AGNET OCTOBER 25, 1998 Plant Will Make Fuel Oil From Agricultural Garbage This Spud May Or May Not Be For You: Monsanto's New Leaf Russet Burbank, Bioengineered To French-Fry Perfection Expand Hay Markets For Profit Minister Vanclief To Discuss Farm Income Issue With Farm Leaders And Provinces Develop Strategies To Enhance Your Income Food Industry Backs Genetic Crop Move, Green Groups Angry Environmental Board Overruled : Aerial Spraying Will Be Done To Combat Gypsy-Moth Outbreak Farmers Air Sludge Concerns Taskforce Will Advise Minister On Biotechnology Strategy Agnet is produced by researchers at the Agri-Food Risk Management and Communications Project at the University of Guelph, is edited by Douglas Powell (dpowell@uoguelph.ca) and Amanda Whitfield (awhitfie@uoguelph.ca), and is sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Plants Program at the University of Guelph, with additional support provided by the U.S. National Food Processors Association, the U.S. National Pork Producers, Dairy Farmers of Canada, AGCare (Agricultural Groups Concerned About Resources and the Environment), Monsanto Canada, Hedley Technologies Inc., Qualicon, L.L.C., DeKalb Canada Inc., Pioneer Hi-Bred Limited (Canada), the U.S. National Cattlemen's Beef Association, Ontario Agri-Food Technologies, Novartis Crop Protection Canada, the Rutgers University Food Safety Extension Program, the Crop Protection Institute, the Ontario Soybean Growers Marketing Board, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, Food Industry Environmental Network, Dow AgroSciences and the Agricultural Adaptation Council (CanAdapt Program). archived at: http://www.findmail.com/listsaver/agnet-l/ PLANT WILL MAKE FUEL OIL FROM AGRICULTURAL GARBAGE Oct. 25 /98 N.Y. Times MATTHEW L. WALD JENNINGS, --According to this story, a fuel plant in this south-central Louisiana town will run on bagasse, a part of the sugar cane plant usually considered useless, as well as on rice hulls, a currently useless part of the rice plant. Later, it may digest sawdust as well. The plant's product, ethanol, which can be blended with gasoline to power cars and trucks or used on its own to power modified vehicles, has been produced around the country for years using corn and wheat and other high-quality, high-cost ingredients, but never with economic success. But the new owners of the plant here, BC International Corp., with a subsidy from the U.S. Energy Department and help from a genetically engineered, patented bacterium, hope they are on the cusp of a new era. Stephen Gatto, president and chief executive of the company was quoted as saying, "It is a bio-refinery." Dan Reicher, assistant secretary of energy at USDA was quoted as saying, "The input costs are close to zero. In some cases they are less than zero, because people are paying to get rid of these materials." And if it works, he said, the technology could also reduce the accumulation of gases in the atmosphere that are thought to cause climate change, and could lower smog. The story says that around the country, energy experts have their eyes on clippings from suburban lawns, prairie grasses and other woody materials, as fuel for the new process. John Ferrell, director of the Office of Fuels Development at the Energy Department was quoted as saying, "It's a lot cheaper to grow wood and grass than corn." In the current generation of ethanol plants, the fuel is the corn kernel; plants using the new technology could digest the cob and the stalk as well. These materials are made of cellulose, which contains large amounts of sugar, the basic ingredient required for alcohol production. But the sugar in cellulose is in a chemical form that traditional fermentation processes, which use yeast, cannot digest. BC's plant uses a bacterium, KO11, also used in the pharmaceutical industry, to break down the sugars. The natural bacterium on which KO11 is based likes to eat sugars and produces a chemical called acetic acid. But then came gene splicing. Dr. Lonnie Ingram, a microbiologist at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, borrowed four genes from another organism, Zymomonas mobilis, to make the bacterium produce alcohol instead. Around the country, researchers are working with Z. mobilis to find other approaches, but BC International's will be the first commercial plant to make ethanol from woody material. The plant will take about 18 months to build and will cost $90 million, including $11 million from the Energy Department. THIS SPUD MAY OR MAY NOT BE FOR YOU: MONSANTO'S NEW LEAF RUSSET BURBANK, BIOENGINEERED TO FRENCH-FRY PERFECTION. Oct. 25 /98 N.Y. Times Magazine The cover story in the magazine examines the genetically-engineered Bt-containing New Leaf Superior potato. The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome and voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight. Any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of my New Leafs will supposedly keel over and die, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in the leaves of these otherwise ordinary Superiors. (Superiors are the thin-skinned white spuds sold fresh in the supermarket.) You're probably wondering if I plan to eat these potatoes, or serve them to my family. That's still up in the air; it's only the first week of May, and, according to author and gardener Pollan, harvest is a few months off. Certainly my New Leafs are aptly named. They're part of a new class of crop plants that is rapidly changing the American food chain. This year, the fourth year that genetically altered seed has been on the market, some 45 million acres of American farmland have been planted with biotech crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton and potatoes that have been engineered to either produce their own pesticides or withstand