All About Agriculture, the Dummy Version

Offspring of hybrid plants

Every once in a while, one of the staff stumbles upon a post written by a freelancer who was clearly just throwing words at the page. The prose may appear to make sense, but anything beyond a cursory glance will reveal that the author had abso-friggin'-lutley no idea what he or she was pretending to talk about. That's why we picked today's nominee on the basis of the post he barfed up on EzineArticles.com, "Increase Your Harvests Multi-Fold With Non-Hybrid Seeds." Let's welcome James K. Blake back to the podium.

We've seen Blake here twice before, but only because of his "reviews" of power tools he'd never actually used. This post is one of the later ones written by Jimmy, who claims to be a Brit (but is probably a classmate of Shalini Madhav in Mumbai), during his "agriculture" period. The probability that Blake has any knowledge whatsoever of agronomy seems unlikely. We say that because of some of his pronouncements, which seem rather... vague and uneducated, pronouncements like,

• "Hybrid seeds are seeds produced through cross-pollination, collected and replanted. Collection and replanting can give you low yield." – If hybrids have low yields, why are they so popular with farmers?
• "If you want high yields, no matter what season the earth is in, you can rely on non-hybrid seeds." – That's just plain stupid: you won't get "high yields" in winter, no matter what you plant!
• "...non-hybrid seeds... are seeds that are collected from mature plants that are open pollinated. By being from mature plants, which have been specially collected and packed, the seeds are guaranteed to grow when you plant them and produce yields." – Is this moron trying to say that hybrid seeds come from immature plants? and that "yields" are guaranteed? What an idiot!
• "Many of these farmers plant the cross-pollinated seeds that they gather from the previous harvest; after the harvest, these seeds are replanted in the next season. This goes on and on. These seeds reach a point where they become sterile and unproductive." – We think Blake might be confusing hybrid seeds with mules...
• "You can buy organic, non hybrid seeds online in a very convenient way...." – Uh, yeah. "Convenient."

Blake's "warning" would be more useful if he simply stated that the seeds of hybrid plants don't breed true. Apparently, however, he didn't quite get that point.

We can't be certain, but we think Blake has confused hybrid with genetically modified. His sudden introduction of the word "organic" more than halfway through his post does little to improve the quality of  the information James K was attempting to share, quality so low that we have no choice but to award him the Dumbass of the Day for another contribution to the stupidification of the internet.

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