Many people (including comments on hacker news!) have called farmers the original hackers. The amount of bespoke problem solving needed is tremendous. Uniformity in farming is an extremely recent phenomenon.
OpenSourceEcology has the mission to create open source versions of 50 technologies they consider fundamental to "human civilization". One of the few technologies they've actually succeeded in open sourcing is a tractor
most of the named countries that are recognized today, were founded by hunting groups (defined by spoken language) that sought control over farmers and definitely over migrants.. oddly, farming itself is cited as a major driver of armed conflicts
Oh I know, a relative was bio-chem at monsanto related to corn... but I normally avoid telling people that because of the stigma it carries (unfair considering the global impact to yield)... now he works tirelessly to reduce invasive species to reduce coastal erosion.
The Monsanto stigma is well-earned by its legal teams, much to the chagrin of its many Monsanto biochem employees that saw (and see) the company as a creator of good in the world.
this purposefully blurs the distinction between pairing natural breeding versus invasive engineering.. often repeated by people in favor of invasive engineering
Because "invasive engineering" is just systematized "natural breeding".
People that don't understand this think that the production of GMO crops is done by scientists gene splicing scary chemicals into food products.
What is actually done is scientist get a genetic profile of crops, look for genes in crops that behave in a way they like, and bread crops with those genes. Exactly what "natural breeding" does, except for maybe the fact that it can be far more targeted with the genetic information.
There is a downside to this, it often results in highly homogeneous genetics in plants. However, that's a problem we already have with "natural" processes (see: bananas and most citrus fruits).
GMO is different. It involves the laboratory isolation of genes, and techniques to introduce said genes into an organism such that its DNA is altered. These technique do include gene splicing.
Golden rice is one well known example. It is a GMO plant which has been modified with genes taken from daffodils and a bacteria called erwinium uredovora. It's not just breeding existing species for good qualities.
Yes this is why eg the French bombard seeds with extraordinary amounts of radiation to get desired sets of random mutations, it’s much more natural and less invasive.
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626534