pointing to a cornfield.
Monsanto's grower contract never mentions the word "refuge" and only
requires that farmers plant no more than 80 percent of their fields in New
Leaf. Basically, any field not planted in New Leaf is considered a refuge,
even if that field has been sprayed to kill every bug in it. Farmers call
such acreage a clean field; calling it a refuge is a stretch at best.
It probably shouldn't come as a big surprise that conventional farmers
would have trouble embracing the notion of an insect refuge. To insist on
real and substantial refuges is to ask them to start thinking of their
fields in an entirely new way, less as a factory than as an ecosystem. In
the factory, Bt is another in a long line of "silver bullets" that work
for a while and then get replaced; in the ecosystem, all bugs are not
necessarily bad, and the relationships between various species can be
manipulated to achieve desired ends -- like the long-term sustainability
of Bt.
This is, of course, precisely the approach organic farmers have always
taken to their fields, and after my lunch with the Youngs that afternoon,
I paid a brief visit to an organic potato grower. Mike Heath is a rugged,
laconic man in his mid-50's; like most of the organic farmers I've met, he
looks as though he spends a lot more time out of doors than a conventional
farmer, and he probably does: chemicals are, among other things,
labor-saving devices. While we drove around his 500 acres in a battered
old pickup, I asked him about biotechnology. He voiced many reservations
-- it was synthetic, there were too many unknowns -- but his main
objection to planting a biotech potato was simply that "it's not what my
customers want."
That point was driven home last December when the Department of
Agriculture proposed a new "organic standards" rule that, among other
things, would have allowed biotech crops to carry an organic label. After
receiving a flood of outraged cards and letters, the agency backed off.
(As did Monsanto, which asked the U.S.D.A. to shelve the issue for three
years.) Heath suggested that biotech may actually help organic farmers by
driving worried consumers to the organic label.
I asked Heath about the New Leaf. He had no doubt resistance would come --
"the bugs are always going to be smarter than we are" -- and said it was
unjust that Monsanto was profiting from the ruin of Bt, something he
regarded as a "public good."
None of this particularly surprised me; what did was that Heath himself
resorted to Bt sprays only once or twice in the last 10 years. I had
assumed that organic farmers used Bt or other approved pesticides in much
the same way conventional farmers use theirs, but as Heath showed me
around his farm, I began to understand that organic farming was a lot more
complicated than substituting good inputs for bad. Instead of buying many
inputs at all, Heath relied on long and complex crop rotations to prevent
a buildup of crop-specific pests -- he has found, for example, that
planting wheat after spuds "confuses" the potato beetles.
He also plants strips of flowering crops on the margins of his potato
fields -- peas or alfalfa, usually -- to attract the beneficial insects
that eat beetle larvae and aphids. If there aren't enough beneficials to
do the job, he'll introduce ladybugs. Heath also grows eight varieties of
potatoes, on the theory that biodiversity in a field, as in the wild, is
the best defense against any imbalances in the system. A bad year with one
variety will probably be offset by a good year with the others.
"I can eat any potato in this field right now," he said, digging Yukon
Golds for me to take home. "Most farmers can't eat their spuds out of the
field. But you don't want to start talking about safe food in Idaho."
Heath's were the antithesis of "clean" fields, and, frankly, their weedy
margins and overall patchiness made them much less pretty to look at. Yet
it was the very complexity of these fields -- the sheer diversity of
species, both in space and time -- that made them productive year after
year without many inputs. The system provided for most of its needs.
All told, Heath's annual inputs consisted of natural fertilizers (compost
and fish powder), ladybugs and a copper spray (for blight) -- a few
hundred dollars an acre. Of course, before you can compare Heath's
operation with a conventional farm, you've got to add in the extra labor
(lots of smaller crops means more work; organic fields must also be
cultivated for weeds) and time -- the typical organic rotation calls for
potatoes every fifth year, in contrast to every third on a conventional
farm. I asked Heath about his yields. To my astonishment, he was digging
between 300 and 400 bags per acre -- just as many as Danny Forsyth and
only slightly fewer than Steve Young. Heath was also getting almost twice
the price for his spuds: $8 a bag from an organic processor who was
shipping frozen french fries to Japan.
On the drive back to Boise, I thought about why Heath's farm
remained the exception, both in Idaho and elsewhere. Here was a genuinely
new paradigm that seemed to work. But while it's true that organic
agriculture is gaining ground (I met a big grower in Washington who had
just added several organic circles), few of the mainstream farmers I met
considered organic a "realistic" alternative. For one thing, it's
expensive to convert: organic certifiers require a field to go without
chemicals for three years before it can be called organic. For another,
the U.S.D.A., which sets the course of American agriculture, has long been
hostile to organic methods.
