When The Corn Hits The Fan

ACRES, USA Special Report By Steven Sprinkel Yankton, South Dakota, EEUU 18sep99

A few sundry observations on the state of the US corn crop at harvest, mingled with the usual inevitable questions. Having pulled aside by the banks of the lovely, broad Missouri River on the South Dakota-Nebraska border, impressions, interrogations, and inspirations mass at the same point on the compass. First, a bit of better news.

Super Corn.

Aye, not much of that around, amigos, but a few choice and well sequestered fields may prove to be certifiably organic in the end, which may or may not be ultimately resolved through further testing. Fear that, especially if you are a North American organic producer with an export crop. Fear also for the entire corn genome, with the real possibility that a double-digit percentage of the acreage of the 2000 corn seed production may have been accidentally contaminated through cross pollination. Seed providers are asking now that farmers reserve non-GMO seed for next year. Perhaps they should ask for seed held over from 1998 or 1997, if it still exists.

Leo and Mari Schultes thought their forty acres of open pollinated organic corn crops near Coon Rapids, Iowa, would probably be best used as silage for their livestock, especially once the Minnesota Blue field started to lodge prematurely. Harvesting the blue for chip-corn, if left to stand, would probably have resulted in a ten-bushel to the acre yield. Much of the blue had already been chopped and put up. Adjacent to the Minnesota Blue was 25 acres of Reed’s Dent and Minnesota Dent. Those two varieties were standing well, with around 10% down. Once we had come to rest at the top of the hill, we could better judge the value of this corn, because very little conventional corn was visible from that vantage point. I suggested to the Schultes that what they might have was a corn seed crop rather than cattle feed. Instead of a 4 dollar per bushel product, such open pollinated, organically produced corn may be worth five or even ten times as much. I believe that it should be and, moreover, that such corn should be recognized as a public heritage. I suggested that the Schultes should politely inquire about the corn varieties planted within a mile of their crop to further evaluate GMO contamination potential.

The side-by-side cropping of the Minnesota Blue and the Reeds Dent instructs well the cross-pollination issues: we continued to find many blue kernels in ears ten rows within the Reeds field. Corn seed production segregation protocols call for 660 feet between crops. Has that really been imposed on the US corn seed production for 1999?

Gerald and Carol Koch have fifty six acres of blue corn near Newcastle, Nebraska with nearly ideal segregation. No corn at all can be seen from the top of the northern ridge where Koch’s Blue has been planted. Literally for miles around, the surrounding hilly country has been seeded down to the USDA Conservation Reserve Program or is in cattle pasture. For the past five years, Gerald Koch has been selecting out his blue corn for color, height, and stand-ability, saving back only ten percent per year to replant. His current "seed patch" of around three acres is a nearly uniform stand of perfectly deep-purple corn, with less than 5% down at a late stage of maturity. Seventeen cents a pound is the best price the Kochs have found so far for the corn, which translates out to around $8.50 a bushel. GMO-contamination concerns aside, Kochs Long Standing Blue would be highly valued by other organic corn growers like the Schultes, who have seen theirs keel over.

The thirty-seven acres of organic yellow corn grown by John Lubke near Bluffton, Iowa is where the search for Super Corn began, because it was the first place that I actually observed it. The only limitation on Lubke’s crops is that they are hybrids, which severely limits their potential for seed, however, as a progenitor crop they may be suitable for further breeding because GMO contamination is nearly nil. The Bluffton ground is surrounded by woods and ravines, a state park to one side, and much of the acreage is in the bottom-land cut by Ten Mile Creek, with high tree-covered limestone cliffs to the north. We drove to the top of the ridge, and all around the surrounding acreage, identifying parcels planted to corn. Only one was visible, nearly a mile to the south, and once again I suggested that Mr. Lubke should determine the corn varieties being grown near him to further authenticate the GMO-free nature of this miracle. By the way, the Lubke corn will come in at 120 bushels to the acre or better, should it be of any concern to latter-day altruists who claim we can’t feed the world organically.

