"Brian Sandle" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger wrote:
Idiot, BT cotton kills boll worms no boll weevil.

Thanks, Gordon. We note you gave a good explanation on a previous
article.

I understood that boll weevil has to be treated separately taking
care not to kill beneficial organisms. Are the `beneficials' you
wrote of

i) necessary pollen spreaders
ii) parasites or predators which kill boll worms?
Parasites to kill other insects. Boll worms are the most important.

It is all quite complex and maybe the knowledge of the farmers of
old will pay off.

Now they are finding in China that mixing lots of different rice
produces much more yield, makes better use of soil micro-organisms
and produces less greenhouse gas - methane.

If you happen to want individual types of rice maybe the technology
these days could go into designing a machine to do the job. That
might cost a bit but the extra yield could more than make up for it.
In the old days the technology to design the machine would nto have
been so easy. Same with all sorts of weeding technology, too.
Sorting could even develop to sort crops from beneficial weeds which
might grow with them, and perhaps shade other weeds to stop them
growing.
==========
Mixed varities give you a better shot at different conditions and if they
have different disease resistance it is more difficlut for disease to spread
and the uneffected rice will yield more than it would if it had healty
competition. I don't know about rice but it make little differce if the
ground is clean if you plant 25 or 125 pounds of wheat per acre on the
yeild.

There may be an exception but I never saw a weed that didn't reduce the
yeild of the crop and I have seen a lot of both.

As Jim said billions has gone on BSE research which may have saved
more lives elsewhere. We weren't quite sure about that. But since
weeds are getting resistant to Roundup, or the weeds which were
already resistant are much more prevalent, and so many billions have
been spent on producing the Roundup Ready system, it might have been
better to spread the research a bit.
========
First most of it was private money on the Round up ready system and it
replaces herbicides that have a very negative effect on the environment.
There are weed resistant to every herbicide but there are ways to manage
them. It took over 20 years for 4 or 5 weeds to develop resistance to Round
Up.

The money spent 600,000 cattle and 120 people with BSE would have save more
lives applied to almost anything safety related. Finding one cow with BSE in
Canada wrecked their beef business for at least 3 years over something that
has less risk than being hit by lighting.

You have no perception of risk analysis when you are concerned with GM crops
and BSE while there are drunk drivers on the road, west Nile virus, and
people refusing to vaccinate their children. All things that something can
be done about.

Gordon