I love how you thoroughly put it. How about a combination of GMOs and organic farming? I mean, do we really need to use chemicals such as herbicides when cultivating GM crops? If we focus more on pest-resistant crops, we can jettison pesticides as well.
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This is exactly the point of aquaponics/vertical farming. In such controlled environments weed seeds are almost completely excluded inherently, and herbicides are utterly unnecessary. There are some compelling reasons to use genetic modification, and these reasons all scale down to DIY/decentralized production, particularly when looking at creating customized nutritional profiles of specific crops. For example, someone with a vitamin A deficiency due to an inherited trait or birth defect can enhance the vitamin A productivity of a strain of carrots they grow, and resolve their nutritional defect with bespoke produce, rather than pills and Big Pharma.
In vertical farms pests that prey on crops are as inherently excluded as are weeds, so the energy crops have to devote to pest resistance can be used instead to improve the quality of the crop, increase sweetness, size, or other meaningful metrics for that crop. All the modifications of tender crops that cause them to be able to be mass produced similarly require plants to devote their resources to producing those traits, and by producing our food where we eat instead, the bruising resistance, ability to be ripened during transit, and etc. do not need to be invested in by crops, which can instead be extremely tender, ripen on the vine, etc. Where crops are grown in bespoke personal environments for our exclusive use instead of commercially in bulk for trade purposes, horizontal gene transfer is eliminated from concern, as are most of the reasons Big Ag modifies crops. Instead of such costly development, DIY crops can devote a much larger percentage of their development resources into improving eating quality of the crop, and GMO enhanced crops inherently have far fewer drawbacks, and much greater benefit to consumers.