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  • From: "clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Soy
  • Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 09:35:11 -0500





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






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