In case you don’t know me personally, I’ll tell you now that I have a passion for agriculture. Specifically alternative agriculture for a new era. Specifically aquaponics, which I love with my whole heart.

If you recall my very heated strawberry post, I am generally frustrated with the conversations surrounding the future of food, especially GMOs. The reason people dislike GMOs is that it is a scary acronym like MSG. So here is my scathing hot take on GMOs: as long as GMOs are grown without artificial fertilizer or pesticide, it should be able to label itself as organic.  

Shocking, I know. But the truth is that humans have been making GMOs since we started doing agriculture. Corn? GMOs. Wheat? GMOs. Dogs? GMOs. GMOs aren’t new in the slightest, it just used to take longer. Now we can do it quickly and with more options. 

However, I would also be lying if I did not have one big problem with GMOs, and that has nothing to do with the science itself, but how it is abused by corporations. Near the popularization of GMOs, during a green revolution, private entities started genetically engineering their own seeds with lots of incredible benefits and then patenting them. The patent makes it so farmers can be sued for growing the crops unintentionally on their fields as a result of natural cross-pollination by local insects. Abuse in the same vein is making these organisms unable to reproduce outside of a lab and then giving these seeds away for free to farmers in impoverished countries. This then makes these farmers dependant on the genetically modified seeds, but unable to harvest them themselves, which means seeds must be bought year after year from the corporation that “generously” gave them away for free. It sounds like something out of a 90s movie starring a group of plucky young protagonists who take down the evil factory farm baron. But in reality, capitalism is just like that.  

I’m planning on making some posts about my aquaponics projects after the semester ends, so stay tuned for that I guess!