herbicides. Though Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered potatoes, corn and soybeans, industry research confirms what my own informal surveys suggest: hardly any of us knows it. The reason is not hard to find. The biotech industry, with the concurrence of the Food and Drug Administration, has decided we don't need to know it, so biotech foods carry no identifying labels. In a dazzling feat of positioning, the industry has succeeded in depicting these plants simultaneously as the linchpins of a biological revolutionpart of a "new agricultural paradigm" that will make farming more sustainable, feed the world and improve health and nutritionand, oddly enough, as the same old stuff, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned. This convenient version of reality has been roundly rejected by both consumers and farmers across the Atlantic. Last summer, biotech food emerged as the most explosive environmental issue in Europe. Protesters have destroyed dozens of field trials of the very same "frankenplants" (as they are sometimes called) that we Americans are already serving for dinner, and throughout Europe the public has demanded that biotech food be labeled in the market. The authors says that by growing his own transgenic crop, and talking with scientists and farmers involved with biotech, he had hoped to discover which of us was crazy. Are the Europeans overreacting, or is it possible that we've been underreacting to genetically engineered food?U The story says that the potatoes the author will harvest come August are his to eat or sell, but their genes remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under numerous United States patents, including Nos. 5,196,525, 5,164,316, 5,322,938 and 5,352,605. The story says that the food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity -- on average, a single American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed 100 people. But this accomplishment has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot achieve such yields without enormous amounts of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, machinery and fuel, a set of capital-intensive inputs, as they're called, that saddle the farmer with debt, threaten his health, erode his soil and destroy its fertility, pollute the ground water and compromise the safety of the food we eat. We've heard all this before, of course, but usually from environmentalists and organic farmers; what is new is to hear the same critique from conventional farmers, government officials and even many agribusiness corporations, all of whom now acknowledge that our food chain stands in need of reform. Sounding more like Wendell Berry than the agribusiness giant it is, Monsanto declared in its most recent annual report that "current agricultural technology is not sustainable." What is supposed to rescue the American food chain is biotechnology, the replacement of expensive and toxic chemical inputs with expensive but apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like the author s New Leafs, can protect themselves from insects and disease without being sprayed with pesticides. With the advent of biotechnology, agriculture is entering the information age, and more than any other company, Monsanto is positioning itself to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary "operating systems" to run this new generation of plants. There is, of course, a second food chain in America: organic agriculture. And while it is still only a fraction of the size of the conventional food chain, it has been growing in leaps and boundsin large part because of concerns over the safety of conventional agriculture. Organic farmers have been among biotechnology's fiercest critics, regarding crops like the author s New Leafs as inimical to their principles and, potentially, a threat to their survival. That's because Bt, the bacterial toxin produced in New Leafs (and in many other biotech plants) happens to be the same insecticide organic growers have relied on for decades. Instead of being flattered by the imitation, however, organic farmers are up in arms: the widespread use of Bt in biotech crops is likely to lead to insect resistance, thus robbing organic growers of one of their most critical tools; that is, Monsanto's version of sustainable agriculture may threaten precisely those farmers who pioneered sustainable farming. The author describes the various kinds of potatoes, and says that with biotechnology, for the first time, breeders can bring qualities from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plantfrom flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance) and, in the case of my potatoes, from Bacillus thuringiensis, the soil bacterium that produces the organic insecticide known as Bt. The introduction into a plant of genes transported not only across species but whole phyla means that the wall of that plant's essential identity, its irreducible wildness, you might say, has been breached. But what is perhaps most astonishing about the New Leafs coming up in my garden is the human intelligence that the inclusion of the Bt gene represents. In the past, that intelligence resided outside the plant, in the mind of the organic farmers who deployed Bt (in the form of a spray) to manipulate the ecological relationship of certain insects and a certain bacterium as a way to foil those insects. The irony about the New Leafs is that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that resides in the heads of the very sort of people, that is, organic growers, who most distrust high technology. The author says that he traveled to suburban St. Louis in early June to determine that his New Leafs were clones of clones of plants that were first engineered seven years ago in Monsanto's $150 million research facility, a long, low-slung brick building on the banks of the Missouri that would look like any other corporate complex were it not for the 26 greenhouses that crown its roof like shimmering crenellations of glass. Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, was quoted as saying that regarding the DNA-as-software metaphor employed by Mondanto, "From an intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right. But it's a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does" in interpreting its DNA, he meant "I'd throw it out." A beter metaphor, says Lewontin, is "An ecosystem. You can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another." The story goes on to say that uncertainty is the theme that unifies much of the criticism leveled against biotech agriculture by scientists and environmentalists. By planting millions of acres of genetically altered plants, we have introduced something novel into the environment and the food chain, the consequences of which are not, and at this point, cannot be, completely understood. One of the uncertainties has to do with those grains of pollen bumblebees are carting off from my potatoes. That pollen contains Bt genes that may wind up in some other, related plant, possibly conferring a new evolutionary advantage on that species. "Gene flow," the scientific term for this phenomenon, occurs only between closely related species, and since the potato evolved in South America, the chances are slim that my Bt potato genes will escape into the wilds of Connecticut. (It's interesting to note that while biotechnology depends for its power on the ability to move genes freely among species and even phyla, its environmental safety depends on the very opposite phenomenon: on the integrity of species in nature and their rejection of foreign genetic material.) Yet what happens if and when Peruvian farmers plant Bt potatoes? Or when I plant a biotech crop that does have local relatives? A study reported in Nature last month found that plant traits introduced by genetic engineering were more likely to escape into the wild than the same traits introduced conventionally. Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, was quoted as saying, "Biological pollution will be the environmental nightmare of the 21st century. This is not like chemical pollution, an oil spillthat eventually disperses. Biological pollution is an entirely different model, more like a disease. Is Monsanto going to be held legally responsible when one of its transgenes creates a superweed or resistant insect?" The story describes how Monsanto had to develop a resistance management plan to postpone the development of resistance. Under the plan, farmers who plant Bt crops must leave a certain portion of their land in non-Bt crops to create "refuges" for the targeted insects. The goal is to prevent the first Bt-resistant Colorado potato beetle from mating with a second resistant bug, unleashing a new race of superbeetles. The theory is that when a Bt-resistant bug does show up, it can be induced to mate with a susceptible bug from the refuge, thus diluting the new gene for resistance. But a lot has to go right for Mr. Wrong to meet Miss Right. No one is sure how big the refuges need to be, where they should be situated or whether the farmers will cooperate (creating havens for a detested pest is counter- intuitive, after all), not to mention the bugs. In the case of potatoes, the E.P.A. has made the plan voluntary and lets the companies themselves implement it; there are no E.P.A. enforcement mechanisms. Which is why most of the organic farmers the author spoke to dismissed the regulatory scheme as window dressing. Monsanto executives offer two basic responses to criticism of their Bt crops. The first is that their voluntary resistance-management plans will work, though the company's definition of success will come as small consolation to an organic farmer: Monsanto scientists told me that if all goes well, resistance can be postponed for 30 years. (Some scientists believe it will come in three to five years.) The second response is more troubling. In St. Louis, the author says he met with Jerry Hjelle, Monsanto's vice president for regulatory affairs. Hjelle was cited as saying that resistance should not unduly concern us since "there are a thousand other Bt's out there"other insecticidal proteins. We can handle this problem with new products. The critics don't know what we have in the pipeline." And then Hjelle uttered two words that the author (and I -- dp) thought had been expunged from the corporate vocabulary a long time ago: "Trust us." The story says that in explianing European distrust of biotechnology, Monsanto executives are quick to point out that mad cow disease has made Europeans extremely sensitive about the safety of their food chain and has undermined confidence in their regulators, adding, "They don't have a trusted agency like the F.D.A. looking after the safety of their food supply." James Maryanski, who oversees biotech food at the FDA, was asked why the F.D.A. didn't consider Bt a food additive. Under F.D.A. law, any novel substance added to a food must unless it is "generally regarded as safe" ("GRAS," in F.D.A. parlance) -- be thoroughly tested and if it changes the product in any way, must be labeled. "That's easy," Maryanski said. "Bt is a pesticide, so it's exempt" from F.D.A. regulation. That is, even though a Bt potato is plainly a food, for the purposes of Federal regulation it is not a food but a pesticide and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the E.P.A. Yet even in the case of those biotech crops over which the F.D.A. does have jurisdiction, the author learned that F.D.A. regulation of biotech food has been largely voluntary since 1992, when Vice President Dan Quayle issued regulatory guidelines for the industry as part of the Bush Administration's campaign for "regulatory