But I suspect the real reasons run deeper, and have more to do with the
fact that in a dozen ways a farm like Heath's simply doesn't conform to
the requirements of a corporate food chain. Heath's type of agriculture
doesn't leave much room for the Monsantos of this world: organic farmers
buy remarkably little -- some seed, a few tons of compost, maybe a few
gallons of ladybugs. That's because the organic farmer's focus is on a
process, rather than on products. Nor is that process readily
systematized, reduced to, say, a prescribed regime of sprayings like the
one Forsyth outlined for me -- regimes that are often designed by
companies selling chemicals.
Most of the intelligence and local knowledge needed to run Mike Heath's
farm resides in the head of Mike Heath. Growing potatoes conventionally
requires intelligence, too, but a large portion of it resides in
laboratories in distant places like St. Louis, where it is employed in
developing sophisticated chemical inputs. That sort of centralization of
agriculture is unlikely to be reversed, if only because there's so much
money in it; besides, it's much easier for the farmer to buy prepackaged
solutions from big companies. "Whose Head Is the Farmer Using? Whose Head
Is Using the Farmer?" goes the title of a Wendell Berry essay.
Organic farmers like Heath have also rejected what is perhaps the
cornerstone of industrial agriculture: the economies of scale that only a
monoculture can achieve. Monoculture -- growing vast fields of the same
crop year after year -- is probably the single most powerful
simplification of modern agriculture. But monoculture is poorly fitted to
the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a field of identical plants
will be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds and disease. Monoculture
is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer,
and that virtually every input has been designed to solve.
To put the matter baldly, a farmer like Heath is working very hard to
adjust his fields and his crops to the nature of nature, while farmers
like Forsyth are working equally hard to adjust nature in their fields to
the requirement of monoculture and, beyond that, to the needs of the
industrial food chain. I remember asking Heath what he did about net
necrosis, the bane of Forsyth's existence. "That's only really a problem
with Russet Burbanks," he said. "So I plant other kinds." Forsyth can't do
that. He's part of a food chain -- at the far end of which stands a long,
perfectly golden McDonald's fry -- that demands he grow Russet Burbanks
and little else.
This is where biotechnology comes in, to the rescue of Forsyth's Russet
Burbanks and, if Monsanto is right, to the whole food chain of which they
form a part. Monoculture is in trouble -- the pesticides that make it
possible are rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to heightened
concerns about their danger. Biotechnology is the new silver bullet that
will save monoculture. But a new silver bullet is not a new paradigm --
rather, it's something that will allow the old paradigm to survive. That
paradigm will always construe the problem in Forsyth's fields as a
Colorado potato beetle problem, rather than as a problem of potato
monoculture.
Like the silver bullets that preceded them -- the modern hybrids, the
pesticides and the chemical fertilizers -- the new biotech crops will
probably, as advertised, increase yields. But equally important, they will
also speed the process by which agriculture is being concentrated in a
shrinking number of corporate hands. If that process has advanced more
slowly in farming than in other sectors of the economy, it is only because
nature herself -- her complexity, diversity and sheer intractability in
the face of our best efforts at control -- has acted as a check on it. But
biotechnology promises to remedy this "problem," too.
Consider, for example, the seed, perhaps the ultimate "means of
production" in any agriculture. It is only in the last few decades that
farmers have begun buying their seed from big companies, and even today
many farmers still save some seed every fall to replant in the spring.
Brown-bagging, as it is called, allows farmers to select strains
particularly well adapted to their needs; since these seeds are often
traded, the practice advances the state of the genetic art -- indeed, has
given us most of our crop plants. Seeds by their very nature don't lend
themselves to commodification: they produce more of themselves ad
infinitum (with the exception of certain modern hybrids), and for that
reason the genetics of most major crop plants have traditionally been
regarded as a common heritage. In the case of the potato, the genetics of
most important varieties -- the Burbanks, the Superiors, the Atlantics --
have always been in the public domain. Before Monsanto released the New
Leaf, there had never been a multinational seed corporation in the
potato-seed business -- there was no money in it.
Biotechnology changes all that. By adding a new gene or two to a Russet
Burbank or Superior, Monsanto can now patent the improved variety.
Legally, it has been possible to patent a plant for many years, but
biologically, these patents have been almost impossible to enforce.
