This Blessed Earth

by Ted Genoways

  Before long, Monsanto returned to manufacturing 2,4-D for its original purpose. During the early stages of the Vietnam War, Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued to President John F. Kennedy that the use of chemical defoliants was not technically a violation of the Geneva ban on chemical weaponry, because the chemicals were meant to be sprayed on dense jungle foliage, not enemy combatants themselves. Willing to be persuaded, Kennedy authorized the covert Operation Ranch Hand. Using chemical herbicides provided by Monsanto and Dow, most of them based on 2,4-D or its descendant 2,4,5-T, the military created a series of Rainbow Herbicides, code-named according to different colors on the spectrum. There was Agent Purple, then Agent Green and Agent Pink. Then in 1965, government chemists developed a potent mixture of the esters of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which they called Agent Orange. The herbicide was unusually effective—especially when it was deployed at fifty times the concentration that either chemical had been used in agriculture.

  Rick told me that he thought that allowing 2,4-D and other herbicides to be used in that way had been a mistake. The military had been applying those chemicals in concentrations that scientists at Monsanto and Dow had warned would be lethal or debilitating to humans. In time, the government admitted that Agent Orange had led to lung and prostate cancers for American veterans and poisoned the water and food supply of forest villages in Vietnam, leaving behind a legacy of horrifying birth defects. More than that, the fear caused by seeing the effects of military-grade applications of Agent Orange had turned the public against it as an herbicide in the United States. But Rick believed that limiting its use had only increased the production of other, less-tested replacements.

  In 2012, for example, high levels of atrazine, a substitute for 2,4-D widely used by corn growers, were found in the water supplies of thousands of municipalities across the Midwest. Syngenta, the manufacturer of atrazine, agreed to pay more than $100 million to those utilities for the installation of filtration systems, as part of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit. The company admitted to no wrongdoing, but the Natural Resources Defense Council was quick to note that Syngenta’s pay-out came after researchers in France linked drinking atrazine-laced water during pregnancy with increased risk of delivering a low-birth-weight baby—with all of the associated health problems for the infant. And that’s just one example among thousands of herbicides.

  “Bill Moyers had this deal on chemicals on PBS,” Rick told me. “They tested his blood and found eighty-four different chemicals there—of which about fifty or so hadn’t been invented in 1940.” He noted that there are now more than 75,000 chemicals registered with the EPA, but that the vast majority have never been tested to find out their effects on human health. For Rick, and anyone working on a farm, these concerns are anything but abstract. In the waning days of harvest in 2014, the National Institutes of Health had published the results of a twenty-year study that looked at rates of depression among farmers, showing compelling evidence that use of seven different pesticides, mostly neurodisrupters, had nearly doubled the suicide rates among the men who applied those chemicals. Worse still, the depression rates were even elevated among their spouses and other immediate family members. Soon after, another study found two hotspots for Parkinson’s disease in Nebraska, apparently linked to historical use of pesticides in those areas.

  “You can’t ignore it,” Rick said, “but banning old chemicals just puts industry on the hunt for new ones—which will be used before we even know if they’re safe or not. We can always see the short-term benefits, but we don’t see the long-term ill effects until it’s too late.” That’s why Kyle waits for a windless day to use the sprayer, applies as little of each chemical input as possible, and stays inside the cab until a whole field is sprayed and the air has cleared. It’s why Rick showers and washes his clothes right after applying these chemicals and insists that Kyle do the same. It’s also why Rick fiercely defends the use of anti-pest varieties of row crops that have been developed using genetic modifications. And it’s why he eventually decided to plant crops with engineered resistance to a newer product developed by Monsanto as an alternative to 2,4-D-based herbicides.

  That herbicide, which has gained widespread use in the last twenty years, is called glyphosate—or, more commonly, Roundup.

  RICK HELD off on planting soybeans through most of May. He had chosen to go with a short-season variety again that year and didn’t want to get them in too early, risking another wet fall and another late harvest—especially with what he was seeing in the commodities markets. Rick had spent the winter emptying his bins as slowly as possible, keeping back reserves, waiting. There’s typically a spring bump in prices, what’s called a “seasonal rally,” at the start of planting when stockpiles are at their absolute lows and the results of the South American harvest start to come in. “Eight out of ten years, you’ll see it,” Rick said. “But then a couple of weeks ago, we had a report come out that made everything go the other way. The U.S. had had a big bean crop, and then South America had a fantastic year.” Instead of the usual spring bump, prices had actually fallen further on the news. Rick decided to sell off what he had left—about 5 percent of his overall corn crop and fully 25 percent of his soybeans, grain he had been storing for more than six months. It was time to cut losses and hope for a better year ahead. “Maybe I sold on the low,” he said. “But I just didn’t see upside anytime soon.”

