king_of_aces

The anti-GMO crowd doesn't understand the opportunities available here.

Unfortunately seems it isn't just a matter of not understanding, but not wanting to understand even when you explain it to a pretty sizable chunk of people. Good luck indeed on that front.

Crop breeder here, so I'm going to lead into a question with that in mind. The actual modification seems quite simple and at least a first glance as something that could maybe be done with more traditional breeding methods (screening mutants without the trait, etc.). Could you explain to people why you decided to go the GM route rather than methods people consider "traditional" breeding? I'm sure there was weighing of different ideas such as regulatory on the GM side, how long traditional breeding actually takes with apples, etc., so I'm just curious what got you to the route you chose for the trait.

The reason is, PPO has multiple genes on multiple sites on the chromosome . . .

And that's one thing I didn't know yet. It looks deceptively easy until you mention that. Thanks.

For anyone is interested in asking questions to actual farmers, feel free to stop over at r/farming. We always welcome legitimate questions.

Judging by the posts here, it's sounding like people aren't too familiar with what we actually do on farms (especially the big ones). One of the biggest misnomers out there is that it's common for us to mistreat our animals, so I'm betting it would do folks a lot of good to ask some actual farmers.

For the OP, there always seems to be a strange tendency for groups like yours to overstate how common abuse actually is on farms. Why don't you take the opportunity to demonstrate that these "investigations" represent the minority rather than the norm more often? It seems like that's a detail that gets conveniently omitted so often in these discussions. Some would chalk that up to trying to further an agenda, but I'm legitimately curious if there's more to it than just that. I've seen a lot of questions asking how many farms you've been on and how many didn't have abuse, so that seems like a really important detail to cover.