Oh my General sorry for the delay, very busy day on the front lines yesir...plenty of time to answer the "Uh what?" in a moment, but for now on that count how about start with this...lol...
Before we get on with the rest of that business though, I would like to address this new business you have raised in attempt at being rewarded with a pardon I can only suspect:
Something that I always find fascinating about this particular complaint is that the greatest tool to prevent the lateral spread of herbicide resistance or some terrible infection (which has never happened...) is... terminator seeds (GURT)! By preventing by product seeds from being replanted you can kill a generation and prepare a new one very easily and prevent a catastrophic spread. It is in fact partially what GURT was made for.
Secondly agricultural biodiversity died years ago when we shifted to the modern agricultural standard which emphasized crop uniformity to increase food output and consistency. GMO's are a recent contribution to this mix and in fact are the hoped for answer to the problems caused by the decline of agricultural biodiversity. Why? Because if we are going to have mass modern agriculture (which we will, we have billions to feed) and take that loss, it would be best to experiment and test plant and feed strains that are resistant to various blights and plagues that cause us so much trouble. While constant research and testing offers opportunities offers the chance for future anticipatory protection as well.
Pardon denied, explanation below:
Industrial Agriculture
Today, the majority of American farmland is dominated by industrial agriculture—the system of chemically intensive food production developed in the decades after World War II, featuring enormous single-crop farms and animal production facilities.
Back then, industrial agriculture was hailed as a technological triumph that would enable a skyrocketing world population to feed itself. Today, a growing chorus of agricultural experts—including farmers as well as scientists and policy makers—sees industrial agriculture as a dead end, a mistaken application to living systems of approaches better suited for making jet fighters and refrigerators.
The impacts of industrial agriculture on the environment, public health, and rural communities make it an unsustainable way to grow our food over the long term. And better, science-based methods are available.
Industrial Agriculture Practices: Monoculture
At the core of industrial food production is monoculture—the practice of growing single crops intensively on a very large scale. Corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice are all commonly grown this way in the United States.
Monoculture farming relies heavily on chemical inputs such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The fertilizers are needed because growing the same plant (and nothing else) in the same place year after year quickly depletes the nutrients that the plant relies on, and these nutrients have to be replenished somehow. The pesticides are needed because monoculture fields are highly attractive to certain weeds and insect pests.
Learn more:
Expanding Monoculture: Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture
Industrial Agriculture Practices: Meat Production
In the industrial system of meat production, meat animals are "finished"—prepared for slaughter—at large-scale facilities called CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations), where their mobility is restricted and they are fed a high-calorie, grain-based diet, often supplemented with antibiotics and hormones, to maximize their weight gain. Their waste is concentrated and becomes an environmental problem, not the convenient source of fertilizer that manure can be for more diverse, less massively scaled farms.
Learn more:
CAFOs Uncovered (2008)
They Eat What? The Reality of Feed at Animal Factories
Impacts of Industrial Agriculture: Environmental Damage
No matter what methods are used, agriculture always has some impact on the environment. But industrial agriculture is a special case: it damages the soil, water, and even the climate on an unprecedented scale.
Intensive monoculture depletes soil and leaves it vulnerable to erosion. Chemical fertilizer runoff and CAFO wastes add to global warming emissions and create oxygen-deprived "dead zones" at the mouths of major waterways. Herbicides and insecticides harm wildlife and can pose human health risks as well. Biodiversity in and near monoculture fields takes a hit, as populations of birds and beneficial insects decline.
Learn more:
Increasing Herbicide Use: Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture
Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture
Impacts of Industrial Agriculture: Evolutionary Wars
Whenever we attack a population of unwanted organisms (such as weeds or bacteria) repeatedly with the same weapon, we give an evolutionary advantage to genes that make the organism less vulnerable to that weapon. Over time, those genes become more widespread, and the weapon becomes less useful—a phenomenon called resistance. Industrial agriculture has accelerated resistance problems on at least two fronts.
Overuse of antibiotics in meat production (in the U.S., more antibiotics are consumed each year by healthy animals than by sick humans) has contributed to a growing problem of antibiotic resistance that is having a serious impact on the treatment of infectious diseases.
And a similar over-reliance on the herbicide glyphosate (marketed by Monsanto Co. as Roundup) has spawned a burgeoning population of Roundup-resistant "superweeds" that has become a scourge for farmers in many areas of the U.S., especially the South and Midwest.
Learn more:
Prescription for Trouble: Using Antibiotics to Fatten Livestock
Promoting Pesticide Resistance: Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture
See also:
Industrial Agriculture | Pesticide Action Network
"Humans have been farming for 10,000 years. Sixty years ago, after World War II, we started industrializing U.S. farming operations through a mix of policy decisions and accidents of history. This method of farming is neither inevitable nor efficient. More to the point, it can't be sustained.
Industrial agriculture treats the farm as a factory, with "inputs" (pesticides, fertilizers) and "outputs" (crops). The end-objective is increasing yields while controlling costs — usually by exploiting economies of scale (i.e. making a lot of one thing, or "monocropping"), and by replacing solar energy and manual labor with machines and petro-chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers.
In relying on chemical "inputs," we have un-learned how to farm.
This model of farming is inefficient and does not represent the cutting edge of modern farming. In 1940, we produced 2.3 food calories for every 1 fossil fuel calorie used. By industrializing our food and farming systems, we now get 1 food calorie for every 10 fossil fuel calories used — a 23-fold reduction in efficiency. Following this path we have become dependent on cheap, abundant oil, and on quick chemical "fixes" for agro-ecosystem challenges that are complicated and require deep, local and hands-on knowledge. In relying on chemical inputs, we have un-learned how to farm.
Hidden Costs of Chemical Dependence..." read the rest here:
Industrial Agriculture | Pesticide Action Network
We will now proceed with the rest of the "Uh what?" question in the following post...General...