I find it bizarre that you’d lump all NGO’s as ‘watchdogs of our society’ – NGOs are capable of being ideologically driven as compared to the profit driven nature of corporate spin (a money thing generally in both directions – your donors have a set of beliefs and thus you’d better follow them if you want donations to roll in), if your ideology is vehement opposition to all genetic modification – then surely your spin is at least as invalid as the corporate spin of big-Ag companies (who at least are opposed to some types of genetic modification, be it on safety grounds (engineering actually dangerous things), or simply attempting to mollify public fears (terminator seeds)).

You also appear to have taken it upon yourself to completely redefine “spin” mid post – in what sense does Monsanto attempt to spin “everything under the sun” – this doesn’t particularly make sense any way I attempt to look at it, although this doesnt come as much of a surprise when moving on to the next conspiracy laden rant about ownership of the food supply and subsequent enslavement of the human race, followed by a plea to look for the evidence yourself – I’d be interested to see where you look for the evidence, and how critical you are about it – this blog, and Genetic Maize, both have (if I recall correctly) posts about what constitutes reasonable searching for evidence – which essentially boils down to looking at peer reviewed evidence, from multiple sources, and using prior knowledge to weight each piece of evidence based on where it is published, who wrote it, exactly what the dataset includes, how often it has been cited, etc etc – would you agree that this method is probably more worthwhile than going to clearly biased sources? (this includes both big biotech, and anti-GM NGOs – although weighing reports from both of these should probably be part of the picture, if only to give you search terms to look for peer-reviewed literature) Or is your methodology more of a find your pre-conceived idea on a website which is ideologically aligned with your beliefs and that’s all the evidence you require?

Caricatures of the above post fail especially when people can read what was actually written.

While I like talking with Karl and the regular commenters, I’d really like to have some people with differing viewpoints around. That’s actually the whole point of Biofortified – conversation between diverse people. I personally would like to find things that we (people of diverse viewpoints) have in common, as a starting point, which is why I write posts like the recent one about health care costs potentially having a positive effect on agricultural biodiversity. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: Bill, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts about my posts and I’d really like to learn more from you. We can’t have a conversation, though, that starts with assumptions and name calling. I hope we can move past this.

James – see the last article on Nature’s peer review debate for some discussion of the problem of accessibility to the public. I totally agree that some papers are way too difficult to understand even with prerequisite knowledge, thus impossible without it.

Over the long weekend, I built a new version of Genetic Maize to be more of a portfolio site so I can direct comment-type traffic over here, where all the good conversation is (you can see the new site at http://sandbox.geneticmaize.com/, including a timestamp 4 days ago on the post announcing the change). I haven’t switched it to the regular domain yet because I haven’t had time to download and configure an FTP client so I can change the pictures at the top. I’ve also been trying to figure out (as James so astutely predicted) how to transfer comments over here, or if I should email recent commenters and ask them to repost their comments here (Bill, you’re welcome to repost yours). I was happily making the new site pretty over break when I realized that I forgot to turn off comments over at the old site. I went over there to find some more comments that need responses, said “oh, shit”, turned off comments, and basically just haven’t had time to deal with the existing ones because it’s Monday and break is over and I’m supposed to be working. I just told Karl about the change yesterday.

Incidentally, does anyone know if you can import a blog into an existing blog? Will it just add all the new posts to the existing posts, or will it overwrite? I ask because importing does bring all the comments with the posts.

I’m making this change for a lot of reasons, but one is selfish. I just don’t have time to adequately respond to every comment or even to write enough posts to justify having my own blog. My major professor has been justifiably getting fussy with my heavy emphasis on extracurricular activities. I really seriously need to get working on my research and let blogging and other things go for a while so I can graduate! When I do have time, I want to contribute to making Biofortified better, not just my own little blog that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Plus, Squarespace is expensive, so I needed to switch back to WordPress anyway. I was hoping to announce this with a little fanfare, but that’s ok.

Bill, you obviously didn’t know any of this, but I don’t appreciate your jumping to conclusions. I don’t even know what you mean by “to engage in the age-old and ever popular ad hominem attack so favored by polemicists everywhere”, except I’m pretty sure I didn’t use an ad hominem attack since I didn’t even mention Dr. Benbrook in this post, and I was respectful in the last post as well. Heck, I was even respectful when I asked Who is Jeffery Smith?, to the chagrin of some readers. I’m former military, I can’t even bear to call someone with a PhD by their 1st name unless I know them really well, let alone say anything inappropriate about a person. I’m also pretty friendly and go out of my way to try to understand the viewpoints of people that I disagree with at the surface level, trying to find our commonalities underneath. I see on your CFS bio that you went to Grinnell College. I’ll be in Ames for about 2 more years. If you make it back to the area, let me know and we can have coffee or something.

I am confused about your saying that I was being snide in calling the Organic Center a special interest group. I wasn’t sneering as I typed this! I don’t have any positive or negative connotations toward the phrase, and it’s really not my fault if you do. If you’d like, substitute one of the synonyms I provided at the beginning of the post: non-profit or NGO.

Again, you have no way of knowing (other than looking at my profile information) that I’m not a snide person. I try my best to be honestly curious and critical about everything, no matter where it comes from. That’s what I was trying to show in this post, although I may have failed miserably. I am fully aware that my writing skills may not be up to snuff, which is one reason why I started blogging in the first place.

These non-peer reviewed reports are likely to be biased at least to some degree. That’s just the nature of humans. We’re all biased in some small way, no matter how hard we try to be neutral. At least if we get our info from a variety of sources, including ones that we know are likely to have some degree of bias, then we can find what’s really going on. These reports advertise themselves as being unbiased, which science reporters then serve to the public as God’s honest truth. It’s just wrong, no matter what “side” you’re on.

