The Year Of The Grasshopper And Bioengineered Seed

The Wall Street Journal reports that millions of acres of prime American farmland will be destroyed this year by a plague of grasshoppers. The paper reports that “grasshoppers will likely hatch in bigger numbers than any year since 1985.”

There are methods for killing grasshoppers, but the numbers that will hit farms land this year may simply too great for pesticides and poisons to matter much.

The interesting thing about bioengineered seed is that almost no one wants to use it until they need it. Monsanto is the largest developer of seeds with ingredients which are not made by Mother Nature. The company is testing eight forms of soybeans a greater number of seeds for corn and wheat.

The products engineered by Monsanto and its smaller competitors are called genetically modified organisms. Once these seeds are planted in the ground they are, like other seeds, able to grow outside the area that the farmers intended. The difference is the bioengineered seeds can be so hardy that they can grow in dry ground and concrete.

The major objection to bioengineered seeds is that there is no long-term testing to show whether products made from they seeds are dangerous to cattle or people over years of consumption. So far, there is no evidence that the Monsanto products are dangerous, but parts of the environmental and medical communities are not convinced.

Bioengineered seed is relatively easy to sell in areas of the world where crop yields are not large enough to feed starving populations. Places like the US and Canada, where wheat, corn, and soybean are more abundant, bioengineered seed is often not critical to the success or failure of crops. That is until there is a unusally dry or wet growing season, or, until there are grasshoppers that will eat regular crops but may not eat the secret sauce Monsanto can create.

Douglas A. McIntyre