The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (25 page)

Monsanto executives voice confidence that the plan will work, though their definition of success will come as small comfort to organic farmers: the company’s scientists say that, if all goes well, resistance can be postponed for thirty years. After that? Dave Hjelle, the company’s director of regulatory affairs, told me over lunch in St. Louis that Bt resistance shouldn’t overly concern us since “there are a thousand other Bts out there”—that is, other proteins with insecticidal properties. “We can handle this problem with new products. The critics don’t know what we have in the pipeline.” This is, of course, how chemical companies have always handled the problem of pest resistance: by simply introducing a new and improved pesticide every few years. With any luck, the effectiveness of the last one will expire around the same time its patent does.

Behind the bland corporate assurances, though, stands a fairly startling admission. Monsanto is acknowledging that, in the case of Bt, it plans on simply using up not just another patented synthetic chemical but a natural resource, one that, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to everyone. The true cost of this technology is being charged to the future—no new paradigm there. Today’s gain in control over nature will be paid for by tomorrow’s new disorder, which in turn will become simply a fresh problem for science to solve.
We can cross that bridge when we come to it.
Of course, it was precisely this attitude toward the future that encouraged us to build nuclear power plants before anybody had figured out what to do with the waste—a bridge we now badly need to cross but find we still don’t have any idea how to.

Dave Hjelle is a disarmingly candid man, and before we finished our lunch he uttered two words that I never thought I’d hear from the lips of a corporate executive, except perhaps in a bad movie. I’d assumed these two words had been scrupulously expunged from the corporate vocabulary many years ago, during a previous paradigm long since discredited, but Dave Hjelle proved me wrong:

“Trust us.”

• • •

July 7.
My Colorado potato beetle vigil came to an end the first week of July, shortly before I planned to fly to Idaho to visit potato growers. I found a small platoon of larvae—soft brown dabs wearing what looked like miniature backpacks—munching with impunity on the leaves of my ordinary potato plants. I couldn’t find a single one of the bugs on my NewLeafs, however, either alive or dead. Glenda Debrecht, the Monsanto horticulturist, had prepared me for this: predator insects were probably feasting on the bugs the NewLeafs had killed. I kept looking for them, though, and eventually I spied a single mature beetle sitting on a NewLeaf leaf; when I reached to pick it up, the beetle fell drunkenly to the ground. It had been sickened by the plant and would shortly be dead. My NewLeafs were working.

I have to admit to a certain thrill, a triumphal feeling that any gardener who has battled pests will understand. The typical gardener is not in the least bit romantic about the wildlife that assaults his plants, not the bugs or the woodchucks or the deer, and in his heart of hearts he believes that all is fair in war—even if organic principles (sort of like the Geneva Convention) do sometimes prevent him from heeding his heart’s desire. But make no mistake, this is a desire whose fantasies feature rifles, explosives, and chemicals of unspeakable toxicity. So to watch a potato plant single-handedly vanquish a potato beetle is, at least from this perspective, a thing of beauty—an ingenious new twist on the Agricultural Sublime.

• • •

Idaho, July 8.
The Agricultural Sublime was very much on my mind during my flight west, especially as we crossed into Idaho. From thirty thousand feet, the perfect green circles formed by the irrigation pivots of the dryland farmer are breathtaking; in places the Idaho landscape becomes an endless grid of verdant coins pressed into the scrubby brown desert: squared circles as far as the eye can see. It’s an image not only of human order, like the rows of corn back home, but also, in a landscape as inhospitable as the American West, of human habitation hard-won. I would soon discover, however, that this austere beauty is harder to see on the ground.