Compromised Corn

Then there were the organic corn fields surrounded by GMO varieties. You may observe the latter frequently from the side of the road, with the variety named on a placard staked there. Any corn crop number ending in RR or BT is a GMO, and depending on the locality and the style of farming, these crops are planted by the linear mile, with no evidence that a refuge or buffer had been planted. The GMO crops are designed for the brave new industrial farming system looming over the horizon. A case in point is the agribusiness production planted on the fine Iowa plain between Blairsburg and Galt on US 69. The hills and woods disappear east of the Des Moines River here, giving way to fenceless industrial soil-mining, with the dirt a sterile medium utilized to hold the corn and soybeans erect until harvest. They may as well have been sown into slag, sand and styrofoam. Just give it a shot of anhydrous and fly on the Round-up later. Along this straight-line strip BT-BT-BT seemed to be the only variety planted, mile after mile, finally giving way to ten acres of metal buildings and gravel, upon which were parked a good dozen immense Deere 9460s, the all-wheel drive eight wheelers designed for this form of "agriculture." There wasn’t a grain wagon parked there that could hold less than 500 bushels, and in the field a combine was emptying out into a semi-truck, with two others waiting. In the distance on each side of the road one could see the sturdy, sparkling hog-feeding plants where this crop is destined to be used. I imagine that the total operation must involve 20-30,000 acres. It took me ten minutes to drive through it. This vertical pork-chop manufactory reminded me of what one Iowa corn producer observed last winter in the style of farming now emerging in Brazil . The Farm Bureau thought it would be nifty to fly a plane-load of farmers down to see what was going on where once the rain-forest stood. Apparently, it was pretty much the same picture as the Iowa facility on US 69, except instead of real towns, there were intentional residential areas, sort of like 19th century mining towns, where specialists drove or fixed tractors, poured chemicals into airplane spray tanks and waited for cooks to put lunch down in the cafeteria. All that Rio Grande Do Sul needs to complete the picture is Round-Up readies.

" Why did they think that we would enjoy or learn from seeing this form of agriculture? Most of us were horrified to see what we are up against down there. If that’s the future, I want no part of it."

It is impossible for an organic farm to co-exist in these environments. Of course one will discover contamination concerns everywhere. One new organic farmer in transition, whose name and locality will remain anonymous, planted a Bt variety immediately adjacent to his organic corn crop. He was looking for yield, and had planned to merely cut eight rows of the organic crop as his buffer. I suggested that he should create three harvests, with the compliant buffer and the conventional GMO crop going to the elevator, the next 8 rows of compliant but suspect organic corn going into a separate grain bin and the rest of the organic into another bin. Everything within the twenty-five foot buffer is "legally" organic, but export capability and the potential to inadvertently contaminate mixed loads of other organic corn has to be a concern of the producer and the buyer. I haven’t any idea to what degree other organic farmers or their certification agencies have evaluated GMO contamination in the field. After this year’s experience, and with my limited knowledge, I have very little confidence that one can assure organic integrity based on the current standards of production. Owing to the largely unspoken potential for the seed crop to have been contaminated as well, I fear that GMO pollution will haunt us for years.

As Gerald Koch said: " Why have these fools done this? Don’t they know they have lost four years of corn breeding? As a matter of fact, they have probably lost eight years, because you have to take into account all the previous breeding experience as well. And it looks like its all headed for a dead-end…"

Why Have These Fools Done This?

Well, the short answer is global domination. But, there are better questions to ask at this point. Are there any seed-breeders worth their salt that have seen this GMO-revolution as an opportunity to go entirely in the other direction? How could the professional entomologist community have failed to raise the caution flag? Are there no independent p-h-ds in universities or regulatory government, or even the crop-pest-management sector who had the cojones to speak out against the madness? The answer is either No, or their voices have fallen prey to the news-black-out. After the Bt-killing-Monarch news was released earlier this summer, how many university entomology departments undertook a field study of the affect of GMO plant-pesticides on other lepidopterans, or even non-target critters? Where is the ecologist who will link plant-pesticides to a web of life at risk from this technology, for surely a sudden lack of food will affect birds, mammals, other insects, even the tiny microorganisms that feed on the millions of tons of insect debris left after summertime’s bloom of life? Please, don’t leave it to people as poorly prepared as I am to volunteer such queries.

Plant-Pesticides aside, there are Round-up resistant weeds everywhere now. Of particular note is a crop rotation of RRsoybeans-RRcorn-RRsoybeans, which will lead to rapid weed resistance, and the prospect of resistant volunteer corn in the third year soybeans. Soy and corn can be the same size when screened, so this means the crop can not be adequately cleaned without a gravity table. I also observed Round-up resistant shatter-cane, which is considered by authorities in some counties as a noxious weed. This same species ( and perhaps grain sorghum and sudan grass), is closely related to field corn, and may now also be carrying attributes of the Bt. Maggie’s Farm is looking pretty bleak.

Darwin’s Tree is Upside-Down Well, the humans will eat this stuff, but the animals won’t. Evolution seems to have come full circle. Unlike a film character played by Sean Connery a few years ago, who " won’t eat anything that I can not identify…" modern developed-world consumers have no idea what they are eating because it is delivered on the run in processed form. Cooking is a lost art. Grazing, however, remains unchanged, and I have heard more than enough stories about how the animals wont go for the GMO.

