Buellton-based organic farmer John Kiddie affably admits he’s new to the whole social media thing.
“I want to make my Twitter name or whatever you call it ‘outstandinginhisfield.’ I had ‘seedsamuri,’ but I spelled samurai wrong,” Kiddie said with a sly smile, while standing in a field of leafy greens.
Technology has become a valuable tool for today’s farmers. The Internet and its wonders, like Twitter, enable them to do business beyond their border crops. Advancements in farm equipment have made what was once backbreaking labor happen faster and with less sweaty labor. And, in just the last two decades, technology developed by several major scientific corporations has turned seeds—the very building blocks of agricultural life—into tools themselves.
Kiddie likes Twitter, and surely he appreciates the fact that he no longer has to till the land Amish-style with a wooden plough and a Clydesdale.
But he’s definitely not a fan of those seeds, more commonly—and sometimes more ominously—known as Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
First developed in the 1970s and ’80s, GMOs are created by adding new genetic material to an organism’s genome. In agriculture, the recombinant DNA is typically inserted into a seed’s genome to make its resulting crop resistant to commercial pesticides or capable of producing its own pesticidal proteins.
The ag industry’s most profitable, and likewise most controversial, GMOs are patent-protected food crops developed by biotechnology companies like Monsanto, Sygenta, and DuPont.
Kiddie said he doesn’t use GMO seeds at Nojoqui Farms, the official farm of health food chain New Frontiers, because “we’re in a growing area here where we don’t really need them [because the soil is]so plentiful.
“We really don’t think there’s a place for GMOs in the biosphere because they haven’t been adequately tested. They’ve been rushed out [into the market] by Monsanto and other biotechs,” he said. “And why would you feed your body something that it probably can’t recognize?”
As mentioned before, GMOs have been around for several decades. But now they seem to be popping up everywhere, much to the chagrin and trepidation of organic farmers like Kiddie.
Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has fully or partially deregulated three GMOS, including Roundup Ready® alfalfa and sugar beets and Amylase corn. The Roundup Ready® seeds are resistant to the weed killer Roundup, which is produced by Monsanto; the Amylase corn is genetically engineered by Syngenta Seeds, Inc. to produce a common enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar—a vital step in ethanol production. They join dozens of other deregulated GMOs, such as seeds infused with an insect-killing bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).
The decisions have an increasing number of organic farmers worried that the GMO crops—especially those that rely on insects or wind currents for pollination—will cross-pollinate with and contaminate their crops, making them uncertifiable as organic.
“Even just a few decades ago, you didn’t hear the words organic or nonorganic. Everything was organic,” Kiddie said. “It used to be all farmers collected their own seeds. They let the best plants go to seed and then they would plant that during the next season.”
But with the development of new technology, he said, that’s all changing.
In January, Kiddie traveled to Pacific Grove to attend the EcoFarm Conference, a three-day event put on by the Ecological Farming Association to highlight issues impacting organic farming. One of the issues discussed this year was GMOs.
According to the Ecological Farming Association’s preamble, the organization “has serious concerns that the development and release of Genetically Engineered (GE) crops around the world has rapidly progressed with inadequate government oversight, scant independent health and environmental safety testing, and minimal public debate.”
The decisions made now regarding genetic engineering in food crops, the preamble continues, “will have permanent consequences on our food production capacity, putting us at a crossroads in terms of the agricultural legacy that we will leave behind for our children and grandchildren.”
Kiddie explains the concept another way, using Roundup Ready® seeds as an example: “[Nojoqui Farms] doesn’t want Roundup—that’s poison. It’s getting in the soil and in the groundwater. That’s not what we’re about. It’s not an economic thing for us; it’s not about how much money we can make on something. It’s about how we’re treating the earth—are we being good stewards?”
A lot of farmers, Kiddie said, only look at the issue through a business lens.
“We have to look at it through the dollars and cents lens, too, or else we’ll go out of business. But we do it in a way that also says, ‘I’m voting for Earth. I don’t want to support Monsanto or big chemical companies who want to put something in the ground for a short-term gain,’” he said. “Everyone seems to be dragging their feet on telling people what’s in this stuff, but people have a right to know what they’re putting in their bodies.”
