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GM Crop Producer Monsanto Using Data Analytics To Expand Its Footprint
Nerval's Lobster writes "Monsanto is more infamous for growing its genetically modified crops than its use of software, but a series of corporate acquisitions and a new emphasis on tech solutions has transformed it into a firm that acts more like an innovative IT vendor than an agribusiness giant. Jim McCarter (the Entrepreneur in Residence for Monsanto) recently detailed for an audience in St. Louis how the company's IT efforts are expanding. Monsanto's core projects generate huge amounts of bits, especially its genomic efforts, which are the focus of so much public attention. Other big data gobblers are the phenotypes of millions of DNA structures that describe the various biological properties of each plant, and the photographic imagery of crop fields. (All told, there are several tens of petabytes that need storage and analysis, a number that's doubling roughly every 16 months.) With all that tech muscle, the company has launched IT-based initiatives such as its FieldScripts software, which uses proprietary algorithms (fed with data from the FieldScripts Testing Network and Monsanto research) to recommend where to best plant corn hybrids. 'Just like Amazon has its recommendation engine for what book to buy, we will have our recommendations of what and how a grower should plant a particular crop,' said McCarter. 'All fields aren't uniform and shouldn't be planted uniformly either.' Despite its increasingly sophisticated use of data analytics in the name of greater crop yields, however, Monsanto faces pushback from various groups with an aversion to genetically modified food; a current ballot initiative in Washington State, for example, could result in genetically modified foods needing a label in order to go on sale here. The company has also inspired a 'March Against Monsanto,' which has been much in the news lately."
Why stick to a single crop and not rotate like days of old?
so the company is using data analytics to determine where it should plant crops most efficiently? thats pretty cool. Chances are great theyve been using analytics heavily in their biosciences divisions for quite some time, considering output from computational modeling software is rarely terse.
this might seem naive, but wasnt this the grand plan for the future? a supercrop that never needs to worry about weeds or bugs? that grows tens of times larger than its regular counterpart? I have a legitimately difficult time bashing monsanto but ive followed lots of slashdot discussion on the matter and it seems to be a pretty common thread.
are they really targeting farmers for intentional litigation somehow? there are plenty of other corn seeds besides roundup ready for example that farmers could decide to plant, and the only evidence ive seen to date was some guy who went to the supreme court to challenge the fact that he knowingly saved proprietary seeds. solution: vote with dollars, dont buy proprietary monsanto seeds.
is GM food dangerous? i really cant find any scientific data on the subject...maybe thats because research hasnt been/is still being conducted, but so far i havent seen a public crisis that indicates GM is a bad thing, other than a tentative link to colony collapse disorder.
does monsanto have a history of using analytics for some nefarious purpose? Other than creating superplants i cant think of any.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Just because Monsanto invests in IT as a competitive advantage doesn't mean they're not acting like an Agricultural bully. It may be great for stockholders, but they're threatening the entire world's food supply by modifying plant DNA so that one year's crop cannot be used to plant next year's crop. That's not playing GOD, that's playing Shiva, the god of destruction.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
No, the argument is that we'll end up with a global GMO monoculture, which will lack the variety to withstand some new pest or other threat, and then we'll have a global famine.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why is a GM crop more likely to become a monoculture than a non GM crop?
except it does, it often selects for attractiveness examples include; attracting birds and others to eat fruit thereby moving the seeds, bees to drink nectar to spread the pollen, or flies in the case of others , ants to live in and on a tree to defend it from other predators, and you can keep going. nature generally solves each problem in many different ways.
True for some plants but not others. Most plants with seeds (fruits, grains) need to be delicious and nutritious so their seeds get excreted some distance from the original plant so that they don't compete for light and nutrients. Only leafy plants (the tops of root vegetables like potatoes, spinach, etc.) tend to be bitter or poisonous.
Non-GM foods that come through random mutation via evolution have been tested... over millions of years tested.
Except that evolution doesn't select for plants that are deliciously edible and nutritious. It selects for the opposite: plants that use poisons, bitter tastes, or other strategies to avoid being eaten.
This is actually a misconception. The reason that many plants produce "deliciously edible and nutritious" fruit is that they use the animal eating the fruit to spread the seeds (critter eats fruit, goes somewhere, seeds leave the digestive system). This is where most of our food crops come from, and why we use them as food crops in the first place. Bitter and poisonous plants either use another method to spread their seeds, like having them blow away in the wind, or use the taste and poison to select which animal spreads it's seeds, like how the capsaicin in peppers is painful for a small mammal to eat, but does nothing to birds, meaning birds would eat the peppers, and spread their seeds farther than a small mammal could.
Everything I read about Monsanto points to them being a strong contender for the Famine version of the end of civilization.
See, it's just this kind of hyperbole that drove me out of the environmental movement for good. It got to be worse than a fucking religion. Every company was evil incarnate, every issue was the *end of the world*, every compromise or attempt at reason was deemed insufficient. Between the wild-eyed Chicken Littles and the misanthropes who seemed to secretly want all humans to commit suicide to save beautiful mother earth, I realized that this was one aspect of the left-wing that I didn't want to be a part of anymore.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
TFA mentions that Washington state has a ballot initiative to label genetically engineered foods. Perhaps more importantly, Connecticut just passed a labeling law (http://grist.org/news/connecticut-will-label-gmos-if-you-do-too/).
The Connecticut bill includes a crucial requirement: the labeling requirement won’t actually go into effect until similar legislation is passed by at least four other states, one of which borders Connecticut.
Also note that 37 labeling proposals have been introduced in 21 states so far this year.
Dude, have you even read the wiki page on them? There's a lot of fear-mongering from the people that fear anything to do with genetics, but Monsanto is your typical giant evil corporation. They're so big that regulatory capture is a problem. They've been caught red handed doing various nefarious stuff over the years. Honestly, any such corporation that large is bound to have bad eggs in them and the money is going to be too good. But hey, they really have brought some innovation and better living to the populace. There's a reason that they're profitable and it's not entirely because of who they're in bed with. Roundup ready crops are a lot easier to farm. My uncle loves the stuff.
But if there was EVER a corporation that deserved scrutiny, it's Monsanto.
"Hate speech"? It's more like spotting the trend.
And you misunderstand the OP; radiation or other mutagens *have* been used to create food crops that are on dinner tables around the world, this process has been going on for some 80 years.
Uff, any citation on that?
Sure. Here you go: Mutation Breeding. At the bottom of the page is a list of food crops produced using these techniques.
If you actually look at what they're doing, making plants roundup ready requires very little change to their genome. On the other hand, selective selection (the process used since time immemorial to modify plants to our liking) modifies the plant's entire genome.
I mean there's a tiny change that you're protesting, but you're just fine with big changes which have an even larger category of unknowns. I can already think of a number of weeds that are resistant to roundup, and that just occurred through natural selection. But a GM plant that does it with hardly any change at all is evil?
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