I heard a prophet several years ago say he was given a vision, that there would be some kind of disease that would affect these genetically altered plants(hybrids) and there would be a catastrophic crop failure leading to massive starvation.
We use only heirloom seeds and prayer ;) We've done this for the past several years. It's probably the best way to go. The heirloom plants seem to do as well as the hybrids and personally I think the veggies taste better. But, maybe it's just my imagination.
December 27, 2007
Coloful houses lie near the mountains in Longyearbyen, a village on the island of Spitsbergen, part of Norway's Svalbard archipelago.
A mountainside near the town was chosen as the home for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a "doomsday" seed bank that will store backup copies of as many as three million different crop varieties in case of a worldwide catastrophe.
The high-tech vault, which will open for storage in February 2008, is going to "put an end to extinction [of] agricultural crops," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome, Italy, which is the leading force behind the project.
The mission is crucial, Fowler noted, because the stored seeds provide researchers with the raw genetic materials needed to adapt the global food supply to survive climate change as well as water and energy shortages.
That disease is just as likely to attack heirloom seeds, in fact, more likely. Hybrids are bred to resist the most common diseases like fusarium and verticilium wilt and while hybrids are unpredictable when the seed is saved, you would still get some form of what you planted.
Hybrids are also heavier yielders. If everyone had to plant heirloom seeds we would very soon have famines by the same scenario as the hybrid and GM seeds getting some dread disease.
For the same reason if all farmers were forced to go organic there would be widespread famine.
I too, have my stash of seeds and it contains open pollinated and hybrids.
Oh yeah, hybrids aren’t what you call genetically modified. They are cross bred with like type plants in an effort to take advantage of the best features of both parents.
GM plants have totally unrelated genes spliced into them.