relief." Under the guidelines, new proteins engineered into foods are regarded as additives (unless they're pesticides), but as Maryanski explained, "the determination whether a new protein is GRAS can be made by the company." Companies with a new biotech food decide for themselves whether they need to consult with the F.D.A. by following a series of "decision trees" that pose yes or no questions like this one: "Does ... the introduced protein raise any safety concern?" When the author called the E.P.A. and asked if the agency had tested my Bt potatoes for safety as a human food, the answer was ... not exactly. It seems the E.P.A. works from the assumption that if the original potato is safe and the Bt protein added to it is safe, then the whole New Leaf package is presumed to be safe. Some geneticists believe this reasoning is flawed, contending that the process of genetic engineering itself may cause subtle, as yet unrecognized changes in a food. The author goes on to say that his Colorado potato beetle vigil came to an end the first week of July, shortly before he went to Idaho to visit potato growers. He spied a single mature beetle sitting on a New Leaf leaf; when he reached to pick it up, the beetle fell drunkenly to the ground. It had been sickened by the plant and would soon be dead. His New Leafs were working. >From where a typical American potato grower stands, the New Leaf looks very much like a godsend. That's because where the typical potato grower stands is in the middle of a bright green field that has been doused with so much pesticide that the leaves of his plants wear a dull white chemical bloom that troubles him as much as it does the rest of us. Out there, at least, the calculation is not complex: a product that promises to eliminate the need for even a single spraying of pesticide is, very simply, an economic and environmental boon. No one can make a better case for a biotech crop than a potato farmer, which is why Monsanto was eager to introduce me to several large growers. Like many farmers today, the ones I met feel trapped by the chemical inputs required to extract the high yields they must achieve in order to pay for the chemical inputs they need. The economics are daunting: a potato farmer in south-central Idaho will spend roughly $1,965 an acre (mainly on chemicals, electricity, water and seed) to grow a crop that, in a good year, will earn him maybe $1,980. That's how much a french-fry processor will pay for the 20 tons of potatoes a single Idaho acre can yield. (The real money in agriculture -- 90 percent of the value added to the food we eat, is, the author says, in selling inputs to farmers and then processing their crops.) Danny Forsyth laid out the dismal economics of potato farming for me one sweltering morning at the coffee shop in downtown Jerome, Idaho. Forsyth, 60, is a slight blue-eyed man with a small gray ponytail; he farms 3,000 acres of potatoes, corn and wheat, and he spoke about agricultural chemicals like a man desperate to kick a bad habit. "None of us would use them if we had any choice," he said glumly. I asked him to walk me through a season's regimen. It typically begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes, many potato farmers douse their fields with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide (like Thimet) is applied to the soil; this will be absorbed by the young seedlings and, for several weeks, will kill any insect that eats their leaves. After planting, Forsyth puts down an herbicide, Sencor or Eptam, to "clean" his field of all weeds. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, an herbicide may be sprayed a second time to control weeds. Idaho farmers like Forsyth farm in vast circles defined by the rotation of a pivot irrigation system, typically 135 acres to a circle; I'd seen them from 30,000 feet flying in, a grid of verdant green coins pressed into a desert of scrubby brown. Pesticides and fertilizers are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth's farm draws most of its water from the nearby Snake River. Along with their water, Forsyth's potatoes may receive 10 applications of chemical fertilizer during the growing season. Just before the rows closewhen the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next, he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, one of the biggest threats to the potato crop. (Late blight, which caused the Irish potato famine, is an airborne fungus that turns stored potatoes into rotting mush.) Blight is such a serious problem that the E.P.A. currently allows farmers to spray powerful fungicides that haven't passed the usual approval process. Forsyth's potatoes will receive eight applications of fungicide. Twice each summer, Forsyth hires a crop duster to spray for aphids. Aphids are harmless in themselves, but they transmit the leafroll virus, which in Russet Burbank potatoes causes net necrosis, a brown spotting that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. It happened to Forsyth last year. "I lost 80,000 bags"they're a hundred pounds each"to net necrosis," he said. "Instead of getting $4.95 a bag, I had to take $2 a bag from the dehydrator, and I was lucky to get that." Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect; yet because big buyers like McDonald's believe (with good reason) that we don't like to see brown spots in our fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor. "Monitor is a deadly chemical," Forsyth said. "I won't go into a field for four or five days after it's been sprayed -- even to fix a broken pivot." That is, he would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to Monitor, which has been found to cause neurological damage. It's not hard to see why a farmer like Forsyth, struggling against tight margins and heartsick over chemicals, would leap at a New Leaf, or, in his case, a New Leaf Plus, which is protected from leafroll virus as well as beetles. "The New Leaf means I can skip a couple of sprayings, including the Monitor," he said. "I save money, and I sleep better. It also happens to be a nice-looking spud." The New Leafs don't come cheaply, however. They cost between $20 and $30 extra per acre in "technology fees" to Monsanto. Forsyth and I discussed organic agriculture, about which he had the usual things to say ("That's all fine on a small scale, but they don't have to feed the world"), as well as a few things I'd never heard from a conventional farmer: "I like to eat organic food, and in fact I raise a lot of it at the house. The vegetables we buy at the market we just wash and wash and wash. I'm not sure I should be saying this, but I always plant a small area of potatoes without any chemicals. By the end of the season, my field potatoes are fine to eat, but any potatoes I pulled today are probably still full of systemics. I don't eat them." Forsyth's words came back to me a few hours later, during lunch at the home of another potato farmer. Steve Young is a progressive and prosperous potato farmer, he calls himself an agribusinessman. In addition to his 10,000 acres -- the picture window in his family room gazes out on 85 circles, all computer-controlled, Young owns a share in a successful fertilizer distributorship. His wife prepared a lavish feast for us, and after Dave, their 18-year-old, said grace, adding a special prayer for me (the Youngs are devout Mormons), she passed around a big bowl of homemade potato salad. As the author helped himself, his Monsanto escort asked what was in the salad, flashing a smile that suggested she might already know. "It's a combination of New Leafs and some of our regular Russets," our hostess said proudly. "Dug this very morning." After talking to farmers like Steve Young and Danny Forsyth, and walking fields made virtually sterile by a drenching season-long rain of chemicals, you could understand how Monsanto's New Leaf potato does indeed look like an environmental boon. Set against current practices, growing New Leafs represents a more sustainable way of potato farming. This advance must be weighed, of course, against everything we don't yet know about New Leafs, and a few things we do: like the problem of Bt resistance I had heard so much about back East. While I was in Idaho and Washington State, I asked potato farmers to show me their refuges. This proved to be a joke. "I guess that's a refuge over there," one Washington farmer told me, 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 endslike the long-term sustainability of Bt. This is, of course, precisely the approach organic farmers have always taken to their fields, and after the author s lunch with the Youngs that afternoon, he 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." The author says that as Heath showed him around his farm, he 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 fieldsthe sheer diversity of species, both in space and timethat made them productive year after year without many inputs. The system provided for most of its needs. The story goes on to say that Monsanto 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 companyto 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." Margaret Mellon at the Union of Concerned Scientists was cited as saying she couldn't offer any hard scientific evidence that the author s 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. ... Let me turn that around. Why would you want to?" EXPAND HAY MARKETS FOR PROFIT Oct. 23 /98 AgAnswers Above-average hay inventories in most parts of Ohio have left hay producers who depend exclusively on local markets with barns full of hay and looking for a new marketing plan, says Mark Sulc, Ohio State Extension forage agronomist. "There is a demand for high quality hay in some areas," says Sulc. "Producers will probably have to look beyond their local markets in order to move hay this year." The extreme southeastern region of Ohio needs good quality hay and has a demand for dairy quality hay now, Sulc says. Because of the dry conditions in late summer and fall over much of southern and eastern Ohio, hay feeding will likely start earlier this year. Ed Vollborn, OSU Extension South District Grazing Program Leader, expects the current hay surplus to end by spring, leading to an increased need for medium quality hay later this winter in southern and eastern Ohio. Hay producers can use the Internet to identify potential markets outside their local areas. Several websites have been set up to help hay buyers and sellers, including: * The Internet Hay Exchange , * The Purdue hay locator service , and * Morgan's Forage Site , which provides information on the U.S. hay supply, demand and prices. For Ohio and Indiana producers and buyers who do not have Internet access, the OSU Extension Agricultural Business Enhancement Center can help. Contact the center at (419) 354-6416 or 1-800-358-4678 for help. The Farm Service Agency (FSA) will serve as a national clearinghouse for producers with shortages or surpluses of hay. To register with the FSA Hay Net, contact a local FSA Service Center office. MINISTER VANCLIEF TO DISCUSS FARM INCOME ISSUE WITH FARM LEADERS AND PROVINCES Oct. 23/98 from a press release OTTAWA -- Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Lyle Vanclief announced yesterday at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food that he will chair a meeting of Canadas top agricultural leaders and provincial ministers in Ottawa Nov. 4 to discuss the farm income situation. Many people in Canadas agriculture and agri-food industry are anxious about the projected level of farm income this year, said Mr. Vanclief. I share these concerns and I want to talk to farm leaders and the provinces