There's a lot of misinformation campaigns from the "anti-GMO" companies and crowd who get in the way of an "Elon vision" for the industry. Most anti-GMOers don't even realize that transgenics occur in nature, while making their signs that foreign DNA is food = frankenfood.
GMO is not inherently bad, but the goals of most companies working on GMO seeds are profit over all else. This means they select for compatibility with pesticides, fertilizers, and monocrop annual planting. Perennial wheat, for example, could be an incredible ecological success for GMO. But it wouldn't have the built-in annual demand for seeds. The concern over GMO is misplaced--people should be debating the accompanying practices that are pushed by the industrial system. When Bayer buys Mansanto, that should be a huge f*cking red flag.
The big vision for the future doesn't need to be entirely novel. The great cuisines were born out of a conversation with nature. Highly local, distributed, diverse farming systems < 50 hectares with an emphasis on soil health should be the model. We just need to make it easier for people to collaborate on these kinds of projects. Entrepreneurs and farms on this scale are mostly constrained by up-front resource requirements. Once ecological systems mature, they are far more profitable than the factory model.
I don't think the big vision of production needs to be novel, but I could envision, if not GMO, then genetic analysis / breeding to start re-localizing what kinds of crops are being grown. I think there are plenty of ways you can take old-fashioned seeming systems and practices and modernize them, maybe with more careful data collection to help it along.
I do think that if this system will ever really work on a larger scale then a big vision will be needed to reimagine the kind of distribution system you would need to efficiently bring the product to the customer; Getting rid of the cold chain and reducing the amount of food waste on the way. A lot of the assumed ways people buy and eat food are shifting with gen x/y/z. The supermarket is a dead zone of product placement kickbacks and corn. What comes after that?
You're spot-on about bringing genetic analysis into breeding and re-localizing. [Steve Jones][1] is an awesome breeder who is doing this in Washington's Skagit Valley.
I see there being a higher participation in local food production. There are already people who want to do it but can't afford the upfront cost. As really good food becomes more available, I think it will drive more interest in growing. It was only 8 generations ago that participation in farming in the U.S. was 90%, and now it's down to 1%.
For the people who don't grow or collaborate directly with growers to get food, I see the responsibility falling to chefs to insist on working with local ingredients. Maybe self-driving cars will also usher in a new system of delivery for getting ingredients from local farms to households.
Hm this is interesting. One question would be if any of these approaches is scalable outside a single climate / area- exportable into a repeatable system that will help breed crops given the inputs of a specific local ecosystem.
I hear some good stuff coming out of academic style research but nothing that goes beyond small studies for a given local climate, nothing disruptive/commercial. Maybe it's just unsexy and doesn't have that 100x potential, but it's sometimes hard to understand why monsanto et.al have such a monopoly going.
I'm sure they do, but their mo seems to be vendor lock in / price fixing vs. open ecosystem. Nothing wrong with making a profit, but I feel that plenty of their practices are criminal / actively harmful. One of the powerful things about the Elon narrative is that some of the underlying motivations are humanitarian. Monsanto may claim to be interested in feeding the world but it's clear that they don't really have any real interest in doing this beyond making good PR.
I believe it's totally possible to be profitable in some of the areas monsanto works in and not be so... evil