Just the tip of the iceberg …
Genetically engineered foods and products are regulated by three federal agencies: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The FDA is in charge of food safety and labeling. The EPA monitors the effects of pesticides on food safety and the environment. And a division of the USDA called Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service monitors the safety of planting and field-testing GE plants.
When a GMO is deregulated, it means those three government agencies have found the crop to be as safe as its traditionally bred counterpart. Also, in FDA terms, the chemical or substance added to the food is “generally recognized as safe,” making it exempt to food additive tolerance requirements.
“The USDA, FDA, and other regulatory agencies don’t do research [on the products]. They gather information from the companies making the product,” said Peggy Lemaux, a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley and a lead researcher at UC Biotech, the University of California’s agriculture and biotechnology research program,
The agencies’ scientists assess the data’s legitimacy, and additional safety tests are conducted in the public sector. The entire deregulation process, Lemaux said, can take several years.
Lemaux has been studying GMOs since 1991. Before that, she worked with transgenic crops. While discussing GMOs with the Sun in a phone interview, she seemed skeptical of the media and general public’s recent dismay over the technology.
“GMOs have been in the food supply for almost 10 years,” she said.
(According to an annual scientific review Lemaux wrote in 2008, Genetically Engineered Plants and Foods: A Scientist’s Analysis of the Issues, estimates suggest that as much as 80 percent of American processed food may contain an ingredient from a GE crop.)
“This is biology; it’s going to happen,” Lemaux said of GMOs. “The question becomes: Can it be controlled in a way [that makes it safe]? It can’t be controlled to the point of zero contamination. It’s never been possible, and it’s never been demanded before. Even certified seed, which is considered pure, isn’t 100 percent pure. And nobody really cared until now.”
Government agencies have never been responsible for testing new food before it goes on the market, she said.
As an example, she gave the kiwi, which came over to the United States in the 1980s. By the 1990s, people started developing allergies to the little green fruit.
“It turns out there’s something in the kiwi that has a cross-reaction with latex. People can die from kiwi allergies,” Lemaux said. “When that happened, people started saying there should have been studies done on it.”
Now people are saying the same things about GMOs.
“People ask, ‘Well, why don’t they test for long-term effects?’ The truth is, it’s a very difficult thing to do. The test subjects—rats and mice—don’t live that long,” she explained. “Also rats don’t eat a lot of potato, so it’s hard to reach the point of toxicity. Sometimes they’ll spike the food to reach the right level, but that doesn’t work because it has to be in the context of a potato.”
There have been several studies done claiming that GMOs have long-term effects on animal and human health.
One of the most well-known studies is a 2009 report released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences that found Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn is linked to organ damage, and even organ failure, in rats.
Monsanto blasted the study, saying it was based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning. The study’s authors shot back in a statement that their research was inconsistent with Monsanto’s because the company neglects to record health effects based on animal gender or testing proportions.
Still, many scientists remain unimpressed with studies like the one by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, including UC Berkeley’s Lemaux.
“I’m certainly not going to defend Monsanto because that’s not my job, and I frankly don’t care. But a lot of those studies have been set up poorly,” she said. “The studies claiming health risks, in general, haven’t been in peer review journals, and often there were problems with those studies, like the testing samples weren’t large enough.”
But what about environmental risks?
During his interview with the Sun, Nojoqui Farms’ Kiddie mentioned studies claiming plants grown from pesticide-infused seeds were killing off butterflies and bees, something that could be a huge threat to crops pollinated by insects.
“You can’t grow crops without insects,” Kiddie said.
When insects and other animals start getting affected by environmental factors, he said, it’s an indication of what’s to come for humans.
Also, Kiddie is concerned about what GMOs are doing to the earth itself. He’d like to see more studies on the seeds’ impact on soil.
“There’s a saying in organic farming that the farmer grows the soil and the soil grows everything else,” he said.
According to UC Biotech’s Lemaux’s aforementioned review, there are no data in the scientific literature available—more than 25 individual studies—supporting damage to bees caused by Bt crops. The Sun failed to find any peer-reviewed studies saying otherwise.
