[Azure]

Originally Posted by valo403

Science please.

That's really what this thread is about, supporting claims that are based in science with actual science. Thor has done that over and over again, I haven't seen a lick of it from the anti-GMO crowd.

You seem to be missing the point. The issue isn't that GMOs are evil, bad or cancerous, but that they require an extreme high use of chemicals to be sustainable, which in itself is not sustainable at all.

There have been numerous studies done to show that while genetically modified crops have higher outputs, it comes at the ever increasing costs of using more herbicides, fertilizers and other chemicals that are not at all healthy for the environment.

Spoiler!

From a great study here.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34218/

The global agricultural enterprise is passing a threshold. It has gone from being a minor source of off-site environmental degradation 35 years ago to becoming the major source of nitrogen and phosphorus loading to terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. If this loading increases as projected here, agriculture will adversely transform most of the remaining natural, nonagricultural ecosystems of the world. Because the global environmental impact of agriculture on natural ecosystems and the services they provide may be as serious a problem as global climate change, the impacts of agriculture merit more study.

A “more of the same” approach to the doubling of agricultural production will have significant environmental costs, costs that could be lowered by processes that increase the efficiency of fertilizer use, such as precision agriculture (The following popper user interface control may not be accessible. Tab to the next button to revert the control to an accessible version.Destroy user interface control23) and by incentives for their use. Methods that increase the nutrient efficiency of the overall agricultural production process also are needed. For instance, wastes from large-scale animal operations are rich in N and P. Unless properly recycled into arable fields, or subjected to tertiary sewage treatment to remove nitrogen and phosphorus, such wastes can be a major source of N and P loading to nonagricultural ecosystems (The following popper user interface control may not be accessible. Tab to the next button to revert the control to an accessible version.Destroy user interface control24). However, the regulations that apply to municipal sewage and factory effluents often have not been applied to large-scale livestock factories or to heavily fertilized fields, even though these are now major sources of nutrient loading to many aquatic ecosystems (The following popper user interface control may not be accessible. Tab to the next button to revert the control to an accessible version.Destroy user interface control18). The development of more nutrient-efficient crops also could have major environmental benefits. If crops could be bred to consume a larger proportion of soil nitrate and ammonium, this would decrease the amount of unconsumed soil nitrate and ammonium that would be lost via leaching and volatilization. This would decrease impacts on off-site ecosystems. Breeding programs that increased crop yields would decrease some of the future impacts of agriculture by decreasing the amount of additional land that would have to be brought into agricultural production.

The ecosystems of the world now are dominated by humans (The following popper user interface control may not be accessible. Tab to the next button to revert the control to an accessible version.Destroy user interface control25). The implications of human domination, including impacts from expanding agricultural activities, must be better understood and incorporated into policy. This will require an on-going, iterative process in which science and policy regulating agricultural practices advance hand-in-hand, much as is being done for the climate issue by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This will require predictive, mechanistic models of the impacts of agriculture on nonagricultural ecosystems.

Conclusions: A hallmark of modern agriculture is its use of monocultures grown on fertilized soils. Ecological principles suggest that such monocultures will be relatively unstable, will have high leaching loss of nutrients, will be susceptible to invasion by weedy species, and will have high incidences of diseases and pests—all of which do occur. Although ecological principles may predict these problems, they do not seem to offer any easy solutions to them. Agriculture, and society, seem to be facing tough tradeoffs. Agricultural ecosystems have become incredibly good at producing food, but these increased yields have environmental costs that cannot be ignored, especially if the rates of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilization triple and the amount of land irrigated doubles. The tradition in agriculture has been to maximize production and minimize the cost of food with little regard to impacts on the environment and the services it provides to society. As the world enters an era in which global food production is likely to double, it is critical that agricultural practices be modified to minimize environmental impacts even though many such practices are likely to increase the costs of production.

Scientific enough for you?