Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> Why not produce products that preserve the best of existing
> products (taste,color,texture,open pollination) but improve them by
> increasing their resistance to things like drought, insects
> (without pesticides), and improve the overall yield.
How about corn that has a venus flytrap grown where the tassle is.....
Resistance to drought is not difficult, but there is a limit to the range of
hydration any plant can tolerate. What would be nice is corn and wheat that has
more resilience to their stalks, so they can be blown down by wind, hail, severe
rain, without permanent damage. Since the weather system seems to be thrashing a
bit more today than usual, hardiness like this would be important at keeping up
yields.
Now, Bt corn does not need to be harmful to butterflies. The only reason why it
is is because conventional field layouts do not allow for large gaps between Bt
corn and milkweed between fields. This obviously mandates that fields get bigger
and irrigation systems be larger, so the field margin that is planted with
non-Bt corn is large enough to allow milkweed to not receive large quantities of
Bt pollen.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:33 MDT