Originally Posted by
Steve Rozmiarek
Sure, be glad to. A little background is probably in order. I am a farmer first, growing corn, sugar beets, hard red wheat, and several types of dry edible beans. My farm has grown around 10% of this nation's great northern bean production for example. I've also worked in boardrooms of companies that take beans from the field to the grocery store shelf.
Monsanto brought out a trait called Round Up ready, more than a decade ago. I doubt that most of the anti GMO crowd even know what it does. What RR does is make the plant tolerant of a non selective Monsanto chemical, Roundup. It'll kill most everything but the RR ready crop. We use the RR corn, soybeans, and sugar beets. The benefits of this are that you can use a simple, safe chemical program of a couple that work very well, vs the massively expensive and much more dangerous cocktails of the past. Atrazine for example is a chemical that the enviros tend to bemoan. RR has pretty much replaced it in corn fields, and is much safer.
These RR crops can now be grown no, or minimum till, which eliminated erosion, ala the dust bowl. They can be grown cheaper now that competition has lowered the prices finally for the seed and chemical, and they are a better quality product, ie you can clean up the toxic nightshade infestations that couldn't be controlled in a beet field, so they don't happen in the food grade beans and end up on your table.
Flip side is, Monsanto acted like a monopoly to get to this point. It was tolerated because they make great products that really work, and probably significant lobbying. You can buy generic glyphosate (Roundup's active ingredient) now for a small fraction of the prices they were charging during the height of their reign. There is a new business model there now though. Sugar beets went RR several years ago. Because of the generic RR availability, the profit is built into a tech fee now. A unit of sugar beet seed will cost around $350, half actual seed, half tech fee. This is tolerable because the RR trait allows a safer cleaner product. The finances are similar at this point.
No RR crops are direct to human consumption. They all get turned into cattle feed, fuels, or processed into something else. Personally, I'd be much more worried about the safety of the processing facilities than the GMO trait. An interesting detail, consumers don't seem to care where their food comes from. There has been a tremendous fight to try to get beef source verified, and the consumer simply doesn't seem to care. They would rather save a buck and import cheaper dry edible beans from China that have potentially been fertilized with raw human waste than by local. To compete with whatever shady activities happen around the world to make "food" to sell to the USA, our farmers need these technologies to raise efficiencies to compete.
I mentioned sugar beets. The industry started growing RR sugar beets 5 years ago. Two years after that, a group of enviro's sued on behalf of a small seed grower. They claimed that the seed was being contaminated by pollinating sugar beets. Sugar beets don't pollinate in farming, they are a biannual, so they get harvested prior to flowering. The suit shut down the beet industry for a bit. It eventually got tossed but it cost many much.
I have to get going, will be happy to add more if any want.