GMOs

I often think about the tension between being principled, confident, and assertive and remaining open to change, truly listening to others perspectives and being willing to reflect and question “fundamental” truths. It is important to “see the other side,” but taken to the extreme it often leads to inaction and confusion. I bring it up now because I’ve been grappling with a couple really interesting farming-related perspectives I’ve come across lately that have challenged some core assumptions. The first is about GMOs and what I start to talk about below. The second is about small family farms in general and what I’ll talk about in a later week.

I’ve generally been “opposed” to GMO for a couple reasons. First, what most all GMO crops have actually meant in agriculture is a company genetically modifying a plant to be resistant to an herbicide that will kill almost all other life except that plant. Then you can blanket the whole field with herbicide multiple times a year and end up with a weed free high yielding crop.

Here is a brief list of issues with this, but I could (and others have) write a book on this…

- Herbicide persisting on the food

- Farm worker health

- Soil and air quality

- Loss of wildlife due to disruption of food chian

- Lack of biodiversity*

- Farmer wedded to propriety products and price fluctuation

- Patented seeds providing lack of resilience.

- Adjacent property has to sacrifice 30+ feet of their property to provide buffer (if wanting to be certified organic…we do this)**

- Plants evolving to be resistant

- Toxic plants becoming more toxic in reaction.

- Drift/crop loss sometimes far from point of spraying.*

- Persistent herbicides ending up in compost and other waste products

- Propping up a system that has many other negative environmental and human health impacts and concentrates wealth and land in the hands of a small number of business.

- Unknown long-term effects on human health

- Unknown long-term effects on ecology (there is still so little we understand about eco-system interactions and co-evolution…)

* In response to these objections, companies contend that they instruct farmers to only spray when there is no wind and the temperature is just right and to reserve part of the crop land for planting diverse wildlife crops. This is a nice little C.Y.A bit from them that I think everyone understands is unreasonable to expect a farmer to do when they are relying on already really tight margins.

**where else in this country fixated on private property rights do we find it acceptable to do something that causes negative effects to another's property and consider it their responsibility to deal with. If you choose to add a toxic chemical to the environment you should have the buffer zone on your property, no? It isn't even a discussion point currently though...

Second, GMOs are an answer to the wrong question in my opinion. Instead of trying to reduce how many people have to farm and increase yields to feed a growing population, perhaps we should restore the dignity of outdoor manual farm labor, have more people directly managing and interacting with the natural environment, and ask tough questions about how to put ourselves in balance with the ecosystem and how to prevent unrestrained population growth and resource extraction. Even if it were possible that GMOs could allow us to accommodate an extra billion people on the planet, what happens when we surpass that? Do we keep just trusting we’ll science our way out of having to answer these questions forever?

I feel like its analogous to being on a train with one set of tracks heading straight off of a cliff. In their worst incarnation I feel like GMOs can be seen as figuring out how to make a faster train that's easier on the conducter and "cheaper" for the passengers these last few miles before we go over the cliff. In their best incarnation (“we need them to feed a growing population”), they are like proposing to build a cantilevered track out over the cliff and buy us a little extra time before we are too far off the cliff to keep building and fall. Perhaps we should ask…do we have to be on this train? What’s over there to the side? What if we walked? What if we slowed the train and built a track going a different direction? What if we took those bumpy old tracks off to the side that can’t support our super heavy luxury train but could support a fun little handcar that, while hard work is also a bunch of fun and should we really be caring about how far or fast we can go?

While the New York Times article “Learning to Love G.M.O’s” from a couple days ago hasn’t shaken my belief in the above points (and I don't agree with all of the article's points) it was a fascinating read and look into the unintended consequences of anti-G.M.O. fervor like making well-intentioned not-for-profit GMOs go through millions of dollars of regulatory hoops that essentially doom them from the start for anyone but big ag. Some of these small GMO projects and minor gene manipulation get lumped together with the ones attached to my concerns above. The article also does a good job laying out the case for GMOs not being much different from the vegetables we already grow, which, through lots of man-made intervention have come to be very far from their occurring-naturally-in-the-wild ancestor. What really piqued my interested with the super cancer-fighting purple tomato that is the cover and star of the article was the idea that the plant actually has the potential to support a non global industrial chemical food system. It is a potentially far superior product that isn’t commercially viable to do on thousands of acres, but great for small farms and backyard growers. Now, Little Society Farm is still a non-GMO operation (and we will certainly tell you if that ever changes so you can make your own informed decision!), but for me the article gave me "skeptical optimism" about a small niche of GMO crops and was persuasive about the need to make distinctions between the type of GMO and its risk/reward of introducing it to the world. At the very least that conversation could help us ask ourselves “What is that beautiful house?” “Where does that highway go to?” “Am I right? Am I wrong?” “My God, What have I done!” and work towards making sure things aren’t the same as it ever was…