[Market-farming] corn gluten
Road's End Farm
organic87 at frontiernet.net
Thu Jan 31 21:34:15 EST 2008
On Jan 31, 2008, at 7:50 PM, Robert Schuler wrote:
> Mark... I have been growing BT sweetcorn for the last 4 years with no
> synthetic pesticides applied and the BT gene is totally natural.
> Therefore if the corn was grown organically it should be organic.
The BT toxin is expressed continuously in every cell of the corn plant.
There is nothing natural about that. Corn does not naturally express
BT, and BT in a natural situation does not occur in such quantities.
The corn plant has been artificially turned into a pesticide.
While BT not produced through GMO methods was acceptable for organic
use, no responsible certifier would ever have approved an organic farm
plan in which the farmer intended to continuously drench the field in
the stuff. It was approvable for organic use in that form, not only
because it was naturally occuring, but also because it broke down
quickly, not persisting in the field.
One reason GMO's are not approved for organic use is because the
techniques used for inserting genes in the plant may cause unexpected
and poorly understood changes. Individual genes do not work in
isolation within the cell or within the organism as a whole, let alone
within the ecosystem as a whole. Work on understanding the
interrelations among individual genes within a living organism is in
its infancy. It's only recently been discovered, for instance, that
some genes that were thought to be inactive are in fact regulating the
expression of other genes.
-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
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