  So Rick cleared out the last of his bins, hauled the final semi loads to the elevator, and started picking up new seeds from the dealer. But by the time he had gotten the John Deere planter loaded on the flatbed and brought over from the seed corn fields, a line of spring storms had rolled in, blanketing the sky for days. By then, there was nothing to do but put his seeds in as the weather allowed, one field at a time. On the day Rick was ready to move to the quarter section neighboring Centennial Hill, the clouds were stacking up, billowy and roiling. They kept threatening big rain but never produced more than a light mist, so he planted half of the field with one variety, and when the weather seemed like it would hold for a few more hours, he hitched up the seed tender, a portable tank that looked like a miniature water tower on wheels, and headed to the seed dealer to get a second variety to finish the field.

  As we drove, Rick explained that his Pioneer dealer offered thirty-eight varieties of soybeans. Almost all of them were genetically modified by bioengineers, inserting strands of DNA that make the plants able to withstand a range of herbicides, particularly the compound glyphosate. Chemist John E. Franz, working for the St. Louis–based chemical giant Monsanto, first hit upon glyphosate in 1970 as part of a company-wide search for potent chemicals that could be sold as weed-killer. Brought to market four years later under the trade name Roundup, the broad-spectrum herbicide saw unmatched growth in the agricultural industry, where it was used for broadleaf weed control. The only problem with Roundup was that it proved so potent that farmers had to apply it carefully, spraying only early weeds, before their corn or soybeans had begun to sprout. Otherwise, it would kill the entire crop.

  From Monsanto’s standpoint this presented a serious problem. Simply put, the necessity of limiting Roundup’s application also limited its sales. So company researchers started to seek out ways of engineering crops that could withstand this new weed-killer. By then, scientists had already developed the revolutionary new ability to cut and splice protein strands into the DNA sequences of bacteria. If they could do the same with plant cells, then, at least in theory, they could chemically insert resistance to insects or to herbicides.

  Monsanto had recently entered into a deal with biotech pioneer Genentech to license some of their gene-splicing technology, and they already had successfully used these techniques to produce recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), a hormone that extended the lactation period of dairy cows and thus increased their milk production. The hormone, eventually marketed as Posilac, was showing promising results in field tests—and Monsanto executives, now convinced of the commercial viabilit
y of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), wanted to find similar modifications that could be made in plants. So company researchers were tasked with trying to find a gene that could be spliced into soybean and corn hybrids to make them resistant to Roundup.

  Researchers began by testing every lab sample amassed from the company’s fields and facilities nationwide, no matter the reason for its original collection. From a Roundup manufacturing plant near Luling, Louisiana, they received a sample that had been collected from a waste dump, where workers had noticed a range of bacteria thriving despite prolonged exposure to glyphosate. When the sample was taken, Monsanto researchers were hoping to produce a glyphosate-resistant bacteria that could help break down the chemical when there were spills or overapplication events. Now they were looking for the resistant gene inside the bacteria in hopes that it could be spliced into row crops to increase the application of Roundup. By 1986, researchers had isolated the particular gene that controlled that immunity, spliced it into soybeans, and were ready to begin field trials.

  In the meantime, other Monsanto researchers were trying to find a similar genetic-engineering solution to the European corn borer, an insect that inflicted more than $1 billion in losses in the United States and Canada each year. Since the 1960s, endotoxins produced by Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a common bacteria found in the soil, had been sold as a commercial microbial insecticide to kill moth larvae. If the specific DNA that produced Bt toxins could be isolated and spliced into corn genetic sequences, scientists believed they could create an ear of corn that would be lethal to the European corn borer but perfectly safe for humans or livestock to eat. Soon, that hurdle had been cleared, and Monsanto began looking for a seed partner to market its pest-resistant corn—and decided to approach Pioneer. If Monsanto could marry its genetic modifications with Pioneer’s superior inbred seed stock, Monsanto believed it would have a line of products with unmatched yield potential.

  In the 1990s, perhaps too eager to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new GMO crops, Monsanto allowed Pioneer to use its biotech to produce Roundup Ready soybeans and Bt corn—asking only for small usage fees and no royalties. For less than $40 million, Pioneer suddenly had the technology and the sales muscle to move toward genetically modified feed crops. Rather than partner with Monsanto, Pioneer became its greatest competitor, entering into a joint venture with DuPont, which soon came to regard seed technology as so lucrative an opportunity that it bought Pioneer outright (and changed the name to DuPont Pioneer). Despite the rounds of lawsuits that followed, DuPont Pioneer released Roundup Ready soybeans in 1994 and then Bt corn in 1996.

  When Pioneer seed reps first started promoting these new products, Rick initially resisted. “I was very reluctant,” he said. He objected to Pioneer requiring that farmers sign an agreement promising not to save and clean soybeans to replant the next year. Even though trying to replant progeny seeds from hybrid varieties rarely produces a quality crop, he said that making that mistake should be a farmer’s prerogative. “It just felt wrong to me—un-American,” he said. “You know, I paid you for this seed. You’re telling me what I can and can’t do next year with the things that I grow? That’s rotten. They say that they went to the expense of doing the GMO modifications. I get that, but you know what? There was expense to seed hybridization before, and we never had to sign anything. It seems to me that if you raise it and grow it you should be able to plant it.”

