Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Cultivars are clonal and biotech crops encourage monocropping, which both create problems with ecosystem health, disease and climate resilience, and soil degradation.
Good and useful crops encourage monocropping because why would farmers want to grow inferior options that will produce less overall and be less desired by consumers?
So monocropping is the natural result of consumer demand and the agricultural improvement of seeds.
That doesn’t make monocropping not a problem, but it doesn’t mean purposefully using worse seeds is the solution.
A lot of consumer’s buying habits for products with inelastic demand is driven by cost. If companies weren’t driven by ever increasing profits then there might be more of an incentive to offer a wider variety of crops to consumers. Certain crops are already subsidized by the government to make it profitable for farmers. If other crops were subsidized then perhaps farmers would be more encouraged to grow them and if people see these at normal prices they might also be more interested in buying them. Of course, this would rely on multiple parts of farming being overhauled. For example, there’s a lot of cost sinks, one I can think of is the locked down maintenance of farming equipment (once again driven by the need for increasing profits via fiduciary duty). Eliminating these and other overheads would not only lead to more cost efficient farming, but also cheaper crops and increased variety offered to consumers.
Crop types are subsidized, like corn in the midwest, but that doesn’t have any special connection to biotech seeds. Outside of you’re more likely to get research done on and biotech seeds made for the more popular crop types than others.
Purposefully using “worse” (different) seed is a solution as crop rotation, cover crops, and allowing land to go fallow helps with soil health (and reduced erosion and runoff and waterway pollution…)
Maximizing yields through subsidized monocropping and biotech seeds is unsustainable resource extraction.