about the latest developments and also about the programs we have in place to deal with such down turns, Mr. Vanclief said. Each year, the federal government contributes 24600 million to farm income protection programs. Provincial governments contribute 24400 million for a total of 241 billion. Farmers contribute a further 24600 million annually. Mr. Vanclief said he expects the meeting to be an important step in the process of helping Canadian farmers find long-term answers to current problems. I know that farm leaders are apprehensive about what the year ahead will bring for producers. Im concerned about it as wellvery concerned. I want farmers to know that they are not alone and that there are programs and services in place to help them survive these difficult times. DEVELOP STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE YOUR INCOME Oct. 23 /98 AgAnswers Farming and financial trials go hand in hand, so farmers tend to be well versed in reducing costs to stay solvent. In fact, Indiana farmers may have been so effective at cutting budgetary fat that they have little or nothing left to trim during the current commodity-price downturn, according to Purdue agricultural economists Ken Foster and Michael Boehlje. "Many farmers have adopted intensive production systems and have reduced costs to the bare minimum over the past several years," Foster says. "This leaves little room for advice on how to weather the financial crises." Foster says, however, that there are ways to earn extra income to cover debts, living expenses, or next year's operating capital.. Foster emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to weather hard times. He and Boehlje offer the following suggestions for farmers to consider as they cope with current financial stresses. To create more income from your assets: You can't buy one-half of a tractor or part of a feed-handling systemyou have to buy the whole thing. This means that most farmers have more of some asset than they can fully employ. A fundamental challenge of farming is increasing throughput, which is the revenue generated by a specific asset. Examples of ways to increase throughput includebut are not limited to * Using your machinery to provide custom services, * Renting out storage space, * Using existing feed mixing equipment, * Mixing specialized rations that you had been buying, * Increasing the use of existing feed mixing equipment by mixing for others, and * Custom manure spreading if you have sufficient equipment and you have all necessary permits. "All of these examples involve using equipment that you already own or are paying for anyway. The key is to identify existing assets that are not generating as much revenue as they might and that the added revenue exceeds any additional costs incurred!" Foster says. Many farm families already have at least one member earning off-farm income. If yours is not one of these families, this may be the year for that to change. Off-farm income can not only provide steady income, but also health, retirement, and other benefits. "However," Foster points out, "making time for family activities is especially important in times of business stress. Beware of sacrificing the well-being of your family for a few more dollars from a low paying off-farm job." If you or a family member has a business or professional skill, consider a home-based business. You can offer to do accounting or bookkeeping to locally based farm and non-farm businesses. Some farmers have carpentry or craft skills that can generate cash income from making furniture or working on a building or construction crew. Could you provide child care or work for a preschool business in your community? Another option is a home repair business or using the farm shop to repair machinery and equipment or to do truck and car overhauls. "In many cases, farmers and their family members have unique skills and capacities that might be a source of supplemental income," Foster says. Consider which assets you might be able to liquidate to relieve short-term financial stress; but be cautious, Foster advises. "Selling these assets is an irreversible decision that may not be wise even if it is to pay off debt," he says. "Consider the long-term earning potential of these liquid assets before selling and compare this to the cost of other sources of cash. "For example," he adds, "if a timber stand is in a stage of profitable growth and the growth rate in value exceeds the cost of refinancing debt, then it is better to leave the trees to grow. However, if the stand is nearing harvest, it may be more economical to harvest it this year rather than enter into additional debt." To help make the decision, Foster advises farmers to ask Extension educators or district foresters for help in evaluating timber stands and developing marketing and timber stand improvement plans. Other liquid assets include real estate that could be developed, grain inventories, investments, etc. "Again," use extreme caution when deciding to sell such assets, and compare the long-term costs of earnings losses to the short-term benefits of less financial stress. FOOD INDUSTRY BACKS GENETIC CROP MOVE, GREEN GROUPS ANGRY October 23, 1998 Reuters Peter Blackburn LONDON -- British farmers and food processors were cited as welcoming a government move this week to allow commercial planting of genetically modified (GM) crops under strict controls, but environmental groups were outraged. Environment Minister Michael Meacher on Wednesday assured a House of Lords committee that the ecological impact of GM crops would be closely monitored before deciding on marketing the produce, and that commercial production of insect-resistant crops will be banned for three years. A spokesperson for the National Farmers' Union of England and Wales was qutoed as saying, "It's a positive means towards the