't even maintain trust in strong scientific consensus (see: anti-vax)

The opportunities for genetic modification are boundless: more nutrition! Higher yields! Reduced allergens! Not to mention complete green-field things like bacteria designed to clean up industrial waste. These are things that could make ordinary people say "we're moving forward as a species."

So what's the face of this brilliant new industry? A mediocre tomato whose primary selling point was a few days longer shelf life in the store, and some staple crops sold with the explicit feature of "you can pour MORE herbicides on them!" GMO didn't hit the market as a way to make good things better, it was a way to make lousy things viable. We blew the launch, and the entire product category has to spend decades building the goodwill it should already have.

Yes, it's oversimplifying to the level of malpractice to put it that way, but marketing and presentation matters.

Herbicide is how they're using GMO to give higher yields. Farmers aren't buying herbicides just to throw away money.

Higher yields means we can produce the same amount of food while converting less natural environments into farmland. So it's not all bad here.

another example is high yeild gmos which reduce nutritional content and increase water content to increase profits while delivering a lower quality crop

GMO means we can use chemicals that break down as opposed to more toxic ones that build up in the soil.

Often any of these chemicals kill the soil microbiology. The real problem according to regenerative farming advocates is the idea that dumping loads of artificial chemicals on to the field is some path to a solution. The alternative is to understand the living nature of the soil and feed it the way you would feed any other living thing.

So it is not a choice between “this chemical” or “that chemical” and many view that kind of thinking as the real problem. In this way the GMOs that you describe support that problematic kind of thinking.

That said, I am not familiar with what you describe. Which chemicals did not break down and how did GMOs allow us to use chemicals that do break down? I’d like to learn about that. Thank you!

This article seems to suggest GMO crops reduce pesticide use. Maybe we need to collect the data for both GMO crops and non GMO crops on pesticide use. But who should we trust to collect that data?

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/07/new-stud...

Your article is about pesticide use. But I am talking about the increase in herbicide use. Monsanto’s “roundup ready” line of GMO products is intended to be blanketed with glyphosate (aka RoundUp), a powerful herbicide. According to the following study, glyphosate use increased 15 fold since the introduction of “Roundup Ready” products.

https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...

Funny thing is, once people started blanketing with roundup, it didn't take long for roundup-resistant weeds to develop.

> Growing reliance on the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate has triggered the spread of tolerant and resistant weeds in the U.S. and globally [5–10]. To combat weeds less sensitive to glyphosate, farmers typically increase glyphosate application rates and spray more often [11–13]. In addition, next-generation herbicide-tolerant crops are, or will soon be on the market genetically engineered to withstand the application of additional herbicides (up to over a dozen), including herbicides posing greater ecological, crop damage, and human health risks (e.g., 2,4-D and dicamba) [6].

Roundup is used at tiny quantities. Yes 15 times as much is used, but that is still much less than a liter per hectare. And roundup strongly binds to dirt where nothing can get it until it degrades in about half a year. It degrades into common elements in the soil so it isn't making any difference.

According to this link, our original belief that it’s use is largely benign needs further study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29117584/

Anyone can publish anything. Such as calling out the WHO even though they ignored most of the evidence. Then speculation about antibiotic resistance even though bacteria don't use the pathways glyphosphate targets.