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["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

> I suspect that with pollen blowing in the wind even "Non-GMO" may not mean 
> much. Rob >

> You mean like the ash from volcanoes
> (or the radiation from Chernobyl) hanging
> in the air for months and years, finally
> sifting gently down on both anti and pro
> *all around the globe*.

In the case of soybeans, some reality has to apply.  Soybeans are 'perfect 
flowered'.  They do not need wind nor insects for pollination.  The flowers 
are self-fertilized even before the blossom is fully open.  Insects increase 
the yield, but are not essential.   Since the soybeans (or any legume) don't 
depend on wind pollination and insect pollination is incidental, the plant 
has no motivation to make the pollen viable for a long time.  Airborne soy 
pollen is viable for about three hours.  It does not float about the 
atmosphere waiting to descend on your tiny patch of soybeans.

Corn is different, of course, because it is designed to be wind pollinated. 
But outside of the areas where there are countless thousands of continuous 
acres of cron, it can be managed.  But it's not an entirely hopeless case. 
In an arcticle of "criollo" corn in Mexico, the farmers say they can tell by 
looking at the corn which kernels have been contaminated by the GMO:

______________________
"Hybrid corn, or any non-criollo corn, will pollinate criollo corn when they 
are grown near each other, if the tassling date of the hybrid corn 
corresponds with the flowering (silking) of the criollo corn, giving seed 
that has genes from the hybrid variety. I asked Imeldo how, when selecting 
seed for the next year, the farmers here keep the criollo corn separate from 
the hybrid varieties. "We can see which grains come from the hybrid corn," 
says Imeldo, "they have a different shape and color."

http://www.newfarm.org/international/pan-am_don/aug04/tepotzetlan.shtml
_______________________

I'm not completely sure about this above, but I suppose it's possible.  I've 
grown at lest four varieties of OP corn for years now and saved the seeds. 
Some patches have been no more than 50 feet apart and although there is some 
mixing cross pollination at the edges sometimes (as is evidenced by the 
color of the kernels), purely colored ears from the middle of the patches 
always produce true to type.

In places like this where the topography is small plots of cultivated land 
separated by ridges and mountians, there's some hope of keeping the GMO 
genes out.

James