controlled commercial introduction of GM crops," adding that it will help all groups, from farmers to environmentalists, be confident about GM food. There are already more than 300 GM crop test sites in Britain and approved varieties of imported GM maize and soybeans as well as tomato paste are sold in shops. Adrian Bebb, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth was quoted as saying, "It's appalling. Meacher has basically given the commercial go-ahead while pretending to have called a moratorium," adding that the three-year moratorium on insect resistant crops was meaningless because there weren't any ready for at least three years. The Food and Drink Federation was quoted as saying in a statement that, "We have long held the belief that genetic modification offers enormous potential benefits, not only to primary agricultural producers, but also to manufacturers and consumers," adding that it was confident that rules were robust enough to ensure the safety of GM food and added that it was committed to providing balanced information to consumers. An official at the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Cofectionery Alliance (BCCA), was cited as noting that U.S. producers did not segregate traditional from GM seed, adding, "It's almost impossible to guarantee that maize and soy are not genetically modified." The story notes that chocolate contains tiny amounts of lecithin, a thickener derived from soybeans, which is exempted from GM labelling rules because it is food additive. ENVIRONMENTAL BOARD OVERRULED : AERIAL SPRAYING WILL BE DONE TO COMBAT GYPSY-MOTH OUTBREAK October 23, 1998 The Vancouver Province A4 Barbara McLintock The B.C. government has, according to this story, overruled its environmental appeal board and ordered aerial spraying to combat a Victoria-area gypsy-moth outbreak. Forests Minister Dave Zirnhelt was cited as saying yesterday cabinet will pass an order authorizing the spraying, bypassing the appeal procedures. Zirnhelt and Agriculture Minister Corky Evans said the spraying is a last-ditch attempt to avoid a quarantine being imposed on Vancouver Island products by the U.S. and federal officials. The spraying can't be done until spring because that's when the caterpillars hatch. The biological agent to be used, Btk, attacks only the caterpillar phase. The federal Food Inspection Agency wanted to spray for a small outbreak last year, but the environmental appeal board said no, citing unacceptable health risks. But the ministers reiterated that medical evidence shows Btk poses no measurable health risk. Evans was quoted as saying, ``Don't let this be a story that scares people,'' noting that public health experts aren't opposed to a spray program. Katy Young, of the Ecological Health Alliance, was cited as saying her group can cite hundreds of cases of people who fell ill after Btk spraying and that opponents will immediately begin a campaign to petition the cabinet. FARMERS AIR SLUDGE CONCERNS October 23, 1998 The St. Catharines - Niagara Standard A6 Niagara Region's agricultural sub-committee was cited as meeting with members of the north and south federations of agriculture and the Niagara Peninsula Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association at regional headquarters in Thorold to discuss a new sewage sludge disposal contract. Sub-committee chairman Ralph Beamer, the mayor of Pelham, was cited as saying farming representatives expressed various concerns, adding, ``The groups are concerned about proposed regulations from the province that would affect them. They want to make sure that what is in their contract will be put on the fields.'' They also expressed concern over how sludge would be applied to their land and potential changes in environmental approvals for the process. TASKFORCE WILL ADVISE MINISTER ON BIOTECHNOLOGY STRATEGY October 22, 1998 from a press release TORONTO -- Energy, Science and Technology Minister Jim Wilson announced today that Graham Strachan, president and CEO of Allelix Biopharmaceuticals Inc., will lead a taskforce that will recommend ways to advance biotechnology research and development in Ontario. ``Biotechnology is in the same position as telecommunications was 10 years ago. It's poised to take off,'' Mr. Wilson said. ``We need a strategy that will help the industry grow and compete internationally.'' ``Ontario has the potential to become a world leader in biotechnology,'' Strachan said. ``The taskforce is looking at ways to accelerate the growth of the industry and help it realize its full potential.'' The 16-member taskforce will develop a discussion paper and recommendations. These will be based mainly on published reports and deliberations, including ministry consultations held earlier this year with industry leaders, the report of the National Biotechnology Advisory Committee and federal consultations to develop a national biotechnology strategy. The taskforce will discuss its recommendations with biotechnology representatives and a discussion paper will be placed on the ministry's website for comments. The final report of the taskforce is due December 31. Members of the taskforce represent finance, research, agri-food and government, as well as the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries. The Ministry of Energy, Science and Technology is coordinating efforts across the government to develop a framework and policies that will support Ontario's health industries sector, including the pharmaceutical, biomedical and medical devices industries. Ce communique est disponible en francais. Backgrounder Biotechnology Taskforce Members Graham Strachan is president and CEO of Allelix Biopharmaceuticals Inc. He helped start the company in 1981 and was its first full-time employee. Based in Mississauga, Allelix Biopharmaceuticals was one of the first companies