What do you think of GMO's?

[The Grand Nudger]

I meant that the benefits gained from the technology are seemingly all going to the producers of that technology, not the producers of the actual food. Sorry for any confusion.

Ah..yeah, well, I mean they get profit from it, but the benefits of the tech still get to you. They sell the seed -to producers- on the basis of it's yield(generally), who imagine they'll make more money (though this is hardly the case) - that increase in yield does mean a reduction in the cost of business to processors and retailers, who then take that wiggle room and compete with each other for your business. Animals are fed on GMO, for example - and that's reflected in the price of beef (the cost of beef would approach princely sums if it weren't for gmo feed - take a look at the price of "organic, gmo free pasture raised etc etc etc"). Cotton is another big GMO crop (though you don't hear about it much) and that's reflected in the price of T-shirts, undies, sucks and such. It may be pennies, it may be dimes, and it may just barely nullify what would otherwise be inflation - but it's there - and while you may not notice that benefit as an individual consumer if you tallied up the pennies saved (assuming it's just pennies) across the economy as a whole you'd see a massive increase in purchasing power. This again benefits you directly (and I've only considered the direct economic effect....there are many other ways to quantify the benefit, to you, of GMO). You're probably "going with" GMOs without even knowing it.

The biggest GMO crops in the US are Corn, Soy, Cotton, Canola, and Sugarbeet -so....pretty much all of our major crops...lol..and a massive percentage in each category is GMO. You're benefiting from one or all of these either directly or in derivatives.
(I'm not a large enough producer to justify buying the seed myself - though I trialed GMO strawberries a few years back for UF's ag extension, afaik, they still don't have approval. Besides, my customers would string me up from the fucking rafters if I fed them GMO...lol. Right now GMO is an institutional ag racket, mainly. The tomatoes and watermelons you buy aren't likely to be GMO....yet......but that's miniscule compared to the above, eh?)

Maybe I'm wrong or simplistic in that statement, too. You apparently know a lot more about the industry than I do. Whoever's getting the benefit, my point is that it's not going to the consumers. As a consumer, I don't really know if there's any danger to these products. IMO no one really knows, as we'll need to see people eating them for a lifetime to really be sure.

GMO wasn't invented yesterday (1983), and it gets tested, whereas few-to-no such tests have been done on traditional crops...which might explain why we didn't realize putting corn in everything was a bad idea until recently.....despite having eaten it for thousands of years.

So, if I don't know if there's danger, and there's no benefit for me in choosing these products, I'm going to stick with the known product.

You don't really need to make any choice. It's already been made for you. The products you "know" are most likely already GMO (and have been for some time). -If- you wanted to remove GMOs from your life, you'd have to put everything you buy under the microscope (which is what the anti-GMO crowd advocates for, that's the point of the labeling campaigns). That's how dangerous this stuff is, it's in everything...has been for some time now.....and you wouldn't even know it. There was really no reason to imagine that GMO's would be any more dangerous than a hybrid crop in the first place - though I'm glad the testing procedures and approval exist (I think they should have existed for hybrids as well). It's difficult to express how absurd the entire debate is regarding some danger posed to you by GMO.

Mind you, if that's your position on GMO, and you'd like to go with non-GMO...by all means have at it. I certainly appreciate those who have made a similar choice and that's a niche I market explicitly to (I couldn't break into the big leagues even if I wanted to...I'm far too poor, relative to them. People making a decision like that leaves me room to operate, and it's room that the big boys either don't give a shit about, haven't found a way to exploit, or simply cannot exploit due to the restrictions imposed by their model...yet). I wish you luck...you're going to need it.