Finally, I acknowledge my bias in full, on my blog’s about page. I say where I’ve come from and what I’m trying to do. Where is your disclosure statement? I didn’t know where you were from until Karl pointed you out – I thought you were Bill Freese, Director of Media Services at Montana State University. That’s my fault, I could have dug further, but I don’t think its nice to tell me how biased I am when you actually work for an NGO and I don’t.

Anyway, on to the report (although I’ve already spent waaay too much time on this, I’m supposed to be doing data analysis or going back to the lab to shell more corn or a million other things).

1st, the report lumps all GMOs into one bunch, even after saying that Bt and glyphosate resistance are different. By lumping them into one bunch, the report effectively invalidates its own distinction between the two, which I didn’t say explicitly in Does using GMOs really increase pesticide use?, but I did go into further detail than I did here, as I indicated in this post. This post wasn’t about the specific details of the reports but was about the subject of reports themselves. The issue of left out data was already covered by James and Ewan here. Oh, and thanks for calling me dishonest.

2nd, I don’t know all of the details of these different data sets. Sorry. What I was referring to (although, again, didn’t go into detail here since that wasn’t the post’s subject) was that this report didn’t use EIQ as a measure, instead choosing a less informative pounds per acre. All that information about toxicity and runoff is important to consider when talking about herbicides and, as far as I know, is readily available.

3rd, the methodologies in the two reports directly contradict each other. I encouraged readers to check out both reports by providing links and saying “No matter our personal beliefs, it’s always good to expose ourselves to many points of view.” I only mentioned the PG Economics report to address the question “what is the relative impact of the herbicides used?” which the Organic Center report did not do. I did not even talk about the methodologies because they are so strikingly different and I am not qualified to evaluate them. I probably should have stated this directly, but if I stated everything I don’t know in every blog post, they’d all be very long and very boring! You can call an admitted lack of knowledge shown by a lack of mention bias if you want, but I don’t.

4th, I was actually pretty clear about my opinions on herbicide resistance, and I’m pretty sure my thoughts on the subject do run counter to that of groups like PG Economics. I stand by what I said: “improper use of herbicides of any type (in conjunction with herbicide tolerant crops or not) will result in resistant weeds. It is misleading to claim that side effects of herbicide use are due to genetic engineering.” I didn’t feel the need to discuss more than was needed to make my point as I’m under the impression that mindful brevity is important in blogging.

5th, I never said anything negative about Dr. Benbrook. I did say that he’s an “agricultural economist and ‘Chief Scientist’ of the Organic Center”, which he is, then I speculated (in words that are obviously speculation, because I don’t presume to know what he was thinking at the time) about his rationale for the way he wrote the report. I put Chief Scientist in quotes because economists aren’t “hard” scientists in the sense that they don’t go out and do experiments, field work, etc.

Finally, I was clear in this post that every non-peer reviewed special interest produced report warrants further criticism. I didn’t single PG Economics out as unbiased or special in any way. I assumed that any one who didn’t already know about them and wanted to know more about PG Economics or the Organic Center would follow the links that I provided to their sites in my previous post or simply look them up for themselves. Again, I’m not snide, that’s you projecting. I’d also like to point out that, while they are smaller and have less funding, organic groups also have a financial incentive to promote their product over other products. That’s just capitalism.

“Sometimes these reports seem 100% legitimate, especially when we agree with the agenda of the group, and especially when we don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to judge them.”

I’m not asking for special treatment in fact checking and credibility. I just wish people would hold everyone to the standards they claim they want: appropriate sourcing, quality data, transparent funding. And it’s funny — for some of them, they’d be horrified to let any similar points from climate deniers slide by they way they let organic food and farming claims slide by without challenge. Just because they want to believe it.

The answer “google it” is not sufficient sourcing….

I hadnt considred yet that in soybean the useage on the remaining acreage (rather than a well controlled comparison as you’d see in what one might call real science) that is not GM may be lower for reasons of low yielding acreage or low weed pressure – thanks James for bringing that up, I’ll store it for future regurgitation.

I was doing a little number juggling of my own earlier, and it appears that in corn at least (where % acreage has changed from 3% to 26% in terms of HT traited acres) useage overall has declined dramatically with the per acre useage of herbicides (on the admittedly poor ‘lbs of AI’ measure) down to 68% of 1996 useage in 2005 (the last year for which the NASS has actual corn data, which makes the 2006,2007 and 2008 figures in the UCS report more bogus than they already are) and when taking into account the lbs of AI/bushel you see that this is at 58% of 1996 useage in 2005.

Now, taking James’ point about the utilization of RR crops on acreage where herbicide useage is most needed – it may not be too unfair to claim that a lot of this reduction is due to the useage of RR crops on the ‘worst’ 23% of corn acreage – it would certainly be an hypothesis worth testing, rather than looking at broad figures on useage across the entire US I’d imagine you could relatively easily pick a random sample of 100 farms who use RR corn/soy/cotton, and 100 farms who dont, and get their historical useage from 1995-2009 for ALL herbicides. That way you could make claims either way based on real comparitive data and even potentially extrapolate this to the full country data – if for instance RR adopters had higher useage of herbicides prior to the introduction/utilization of RR crops as compared to non RR adopters you could actually account for this in the final analysis and make a fair comparison. You could even go so far as to use the far more meaningful environmental impact quotient at the same time.

Although obviously the UCS wont do this. Because regardless of the benefits, GM crops are bad, mmkay? (and it’d be a real pain in the behind to do something that was actually publishable through the peer review process)