in Canada to specialize in the development and application of biotechnology products. Mr. Strachan has served on the National Biotechnology Advisory Committee since 1989 and was appointed chair in 1992. Alan Bernstein is director of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital and a professor in the department of medical genetics at the University of Toronto. He has served on many national and international scientific committees and boards. Dr. Bernstein recently received the Genetics Society of Canada Award of Excellence. Borys Chabursky is a principal with OPTIUM Health Solutions, a Toronto strategic consulting and information management firm. He has extensive experience in business development for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Mr. Chabursky has studied the industry extensively and participates in a number of biotechnology strategy groups. Rene Douville is vice-president of life sciences and health care for the Royal Bank of Canada. He is also vice-president of life sciences and agriscience for the Royal Bank Growth Corporation, which provides financing for the commercialization of new products. Mr. Douville has worked for the Royal Bank in various capacities since 1991. Randal R. Goodfellow is president of Goodfellow Agricola Consultants Inc., a consulting firm involved in government relations and business development for the agriculture, food and life sciences sectors. He is also a senior associate specializing in investment banking and corporate partnering for the consulting firm Thorington Corporation. Ann Humphreys is vice-president, biotech and new product development for Janssen-Ortho Inc., Toronto. She has held progressively more responsible positions in the pharmaceutical industry since 1975. Ms. Humphreys served on the board of the Industrial Biotechnology Association of Canada from 1995 to 1997. Ruth Jackson has been an active member of the Consumers' Association of Canada for more than 40 years. During that time she has held the positions of national vice-president and president of the Ontario and the Kitchener-Waterloo associations. Mrs. Jackson has served on the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Board and on many other agriculture and food groups. Ken Lawless is executive director of the Ottawa Life Sciences Council and interim president of the Ottawa Life Sciences Technology Park. In his previous capacity as a bioscience development officer for the City of Ottawa, he developed a strategic plan for the Ottawa-Carleton life sciences industry. Mr. Lawless was a founder and vice-president of AminoTech. J. Mark Lievonen is acting president of Pasteur Merieux Connaught Canada, the country's leading supplier of vaccines. Mr. Lievonen, a chartered accountant, joined the company in 1983 and has held executive positions with the company since 1988. In his current position, he is responsible for all the company's operations in Canada and Mexico. Dr. Murray McLaughlin is president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies in Guelph, a non-profit corporation dedicated to promoting the province's agri-food biotechnology sector. Dr. McLaughlin is a former deputy minister of Agriculture and Food in Saskatchewan and former president of Ag-West Biotech Inc. Lorne Meikle is president and CEO of BioCatalyst Yorkton Inc., which provides management and consulting services to biotechnology start-up companies and financial organizations. Before joining the company, Mr. Meikle was president of Seragen Biopharmaceuticals Ltd., a Montreal-based biotechnology group which he helped establish. J. Brian Prendergast is president of Monsanto Canada Inc. Monsanto makes and markets agricultural products, pharmaceuticals and food ingredients. Before joining the company in 1995, Mr. Prendergast worked in sales, marketing and management with leading consumer packaged goods companies in Canada and the U.K. David H. Turpin is a professor of biology and vice-principal (academic) at Queen's University. In this capacity he is responsible for all the faculties and schools in the university and for academic support services. Dr. Turpin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals. Jack Wearing established Wearing Development Inc. in 1997 after 30 years in management with Monsanto Canada. His firm specializes in identifying and commercializing new technologies. Mr. Wearing served for four years as chair of the Industrial Biotechnology Association of Canada and was recently elected president of the Toronto Biotechnology Initiative. Ron Yamada is one of the founders and currently holds the positions of senior vice-president of information strategies and corporate affairs and director for MDS Inc., Canada's largest technology-based health and life sciences company. Mr. Yamada serves on a number of committees and councils involved in developing federal and provincial health care policy. Stephanie C. Yanchinski trained as a research biochemist and worked as a science journalist and editor in London, England and Singapore before launching her career as a consultant in strategic planning, marketing and communications for the biotechnology industry. Ms. Yanchinski is currently Canadian news editor for Genetic Engineering News. To subscribe to Agnet, send mail to: listserv@listserv.uoguelph.ca leave subject line blank in the body of the message type: subscribe agnet-L firstname lastname i.e. subscribe agnet-L Doug Powell To unsubscribe to Agnet, send mail to: listserv@listserv.uoguelph.ca leave subject line blank in the body of the message type: signoff agnet-L For more information about the Agnet research program, please contact: Dr. Douglas Powell dept. of plant agriculture University of Guelph Guelph, Ont. N1G 2W1 tel: 519-824-4120 x2506 fax: 519-763-8933 dpowell@uoguelph.ca archived at: http://www.findmail.com/listsaver/agnet-l/