Sometimes I think Monsanto is like a big kid with a chemistry set. See? If you pour the white powder into the test tube and add four drops of this liquid, the whole thing smokes and turns red!
Monsanto found that its researches could pull apart plant DNA strands like so many accordions, insert genetic material and then shove the DNA back together again. Sweet! In one arena, such knowledge allowed the company to splice corn genes with those of a bacteria that can kill corn earworms. Then they started charging farmers real money to “license” the special corn’s seeds – just like a Microsoft product!
Only whoops! it turns out Mother Nature has an even bigger chemistry set, and started cranking out badass corn earworms that are unaffected by the bacteria-laced corn genes. It also turns out that while Monsanto was playing with its DNA toys, it spilt designer genes all over the hemisphere.
But Monsanto lawyers and lobbyists got together and, after a lot of creative thinking and the planting of some seed money, some really interesting laws were passed. Now, if the bees fly from a Monsanto designer-gene soybean field and pollinate your plain-Jane-genes soybean field, sprinkling designer DNA into the seeds you’ve saved just like always for decades and generations – Voila! You are now in illegal possession of Monsanto DNA, and you owe the company a buttload of money.
Ain’t American ingenuity great?
So meanwhile, Monsanto has been making this cool weed-killer called Roundup, see? And since they learned how to splice genes and all, they just spliced some Roundup resistance into their sooper-dooper corn and soybean and cotton seeds and whatnot. Then, they sell the farmers the rad weed killer that strips out all the vegetation in sight, AND they sell farmers the license to use the seeds from the corn, soybeans, cotton and whatnot with the Roundup-resistant DNA.
So Monsanto makes a double sale off of everybody, plus the farmers don’t have to plow up the dirt anymore – they can just pour on the weed-killing chemicals and follow right behind with the Sooper Seeds.
Except Whoa! here’s that damn Mother Nature disrespecting seed licenses and plant patents again:
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
Never fear for long, though, because Monsanto and the other chemistry-set kids just know they can outsmart God if they put their collective minds to it.
Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.
That’s right, buddy. If Mother Nature wants to mess with Big Ag, then Big Ag is gonna go all Agent Orange on her ass. ‘Cause deliverin’ cheap high-fructose corn syrup for soda-pop ‘n ketchup ‘n cattle feed ‘n near every other “prepared” food in America is Job One.
No matter what the cost…
To you.
