GM Crops, World Food & Water Crisis... http://tinyurl.com/7scdrh

While this article has a reasonable balance, it is a little lacking but the reporting of this story elsewhere has been sensational (and misleading). Like it says, these aren't necessarily in premium seed, but also some of the major benefits of GM crops are when stressed by pests or weeds. In identical trials on well-tended land the yields can be similar (or less for GM), but in true use the GM crop will outperform (especially if pests or weed control becomes important). People aren't idiots - if these products were truly and consistently inferior they wouldn't have lasted for more than 10 years. DMS (non-Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta etc, just interested).

Does this mean Monsanto is selling out of date technology to Australian farmers?

Wow...great results....exactly what the US and Canadian farmers have been telling us for 10 years!! Any good plant geneticist will tell you that this will pretty well be the case. One only has to look in the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture website and see that the average canola yield per hectare has not gone up at all in the last few years. Just like the Kalashnikov assault rifle.....not good for society....but somehow we think it will offer us protection from the unforeseen !! Why do we concentrate on GM when plant nutrition (a great example for NSW is canola boron management!!) offers far greater and tenable options for increasing yield. GM...such a good sell !!!. I actually think we should be doing far more trials on "well tended" land to help further GM canola's bleak future!!.

It won't be the recognised "norm", that GM crops main objective is to own the farm & the land by owning the grain, until all matters & methods are in place. Only then will it be recognised that the yield versus the labour & income to whom, when & why, that the best farming practices are for those who put their own effort into the farm. People always seem to learn the hard way.

For the varieties currently available, the average yield of the Clearfield types at Horsham was 0.68t/ha (7 varieties in trial), the Roundup Ready: 0.62 t/ha (4) and the TTs 0.67 t/ha (17 varieties). The Least Significant Difference (LSD) was 0.12 t/ha, ie the difference in average yields needed to be at least 0.12 t/ha different to be statistically significant, otherwise the differences may well be a chance findng. The end result: no significant differences. If you do the same analysis just for the top-performing varieties/hybrids of the 3 herbicide tolerance types, there is still no significant difference. The trial was also sown on 2 July and had decile 1 rainfall and variability was quite high, and results did not reflect what happened at sites sown on time with more growing season rain. The average yield of the Clearfield types at Forbes NVT site was 0.99 t/ha, for TTs was 0.94 t/ha and for Roundup Ready was 1.11 t/ha. The LSD was 0.23t/ha - ie again no significant difference. The Victorian Irrigated Cropping Council also conducted a high-yielding trial at Kerang in 2008. The conventional canola (ie those with no specific herbicide tolerance) averaged 4.02t/ha, the 4 Roundup Ready varieties averaged 3.68t/ha, the Clearfields 3.43t/ha and the TTs 3.33t/ha. The LSD was 0.69t/ha - the conventionals outyielding the TTs, and no significantly difference between the averages of the other types. Two top-yielding conventional varieties statistically significantly exceeded the site's average yield (4.6t/ha and 4.54t/ha). The 2 top performing varieties of the Roundup Ready (4.0t/ha) and Clearfield (3.93t/ha) types were not significantly different from the 2 top conventional varieties. However, the top yielding TT variety ranked 8th out of the 17 varieties at 3.6 t/ha and yielded significantly less than the top two conventional varieties. The NVT trials also included unreleased breeding lines (data unavailable to public) which show some very promising Clearfield and Roundup Ready varieties in the pipeline in terms of yield. A fourth independent trial has been undertaken by Farmlink in NSW, and the report is currently being written. Any farmer or advisor looking at NVT data should also look at the LSD when seeing if there is any significant difference. Just looking at averages only tells part of the story and doesn't reflect the variability across the trial and within the treatments. It's like comparing children's average heights in one grade prep class with another - if one class has a couple of tall kids to bump up the average and the other has one or two short ones to bring down the average, does that mean that kids from classroom 1 are taller than kids from classroom 2? No - it is chance error. You need to look at the big picture, and an LSD and CV allows us to do that.

Sounds like the "Roundup Ready " weeds do better than the canola.

Thanks to Felicity for actual data. A news article can't be expected to have that level of detail, but nice to see here. It seems then that most of the reporting and information (outside of this farmonline page) is not reflecting the lack of statistical significance in the difference. The yield data then are the "same" (but of course the conventional varieties lack the RR trait). Shame this gets lost in the sensationalism.

Bill Crabtree's excuses for poorly performing GM Canola are a bit like the wind farm industry claiming a 'significant minority' of valuers say windfarms don't effect property values. They ignore the 60% who say they do! A bit like the film of tobacco industry spin spin, 'Thanks for killing me!'

Thanks Felicity...the facts win out after all!