Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Scientists Urge Farmers To Back Off GMO Corn

They hope it will lessen Western Corn Rootworm resistance to Bt (h/t Big Picture Agriculture):
Now, in a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released this week, 22 of the nation's top experts on corn pests lay out some of the implications of this discovery, and they are potentially profound.
In order to slow down or prevent the spread of resistance, the scientists are calling for big changes in the way that biotech companies, seed dealers and farmers fight this insect. The scientists urge the agency to act "with a sense of some urgency."
  The rethinking that's laid out in this letter, in fact, goes beyond what the EPA is able to do under current law. For instance, the researchers want seed companies to stop routinely inserting anti-rootworm genes into their most productive hybrid seed lines. According to the letter, this practice means that farmers "often have few options" apart from rootworm-protected seeds — even in some areas where rootworms don't pose a serious problem.
When farmers plant hybrids that contain the same gene, year after year, it dramatically increases the chances that this gene quickly will become useless, because insects will become resistant to it.
The researchers are calling on farmers in some parts of the country to stop planting corn with anti-rootworm genes altogether, or to plant such corn only intermittently.
Here in the eastern corn belt, we could probably skip using the technology, but the seed companies have added the stacks to their hybrids, so it makes it more difficult to do.  Of course, rootworm isn't as much of an issue here since we typically don't plant corn after corn, so we haven't seen the rootworm resistance the guys out west have.

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