Biotechnology partly solves that problem. A Monsanto agent can perform a
simple test in my garden and prove that my plants are the company's
intellectual property. The contract farmers sign with Monsanto allows
company representatives to perform such tests in their fields at will.
According to Progressive Farmer, a trade journal, Monsanto is using
informants and hiring Pinkertons to enforce its patent rights; it has
already brought legal action against hundreds of farmers for patent
infringement.
Soon the company may not have to go to the trouble. It is expected to
acquire the patent to a powerful new biotechnology called the Terminator,
which will, in effect, allow the company to enforce its patents
biologically. Developed by the U.S.D.A. in partnership with Delta and Pine
Land, a seed company in the process of being purchased by Monsanto, the
Terminator is a complex of genes that, theoretically, can be spliced into
any crop plant, where it will cause every seed produced by that plant to
be sterile. Once the Terminator becomes the industry standard, control
over the genetics of crop plants will complete its move from the farmer's
field to the seed company -- to which the farmer will have no choice but
to return year after year. The Terminator will allow companies like
Monsanto to privatize one of the last great commons in nature -- the
genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past
10,000 years.
At lunch on his farm in Idaho, I had asked Steve Young what he thought
about all this, especially about the contract Monsanto made him sign. I
wondered how the American farmer, the putative heir to a long tradition of
agrarian independence, was adjusting to the idea of field men snooping
around his farm, and patented seed he couldn't replant. Young said he had
made his peace with corporate agriculture, and with biotechnology in
particular: "It's here to stay. It's necessary if we're going to feed the
world, and it's going to take us forward."
Then I asked him if he saw any downside to biotechnology, and he paused
for what seemed a very long time. What he then said silenced the table.
"There is a cost," he said. "It gives corporate America one more noose
around my neck."
Harvest
A few weeks after I returned home from Idaho, I dug my New Leafs,
harvesting a gorgeous-looking pile of white spuds, including some real
lunkers. The plants had performed brilliantly, though so had all my other
potatoes. The beetle problem never got serious, probably because the
diversity of species in my (otherwise organic) garden had attracted enough
beneficial insects to keep the beetles in check. By the time I harvested
my crop, the question of eating the New Leafs was moot. Whatever I thought
about the soundness of the process that had declared these potatoes safe
didn't matter. Not just because I'd already had a few bites of New Leaf
potato salad at the Youngs but also because Monsanto and the F.D.A. and
the E.P.A. had long ago taken the decision of whether or not to eat a
biotech potato out of my -- out of all of our -- hands. Chances are, I've
eaten New Leafs already, at McDonald's or in a bag of Frito-Lay chips,
though without a label there can be no way of knowing for sure.
So if I've probably eaten New Leafs already, why was it that I kept
putting off eating mine? Maybe because it was August, and there were so
many more-interesting fresh potatoes around -- fingerlings with dense,
luscious flesh, Yukon Golds that tasted as though they had been
pre-buttered -- that the idea of cooking with a bland commercial variety
like the Superior seemed beside the point.
There was this, too: I had called Margaret Mellon at the Union of
Concerned Scientists to ask her advice. Mellon is a molecular biologist
and lawyer and a leading critic of biotech agriculture. She couldn't offer
any hard scientific evidence that my New Leafs were unsafe, though she
emphasized how little we know about the effects of Bt in the human diet.
"That research simply hasn't been done," she said.
I pressed. Is there any reason I shouldn't eat these spuds?
"Let me turn that around. Why would you want to?"
It was a good question. So for a while I kept my New Leafs in a bag on the
porch. Then I took the bag with me on vacation, thinking maybe I'd sample
them there, but the bag came home untouched.
The bag sat on my porch till the other day, when I was invited to an
end-of-summer potluck supper at the town beach. Perfect. I signed up to
make a potato salad. I brought the bag into the kitchen and set a pot of
water on the stove. But before it boiled I was stricken by this thought:
I'd have to tell people at the picnic what they were eating. I'm sure
(well, almost sure) the potatoes are safe, but if the idea of eating
biotech food without knowing it bothered me, how could I possibly ask my
neighbors to? So I'd tell them about the New Leafs -- and then, no doubt,
lug home a big bowl of untouched potato salad. For surely there would be
other potato salads at the potluck and who, given the choice, was ever
going to opt for the bowl with the biotech spuds?
So there they sit, a bag of biotech spuds on my porch. I'm sure they're
absolutely fine. I pass the bag every day, thinking I really should try
one, but I'm beginning to think that what I like best about these
particular biotech potatoes -- what makes them different -- is that I have
this choice. And until I know more, I choose not.
Sunday, October 25, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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