i do not support the gizmofication of our food supply

i like gizmos as much as the next person – crazy technological wonders that perform everyday tasks more slowly but with greater panache and swagger and verve. handheld battry powered fans, shoes with springs in them, devices on dashboards in non-off-road vehicles that tell you which cardinal direction you’re facing, fancy to-go mugs with built in heaters.

however.

this article yesterday in the nytimes about an arctic seed vault, once i’d gotten over the general neatness and snazzy picture, is really really annoying. i mean, ok, fine, i understand its all about food crops, and i’m even willing for the sake of argument – security blahdiblahbalahblah – to go along with that. but explain to me how exactly having a handful of landraces we’ve driven out of the market now stored in -2od celsius land is better than just growing the stuff now and diversifying our crops to make them less susceptible? instead of going for magic crop #567, planting normal joe crops #1-100?

i can sort of understand the arctic seed bank argument in the case of NONfood plants, because we’re destroying natural lands at such a humungously awful rate and there’s not any real good mechanism for even slowing it down it seems without lots of cultural and ideological shifts which aren’t happening fast enough, and so it might be our best hope to collect seed now, wait for cultural mayhem to sort itself out, and then toss all that seed back on the useless fields and see what happens.

but that is not the argument. the argument is really food. so, food security – notoriously extremely low and poorly defined on the securities list – has finally woken up to the fact that we may be shooting ourselves in the foot growing vast monocultures dependent on genetic tinkering and expensive herbicide and pesticide applications as well as enormous amounts of fertilizer. so what’s the solution? gizmos! no fixing any  of the practices which got you there, no using the handful of market mechanisms which actually work pretty well, no adaptation. nope nope nope. we’ll just stick a backup plan under the MELTING ARCTIC! in a fancy superman style ice cave! where even if the power fails, the plants will be magically the right temperature! and then if monoculture scary corn starts not responding to the billion tons of chemicals and decides to shrivel up and die with a modicum of grace, we can haul out its frozen cousin to do the job!

us farm subsidies cost a heck of a lot of money – the crop insurance program alone is 54,641 million (see http://www.usda.gov/documents/07sumbudgetscore.pdf).

using canola as an example, the average cost of a conventional herbicide regimen is 34.65/acre – with an average large farm size of 2180 acres (working area) – and an estimated 177,840 large farms – that equals 13,433 million. that’s not even including the incremental costs of gen mod crops, or indirect cost associated with environmental effects.

these costs are directly related to the fact that we grow our food stupidly – and can directly be reduced by increasing the diversity of genetic material in our crops. agricultural pests are not usually generalists – they like specific plants, grown specific ways. if you increase the diversity of your plant stock, it makes it more difficult for one type of pest, or disease, or other pathogen, to destroy the lot. it would alos involve less chemical killing gizmos than we currently use.

not to mention – if the reason we’re keeping these landraces around is because “someday we might need them,” why not let those potentially valuable genetics work with “conventional” plants now? instead of assuming that somehow in the future we can pinpoint and stripmine the exact combinations of genes we need to make corn and tomatoes acid rain resistant, why not diversify the crop with one of the other plethora of types of those plants and allow them to adapt naturally to the changing environmental conditions? plants are a freaking lot better at adapting than we are at inducing adaptation. and it would simply require paying attention, linnaeus style, instead of massive injections of cash and laboratory research.

if the problem is cultural, ie thats not the way we farm, then its simply a matter of marketing – of pointing out reduced herbicide and pesticide costs, increased resiliency in yields, potential for specialty markets with increased profits. and if that doesn’t work, we could even use part of the farm bill and our hideously overwrought subsidies to support diversification. the money is there – it just needs to be repurposed, and food security needs to be more about providing food in the long run than providing food cheaply now.