Why, you can put your cattle out into GMO corn stubble and they just won’t touch it. Oh, they’ll bite that new brome down to the ground, but they won’t eat the GMO corn stubble. After four months of retrieving anecdotes from Kansas to Wisconsin, I think its high time to sample the producer community more thoroughly to see how many stories there are out there. About the hogs that wouldn’t eat the ration when the GMO crops were included. About the farmer who said " Well, if you want your cattle to go off their feed, just switch them out to a GMO silage." About the farmer who said that his cattle broke through an old fence and ate down the non-GMO hybrids but wouldn’t touch the Round-up ready corn, and as a matter of fact " They had to walk through the GMOs to get to the Pioneer 3477 on the other side." About the cattleman who saw the weight-gain of his cattle fall off when he switched over to GMO sources. About the organic farmer with a terrible deer problem on his soybeans, and when he drives out at night there are forty of them mowing down his tofu beans while across the road there isn’t one doe eating on the Round-up Readies. About the raccoons romping by the dozen in the organic corn, while down the road there isn’t one ear that’s been touched in the Bt fields. Even the mice will move on down the line if given an alternative to these " crops". What is it that they know instinctively that most of us ignore? I have been traveling around with a bag of contaminated cob corn on the floor of my vehicle, and I have begun to think of it as if it was a bag of plutonium. My truck should probably be de-contaminated by a Hazmat facility. I should probably be put under observation to see what the affect of so much exposure to glyphos and Bt pollen has done to me. I’ll bet my blood will kill mosquitoes now.

We can take great anarchic satisfaction in noting that the conventional grain harvesting system has been thrown into absolute fugue and orbit by the handling and segregation protocols now forced upon people least prepared to do so. Trust it not. The in-house efficiency monitors will have fun figuring out the extra cost associated with these measures-and the inevitable errors that will pollute 100,000 bushels of "clean" corn when somebody dumps the wrong truck into the hole. Every back-water grain elevator from Cherokee, Iowa to Beatrice, Nebraska to Seymour, Wisconsin has been obligated to handle each miserable semi-trailer of corn as if was filled with hybrid corn seed. The other example one could use to explain the new requirements is to overlay the methods imposed on organic farmers and handlers to assure organic integrity.

Wash out every truck? Run and dump ten bushels of crop to clear the combine? These custom combine companies are interested in one thing only: speed. They get paid by the acre. They swing into a field, drop the head, turn up the cowboy rock music on the radio and push the accelerator to the floor. A fully compliant clean out can take an hour. Does anybody know what is in that grain wagon over there? Now do the math.

We heard it in the corn field:

"Cargill is thinking of segregating the corn crop too." ( apparently false)

"The non-GMO premium may go to thirty cents." ( wait and see, come mid-October)

"Dekalb disced ten thousand acres of GMO corn seed because it wasn't worth processing."

I actually saw a few fields of disced corn. Thought at first it had been silage-harvest, then realized the fields were full of debris and corn ears.

I still got paid 5.39 a bushel for my RR soybeans because of the Loan Deficiency Payments"

(Why is that not a WTO-deficient subsidy? And by the way, does the US Congress stall on making emergency farm-crisis cash available to US producers because it will undercut our position in Seattle?)

While observing a weedy soybean field:" No , its not organic, that's a Pursuit field. That’s been the best advertising for Roundup yet."

Oh really? And what will be the next ingredient we will use once Round-up proves useless?

While observing a narrow field of organic corn sandwiched between two GMO corn fields: '" Do you think a 25 foot buffer is wide enough?'

Answer: " No. Combine it into three separate lots, the 25 foot buffer, another 25 foot buffer, and then the middle. Put it all into three separate bins and see if the buyer wants the middle harvest tested. Then be prepared to sell it as conventional or feed it to your cattle."

Obviously I didn't tell him to feed it to organic cattle.

All the above just a whiff of what rural America is dealing with. Wisconsin and much of Illinois is going to harvest a bin-breaking crop of beans and corn this year. Where they will put it is anyone’s guess. The Chinese are currently moving five to seven million bushels of 1999 corn offshore, so if that equals storage lost, alone, one may probably expect to see mountains of corn piled in driveways. Just another reason why Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack is amping the obligatory use of ethanol in gas mixtures.

* " When the rotting corn hits the fan, it will make a tremendous mess, with the debris lying equally on the tables of the great leaders of the world as well as on the plates of consumers."