No one can make a better case for a biotech crop than a potato farmer, which is why Monsanto was eager for me to come out to Idaho to meet a few of their customers. From where a typical American potato grower stands, the NewLeaf looks very much like a godsend. That’s because the typical potato grower stands in the middle of a bright green circle of plants that have been doused with so much pesticide that their leaves wear a dull white chemical bloom and the soil they’re rooted in is a lifeless gray powder. Farmers call this a “clean field,” since, ideally, it has been cleansed of all weeds and insects and disease—of all life, that is, with the sole exception of the potato plant. A clean field represents a triumph of human control, but it is a triumph that even many farmers have come to doubt. To such a farmer a new kind of potato that promises to eliminate the need for even a single spraying of chemicals is, very simply, an economic and environmental and perhaps even psychological boon.

Danny Forsyth laid out the chemistry and economics of modern potato growing for me one sweltering morning at the sleepy but well-air-conditioned coffee shop in Jerome, Idaho, a one-street, one-coffee-shop town about a hundred miles east of Boise on the interstate. Forsyth is a slight, blue-eyed man in his early sixties with a small, unexpected gray ponytail, a somewhat nervous manner, and a passing resemblance to Don Knotts. He farms three thousand acres of potatoes, corn, and wheat here in the Magic Valley, much of it on land inherited from his father. When he talks about agricultural chemicals, he sounds like a man desperate to kick a bad habit.

“None of us would use them if we had any choice,” he said; he believes Monsanto is offering him that choice.

I asked Forsyth to walk me through a season’s regimen, the state of the art in the control of a potato field. Typically it begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes and certain diseases in the soil, potato farmers douse their fields before planting with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Next Forsyth puts down an herbicide—Lexan, Sencor, or Eptam—to “clean” his field of all weeds. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide—such as Thimet—is applied to the soil. This will be absorbed by the young seedlings and kill any insect that eats their leaves for several weeks. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, a second herbicide is sprayed on the field to control weeds.

Dryland farmers like Forsyth farm in the vast circles I’d seen from the sky; each circle, defined by the radius of the irrigation pivot, typically covers an area of 135 acres. Pesticides and fertilizer are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth’s farm draws water from (and returns it to) the nearby Snake River. Along with their ration of water, Forsyth’s potatoes receive ten weekly sprayings of chemical fertilizer. Just before the rows close—when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next—he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine and is once again today the potato grower’s most worrisome threat. A single spore can infect a field overnight, Forsyth said, turning the tubers into a rotting mush.

Beginning this month, Forsyth will hire a crop duster to spray for aphids at fourteen-day intervals. The aphids are harmless in themselves, but they transmit the leaf roll virus, which causes “net necrosis” in Russet Burbanks, a brown spotting of the potato’s flesh that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. Despite all his efforts to control it, this happened to Forsyth just last year. Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect, yet because McDonald’s believes—with good reason—that we don’t like to see brown spots in our french fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals now in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

“Monitor is a deadly chemical,” Forsyth told me; it is known to damage the human nervous system. “I won’t go into a field for four or five days after it’s been sprayed—not even to fix a broken pivot.” That is, Forsyth would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to this poison.

Leaving aside the health and environmental costs, the economic cost of all this control is daunting. A potato farmer in Idaho spends roughly $1,950 an acre (mainly on chemicals, electricity, and water) to grow a crop that, in a
good
year, will earn him maybe $2,000. That’s how much a french-fry processor will pay for the twenty tons of potatoes a single Idaho acre can yield. It’s not hard to see why a farmer like Forsyth, struggling against such tight margins and heartsick over chemicals, would leap at a NewLeaf.

“The NewLeaf means I can skip a couple of sprayings,” Forsyth said. “I save money, and I sleep better. It also happens to be a nice-looking spud.”

Before driving out to have a look at his fields, Forsyth and I got onto the subject of 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”) and a few things I never expected to hear from a conventional farmer. “I like to eat organic food, and in fact I grow 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.”

