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  • From: Richard Stewart <rstewart AT zoomtown.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] GMO crops
  • Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 19:26:33 -0400

Hello, My Name is Richard, and I am a GMO user.

These discussions always end ugly but I'll put my hand up in favor if some types of GMO.


I will argue that some GMO crops DO have their place.  I have 160 acres of bottom lands that I know till.  Every year the weed base is replenished.  A GMO corn or soybean does allow me to make use of this land. I could cultivate the weeds or try to choke it with a cover crop.  All of it has been tried.  We do a single herbicide spray to kill competing plants and that is it.  No pesticides and no other fertilizers.

In other areas we do not use the same seed and do Non-GMO.

I would, literally, be impossible for us to farm this land without GMO seed types.

This land provides us with a good income, the land's fertility is strong because of backwater floods that deposit mineral rich soil (along with weed seeds).  After seven full days spread out over three to four weeks we now have all 160 acres in the ground and can focus on produce, market, managing bees, and baling hay for our horse operation.  That land's value runs between 40 and 80 thousand dollars a year depending on the market.

We use a fraction of the fuel that most large scale organic production uses too farm the same number of acres and do not irrigate at all.  Both of which are a massive drain on resources, are polluters, and wreck the evironment.  Which is the lesser of two evils?  I do not have the answer to that.

Richard Stewart
Carriage House Farm
North Bend, Ohio

An Ohio Century Farm Est. 1855

(513) 967-1106



On Jun 8, 2009, at 1:17 PM, Road's End Farm wrote:


On Jun 8, 2009, at 8:45 AM, Franklin W. Davis wrote:

  Good morning...what are GMO crops...

Genetically modified organisms. Genes not natural to the crop have been artificially inserted into the seed; once in there, they will generally be passed to the next generation, if the seed is viable.

and why are they bad news? Franklin 

A proper answer to this would take quite a long time and I'm too busy to do it right now -- if nobody else fields it I'll try to get back to it. (I should note that there are probably some on this list who don't think they are bad news.)

For a fast and dirty answer: the inserted genes may have additional effects not intended and not well understood, whether in the human diet or in the environment as a whole. Also, in many cases, the companies doing this are inserting things that may themselves be problematic, and/or that imply characteristics on the part of the company that many people don't like. One common GMO crop, for instance, is modified to express the pesticide BT toxin in every cell of the plant continuously; another common GMO technique is to insert herbicide resistance, which is likely to increase the use of herbicides in the short run and is also very likely to cause that gene to pass into weeds now controllable by the herbicide in the long run. Monsanto also wanted to genetically modify seed to make it sterile in the next generation -- the Terminator gene -- so farmers would be forced to buy seed every year; they pulled back on this one because there was such an outcry. If this gene were to transfer itself to other crops being grown in the area, there could be widespread disaster, for the farmers and the genetic base. GMO traits seem to transfer fairly easily, at least from wind-pollinated crops.



-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
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