  Rick also traditionally spread his risk by buying hybrids from different dealers, but as soon as Monsanto and Pioneer got into cutthroat competition, they each started acquiring smaller competitors, just to expand their market share. “There used to be a hundred seed corn companies,” he said. “But it’s been winnowed down to a few. The bigs have bought out most of the littles.” Unable to compete against the seed giants, small companies relied more and more on the open-source genetics provided by public universities, rather than investing in their own research. Rick began to suspect that he was getting identical genetics, no matter what the label on the bag said.

  One year, for example, he planted three different varieties of corn—Super Cross, Maize, and Golden Harvest—and they all fell prey to the same weakness in their stalks. Known as “green snap,” corn plants with a particular genetic defect will develop elongated nodes when exposed to herbicides, making them prone to blow-down in heavy winds. Seeing all three varieties display the same problem made Rick suspicious. “I could not physically tell the difference,” he said, so he just decided to go with the one company that had always been successful for him. “I really liked Pioneer,” he said. “That was it for me. I was done. No more Mr. Nice Guy. There was no sense losing volume discounts, when they were all the same. I wasn’t saving money, and I wasn’t spreading my risk out.” And once he had gone over exclusively to Pioneer corn, it just made sense to plant Pioneer soybean hybrids.

  Even so, Rick had his reservations. “I could see that, within a relatively short period of time, if everybody switched to Bt corn, then the bugs would become resistant. And if both the corn and soybeans were Roundup Ready, then you’d end up with weeds completely resistant to Roundup.” In fact, in the twenty years after Roundup Ready soybeans were first introduced by Monsanto, the amount of glyphosate that the United States collectively applied each year went from less than 10,000 tons to more than 125,000 tons, and, indeed, the combination of monocultures of corn and soybeans and using a single herbicide for both has produced a range of herbicide-resistant superweeds. “If they had just stuck with Roundup Ready beans and rotated those with Bt corn, using old 2,4-D or other families of chemicals for weed control, then Roundup could have been a viable product for many, many years,” Rick said. Instead, farmers tend to use more Roundup and more combinations of other herbicides with Roundup.

  Unsurprisingly, the agricultural chemicals team at the U.S. Geological Survey Office, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, has now detected the presence of glyphosate in the air and water supply in rural states. And the effect of those chemicals is the subject of heated debate. In 2015, the cancer-research wing of the World Health Organization released a report finding that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans. Monsanto hotly disputed the findings. The following year, the UN and WHO issued another report clarifying that, at realistic intake levels, glyphosate was “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through diet.” Still, critics maintain that there are no studies of the effects of exposure over many years. Rick acknowledged this fear about the long-term impact, but he also wondered if it was any worse than the chemicals that had come before.

  “It’s not like we were all organic farmers until Monsanto came along,” he said. He vividly remembered the days of applying dyfonate, a highly toxic pesticide used on corn plants. “You had a separate set of boxes on your planter with this pesticide inside,” Rick said. “It was supposed to go in furrow, but invariably when you plant, the wind’s blowing about forty miles an hour. In those days, there were no vacuum-sealed cabs. I remember that dust caking up along the sweat band of my cap, and when I took my hat off, it took the top layer of skin with it.” Bt corn had done away with many such pesticides, and he said that Roundup had also eliminated many herbicides that were problematic “as far as farmer safety goes.”

  Besides, Rick said, he couldn’t afford to ignore what he saw while driving up and down these same country roads we were on now: his neighbor’s fields of soybeans and corn that looked taller, healthier, more productive than his own. “My decision on whether to go GMO or not was a tough one,” he said. “I didn’t automatically jump in like everyone else did. But the big deciding factor to me was the old question: wherein lies the biggest evil? Because at the other side, I was using old broad-spectrum poisons—dyfonate, another one called Counter—that were killing all the beneficials. With GMOs, at least, we were using material from naturally occurring bacteria and not just killing everything in sight.”

  So one year, Rick decided to raise a few fields
of Roundup Ready soybeans. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, if I forget exactly where the GMO quit, and I spray Roundup in the wrong places, I’ll kill my whole crop.’ ” Plus, even to plant half his fields with Roundup Ready beans, he had to sign an agreement with Pioneer that curbed his rights on the other half. He was under all of the restrictions without any of the rewards. “And ethically, it’s like being a little bit pregnant,” Rick said. “Either you are a sinner or you’re not.” So the next year, and ever after, he bought only Roundup Ready soybeans, and eventually, he bought Pioneer’s newly introduced Roundup Ready corn. And in no time, DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto introduced new varieties with “stacked traits,” combining Roundup resistance with other desirable characteristics.

  At North Forty Seed, Rick’s dealer, there’s a genetically modified variety for almost any soybean need. One modification causes the plant to create a protein that kills insects; another changes the profile of the fatty acids in the beans, making them less susceptible to rot after harvesting. The Soybeans Seed Guide breaks down the performance of each product, all sold under codenames like P22T41R2 and 93Y41, into extremely fine categories: whether they are resistant to particular races of soybean cyst nematodes, to the Phytophthora infections that cause root rot, or to white mold that can cause stem rot; how quickly they emerge, how tall they grow, how wide they canopy; what their protein and oil percentages will be at optimum 13 percent moisture rates at harvest.