You must have been reading a different article Geoff. I thought it was a bit all over the place. There seemed to be quite a bit of ticking the boxes of the cliched list of stuff these sorts of authors like to mention, not much of it really coherent. A bit of feel good stuff to try and get people interested in organic gardening and that sort of thing.

I love Permaculture. I really do, it's great for gardens and small scale Sunday market stuff but I am not under any illusions that it's gonna feed the world. It doesn't lend itself readily to mechanisation the same way field cropping does. The ongoing inputs may not be the same, but they can still be considerable in terms of labour, time and setup costs. Exporting millions of tonnes of wheat grown by permaculture? Sorry, I just can't see it.

The authors also mention 'Bio-dynamic' farming. They might as well have mentioned Aztec blood sacrifice farming. Apparently that worked pretty well in it's day, and based on the same amount of science.

Get a grip guys, small scale organic gardening is not the kind of agriculture that is going to feed the cities. It can help subsistence farmers in poor countries, sure. But can you imagine how many of those farms it will take to feed London or New York?

Aime, I thought that sort of behavior is a response to big seed companies like Monsanto protecting their patented seed supplies?

They have developed specific seed types that are genetically, or selected for genetic traits, and they do not want their investment cheapened by people then distributing or on-selling second or further generation of "their" seeds. The agreement is on the seed packs by the way .. you buy, you agree to comply .. caveat emptor.

So if countries want the seeds from Monsanto or others, they have to comply with the seed owner's demands.

You can refuse and build up your own seed banks, but for years people have just found it easier to buy from Monsanto, let them do the heavy lifting in selecting the good from the poor seed and plant qualities. It's not much good now turning around and saying they are dirty guys, because we were lazy is it?

This is not aimed at backyard or small acreage farmers, it is the vast thousands of acres of wheat and other grain crops farming.

Would it be illegal under the proposed NZ laws to sell seeds, sure .. unless you get a government license.

I expect this to be unbelievably popular with out current government, a new source of bureaucracy, more government departments, more fiddling in peoples lives .. for the national interest of course .. isn't that the current catch-cry.

This isn't new .. Monsanto and DuPont have been at it for years .. good luck to them, at least someone is doing it and looking after the world's seed quality .. you can bet your life they have stocks of old and ancient varieties as well.

If we want to develop and protect seed types, maybe stop funding popular science, that does nothing except return $ to the science, nothing to humanity and fund agri science, unsexy as it is .. take 10% of what climate science gets for instance ..

Aime, if you're interested, you might read Nicky Hagar's Seeds of Distrust .. an expose on the NZ experience with GM seeds and the mechanisms of government .. not just the current conservative one either. http://www.nickyhager.info/category/books/

He's a very good investigative journo, old school .. not opinion, real journalism.

I get nervous when I see a head of that hydra Greenpeace pop up again. Its nearly always in an attempt to 'control' peoples behaviour and usually with reference to Green buzzwords and catchphrases which ultimately make no sense.

I found the article a little disjointed and composed of random 'good sounding' quotes from various and mostly irrlevant sources. What the heck does 'decontextualised standards' in Bolivia have to do with us??

Looks like they want an in for organically grown food which is usually expensive to buy and often dodgy quality. More than that, I can't say because, like most Green tirades, it is full of half-empty, feelgood statements which ultimately make little sense.

The son of a mate of mine is now the fourth generation farming a property near Dalby.

They had been saving their own wheat seed for 50 years. "Why pay for the stuff, when we grow it ourselves" was their motto.

In answer to those who rabbit on about soil degradation, erosion & other such garbage, they have been using no till, plant through stubble, with a cotton, & legume rotation using cottons deep root structure to open up the soil for about 30 years now, actually improving soil structure & productivity. The nitrogen fixed by the legume helps decomposition of the plant matter left behind.

I can hear the screams, cotton uses too much water, we should not grow cotton, & it makes me sick that this kind of rubbish is believed in the city.

They grow dry land cotton, no irrigation, basically as a soil improver. The deep root structure opens the soil, improving water penetration, & moisture retention, adding humus as it does so. Yes cotton is nutrient hungry, but when you only harvest the seed head, most is returned to where it came from.

It was only after using Monsanto cotton seed, that they were talked into using their wheat seed. It was a revelation. The commercial seed gave better germination, faster growth, better water tolerance, & a higher yield.

Even better, it produced prime hard wheat in drier conditions, when their production, using their own saved seed, would have been downgraded to stock feed.

Using proprietary seed has increased the net from the wheat part of their operation by about A$20,000 PA. Add to this the fact that dry land cotton is only viable in that area using the commercial seed with it's enhanced pest & herbicide resistance, & you get an entirely different answer to the Greenpeace spin.

It is time our city folk understood that this type of farming is almost universal today.

I'm with Atman - Greenpeace frighten me. They're a pack of nutters with a penchant for pseudoscience, but they've got such a good PR machine that they've managed to convince most folk that they're nice harmless hippies.

It is surprising that in article co-authored by a GM Wheat Campaigner, no explicit mention was made of genetic modification. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Could it be that Greenpeace have finally realised that genetic modification is not the bogeyman they paint it as?