Danny Forsyth’s words came back to me a few hours later, during lunch at the home of another Magic Valley farmer. Steve Young is a progressive, prosperous potato grower—“a player” in the admiring words of my Monsanto escort. A big, bluff man in his forties, Young farms ten thousand acres; even after passing the entrance to his farm, you have to drive for miles before arriving at his house. He showed me the computers that automatically regulate his eighty-five circles of spuds; each circle on the screen stands for and controls one circle in the field. Without so much as stepping outside, Young can water his fields or spray them with pesticide. Young seemed very much the master of his fate as well as his fields, the picture of a thoroughly modern farmer. He’s built his own potato storage facility—a controlled-atmosphere shed big as a football field, housing a mountain of Russet Burbanks thirty feet tall—and he owns a share in a local chemical distributorship. Compared to Danny Forsyth, a man who clearly feels himself very much at the mercy of the chemicals, the aphids, and the potato processors, Young gives the impression, at least, of a man in complete control.

Mrs. Young had prepared a lavish feast for us, and after Dave, their eighteen-year-old, said grace, adding a special prayer for me (the Youngs are devout Mormons), she passed around a big bowl of potato salad. As I helped myself, my Monsanto escort asked her what was in the salad, flashing me a smile that suggested she might already know.

“It’s a combination of NewLeafs and some of our regular Russets,” Mrs. Young said, positively beaming. “Dug this very morning.”

• • •

As I slowly chewed my potato salad, I considered which ingredient was more likely to be hazardous to my health, the NewLeafs or the Russets à la Thimet? The answer, I decided, is almost certainly potato number two. There might be unknowns about the NewLeafs, but the Russets I
knew
to be full of poison—and the answer says something important about genetically engineered plants I wasn’t ready to hear, at least not before coming out to Idaho. After I talked to farmers like Danny Forsyth and Steve Young while walking fields made sterile by a drenching, season-long rain of chemicals, Monsanto’s NewLeafs began to look like a blessing. Set against current practices, genetically modified potatoes represent a more sustainable way of growing food. The problem is, that isn’t saying much.

After my lunch with the Youngs, I shook off my escort long enough to pay a visit to a nearby organic potato grower. I knew enough not to take someone from Monsanto to visit an organic farm. “If there’s a source of evil in agriculture,” an organic farmer from Maine had told me, “its name is Monsanto.”

Mike Heath is a rugged, lined, laconic man in his mid-fifties. Like most of the organic farmers I’ve ever met, he looks as though he spends a lot more time outdoors than a conventional farmer, and he probably does: chemicals are, among other things, labor-saving devices. While we drove around his five hundred acres in a battered old pickup truck, I asked him what he thought about genetic engineering. 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.”

I asked Heath about the NewLeaf potato. He had no doubt that resistance would come—“Face it,” he said, “the bugs are always going to be smarter than we are”—and he felt it was unjust that Monsanto was profiting from the ruin of a “public good” such as Bt.

None of this particularly surprised me; what did was the fact that Heath himself had resorted to spraying Bt on his potatoes only once or twice in the last ten years. I had assumed that organic farmers used Bt and the other approved pesticides in much the same way conventional farmers use theirs, but as Mike Heath showed me around his farm, I began to understand that organic farming was a lot more complicated than simply substituting good inputs for bad. A whole different metaphor seemed to be involved.

Instead of buying many inputs at all, Heath relies on a long and complex crop rotation to avoid a buildup of crop-specific pests. He’s found, for instance, that planting wheat in a field prior to potatoes “confuses” the potato beetles when they emerge from their larval stage. He also plants strips of flowering plants on the margins of his potato fields—peas or alfalfa, usually—to attract the beneficial insects that dine on beetle larvae and aphids. If there aren’t enough beneficial insects around to do the job, he’ll introduce ladybugs. Heath also grows a dozen different varieties of potatoes, on the theory that biodiversity in a field, as in the wild, is the best defense against nature’s inevitable surprises. A bad year with one variety will likely be offset by a good year with the others. He doesn’t, in other words, ever bet the farm on a single crop.