In regard to butterflies, the science journal Nature in 1999 published results from a laboratory study analyzing the effects of Bt corn on monarch butterflies. In the study, monarch caterpillars were fed milkweed leaves dusted with pollen from a single variety of Bt corn. Researchers found that more caterpillars died when they ate the Bt pollen-dusted leaves as opposed
to those that ate leaves dusted with conventional corn pollen. According to an abstract of the report from nature.com, most hybrid Bt corn plants express the Bt toxin in their pollen.
Another study in 2000 found that black swallowtail caterpillars placed at different distances from a Bt cornfield weren’t negatively impacted. The caterpillars were observed for effects for seven days, the study said.
Following that release of those studies and several others, the EPA found there was a very low probability of risk to monarch butterflies beyond 12 feet from Bt cornfields. It was also determined that certain GMO corn varieties had even more limited negative impacts on the caterpillars. The EPA concluded that Bt corn was not a significant factor in the field death of caterpillars, especially when compared to the use of pesticides and habitat destruction.
Insect deaths, however, aren’t the only environmental concerns expressed by some agriculturalists and scientists. Other issues include insect resistance to pesticides like Bt, the evolution of “superweeds,” loss of plant and species biodiversity, and more.
The biggest threat to organic farming is arguably the evolution of “superweeds”—weeds that have developed a resistance to natural herbicides. (Nojoqui Farms’ Kiddie said hiring labor for weeding is the greatest expenditure in organic farming.)
Bt is a naturally occurring bacterium that many organic farmers use to kill weeds. The emergence of Bt GMOs has many farmers worried the bacterium will be rendered obsolete.
Historically, herbicide-resistant weeds have been grown in conjunction with both traditionally bred and GE crops. Typically, the weeds developed as a result of herbicide overuse. The data on whether herbicide-tolerant weeds grown from GMO crops can or will affect organic crops appears to be inconclusive. Nonetheless, federal agencies, along with biotech companies like Monsanto, require GMO growers to comply with certain insect and weed resistance management plans to maintain crop viability.
This generally involves steps such as creating buffers between GE and non-GE crop fields upward of two miles. The growers are contractually held to these plans. They’re also forbidden under patent law from collecting and reusing GMO seeds.
There have been cases of biotech companies like Monsanto suing contracted farmers for using GMO seeds without permission. Along those lines, Kiddie said he’s heard stories of organic farmers being sued for having in their fields GE crops that where pollinated through wind drift.
Tom Helscher, a representative for Monsanto’s corporate affairs office, said he isn’t aware of any lawsuits against organic farmers.
“It’s a myth that’s been perpetuated,” he said, adding that he also isn’t aware of “any instances where organic farmers say, ‘Hey, I’ve been harmed by pollen from neighboring farmers’ fields.’”
According to Monsanto’s website, since 1997, the company has filed suit against farmers 145 times in the United States.
It’s these legal ramifications that seem to have people most upset about GMOs. The matter begs such questions as: “Does a company have the right to patent an organism?” and “Who controls the seeds?”
Helscher, however, said these questions aren’t anything new.
“Seeds have been patented in the U.S. since the 1930s,” he said. “We patent the traits we put into our seeds. I like to use the analogy of buying a car that has an automatic transmission instead of a manual transmission.”
He said his company is simply supplying farmers with the product for which they’re asking.
“It gives the farmer a choice,” he said. “If people do some research, they’ll find there are other choices out there, too.”
Other organizations, like EcoFarm, are saying that won’t be the case anymore if things keep going the way they are.
Helscher’s response: “Again, I’ll use the car analogy. Nowadays, manual cars are hard to find because consumers are pretty clear to the car companies, ‘We like the automatic, and that’s what we want.’”
UC Biotech’s Lemaux explains it this way: “I’ve studied GMOs for two decades, and I honestly think what’s at the base of [the controversy] is the control of a food supply by a handful of major corporations.
“Frankly, that’s the big issue,” she said. “Are we in a situation where we’re not in control of our food supply? That’s something I think we should really think about.”
Nojoqui Farms, for one, isn’t waiting for an answer to those questions. Manager Kiddie and crew are taking matters into their own hands.
“We’re going to go into the seed business,” Kiddie said, adding that the farm will grow seeds for itself and for other organic homesteads.
When all is said and done, perhaps that’s the only way to ensure one’s seed is as pure as one wants it.
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 3-10, 2011.