by Ted Genoways
The precision is stunning, and the knowledge demanded of farmers, most of whom consult with agronomists but ultimately decide what to plant on their own, seems impossible to fathom—but also impossible to escape. A quarter of a century ago, Roundup Ready crops didn’t exist; today, they are 90 percent of the soybean market and nearly three-quarters of the corn and rice markets. And on the strength of that success, Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer have grown into global seed giants, now controlling 45 percent of all the seed sold in the world. Short of going completely organic and dropping out of growing commodity grains, how is a farmer supposed to avoid raising corn and soybeans that have been genetically modified to withstand Roundup?
As we approached the dealership, Rick put on his hazards, pulled past the end of the driveway, and then backed the trailer straight onto the concrete pad next to the seed warehouse. As Rick swung his driver’s door open, Dennis Stevens was there to greet him.
Dennis wore his Pioneer cap low, and his snowy mustache nearly covered his smile. “Well, if it isn’t the local liberal,” he said.
Rick adjusted his cowboy hat as he stepped out of the cab. “If it isn’t the local son of a bitch,” he replied. The two men smiled broadly and shook hands.
Dennis walked us over to the pro boxes, stacked like oversized milk crates all the way to the rafters, each labeled with its particular product code but also its place of origin, the date it was field-tested, any preapplied treatments used, and the exact number of seeds in the box. Dennis double-checked which product Rick was picking up with this load, and then gave the signal to the forklift operator to pick up a box full of soybeans and hoist it high over Rick’s seed tender. The pro boxes have a trap door on the bottom that, when opened, lets the seeds pour out like sand in an hourglass. The forklift revved and beeped as the operator moved it precisely into place. Rick climbed the side of the tender and yanked on the sliding door, sending the seeds echoing into the empty tank. When every seed had drained out, Rick banged hard on the door to slide it back into place, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Do you need a hammer?” Dennis called.
Rick gave him a quick, dismissive smile, then pushed on the door again, putting his shoulder into it this time. It slid into place with a resounding clang. “That ought to do it,” Rick said.
Before long, we were racketing back over the washboard roads, the heavy tender bouncing and tugging against the hitch. Given everything, Rick seemed oddly ebullient—drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel, whistling a little despite a few raindrops blossoming on the windshield. “I usually have about fifty percent of my beans forward-contracted by now, and this year, I have none,” he said. He had decided to take an even bigger gamble than the year before, banking on prices going up before harvest. It was an undeniable risk, but after all winter worrying, he was happy to finally be getting back to work, doing something instead of just waiting.
At the field edge, Rick pulled alongside the hopper at the back of the planter. Dave fired up the auger, powered by a small diesel engine underneath that started with a pull cord like a lawnmower, and then Rick, climbing a ladder to the hatch door on top of the main hopper, directed the corrugated plastic hose inside, spreading the seeds out layer after layer. Besides their many genetic modifications, the candy-bright seeds, like a barrel of green M&Ms, had been treated with a mix of insecticides and fungicides similar to those used on the seed corn. Rick wore a plaid flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists and thick rubber gloves as protection. All the while, he kept eying the sky. “I’m afraid we’re going to get everything loaded up just in time for it to rain,” he shouted.
The prospect of rain was concerning, not only because the planter can mire and get stuck in a muddy field. Even a light rain can affect seed depth for each furrow, forcing the farmer to constantly recalibrate and double-check the planter to keep from wasting seeds. Rick often recalls the spring, not long after he’d started working with Heidi, that he planted too deep and nothing sprouted, so he replanted but too shallow and a spring rain washed everything away, so he replanted again, by then needing a perfect season just to make up for the lost investment in seed. Rick always wore a mustache up until then, but that year, the worry turned his facial hair snow white. In the end, he broke even for that year, but he’s been clean-shaven and a bit more mindful of his seed depth ever since.
Dave climbed into the cab of the tractor and started the onboard computer. The fan pressurizing the planting system came to life again. A big chemical tank to one side of the planting attachment made it so that Dave could apply additional fungicide, insecticide, or fertilizer right as the seeds came out of the bulk bin. He pulled the planter parallel with the last completed rows, lowered the planting blades, and started again across the field. For the moment at least, they had beaten the rain.
“They say farmers are the world’s biggest optimists,” Rick said, watching Dave go. “You have to be optimistic in this business, just to keep going—or at least have an awful short memory.”
AFTER ENOUGH warm days that the female seed corn was moving toward maturity, Dave returned to the fields to complete planting the missing rows of male corn. The planter crept forward, the blades opening and closing furrows in the blanks between the female rows, where tiny corn plants now sprouted green and tender. Rick leaned against the bed of his truck, watching. Pioneer had sent out a field manager earlier in the day to check on the progress of this quarter section, and Rick was worried about what would happen if the guy came back and found an outsider there. I assured Rick that I had checked in with the company’s media liaison, that the last thing I wanted was to cause him any headaches.
He nodded ruefully, visibly unconvinced.
“Pioneer used to be a wholly owned family deal,” he said. “Then it got bought out by DuPont. Since then, I don’t know. We’ve only been planting seed corn for them for seven years, but it seems like a lot of corporate edicts come down now that your local people just have to follow. What the solution is, I don’t know. I’m sure they’ve got their reasons. I just wish it were a little less top-down, a little more grower-friendly.”
As one example, he explained that DuPont Pioneer now required its farmers to account for the custody and security of every bag of seed corn—right down to requiring a pallet strap for hauling from the company compound, just outside of York. After all Pioneer has done to secure and protect its intellectual property, the last thing the corporate bosses wanted was to risk a spilled load—seed scattered along the roadway or into the ditch, raising the possibility of some farmer scooping up their patented genetics, or seeds simply taking root and cross-pollinating with other corn plants. And even after you’ve picked up the seeds and secured them, you have to agree to drive nonstop from the pickup point to your farm. By then, you’ve already had to prove that you have a locked shop. They come out and check it, and they insist on more than just a barn with a padlock; they want a framed building with a secure door—and the seed has to go straight from their loading dock to that shop or else directly to the field.
As Dave’s tractor neared the pad of the pivot in the center of the field, Rick took out his cell phone. “You call them as soon as you start planting,” he said, dialing. He told the Pioneer seed representative that Dave was underway on a new field and gave them the identification numbers for the bags and location. That way they could come to check that everything was being planted according to their agronomists’ guidelines and then add it to the list of fields under surveillance by the seed security teams.
It sounds like corporate paranoia to have company trucks patrolling the back roads looking for anything suspicious, but in early May 2011, a farmer in the midst of corn planting outside Tama, Iowa, watched as a car pulled over at the edge of his seed corn field. Two Chinese men stepped out and came scrambling up the ditch. One said that they had been attending an international agricultural conference in Ames and wanted to see someone planting a real Iowa cornfield. The farmer was dubious. Ames was nearly an hour away wi
th nothing but expanses of corn in between, all at the peak of the planting season. How had these two men chanced upon his field—on the very day he happened to be planting an experimental and top-secret seed under development by DuPont Pioneer?
It was unusual enough that the farmer contacted his seed representative, who sent out a security team to keep an eye on the newly planted rows. The next day, the field manager spotted the same car. He watched as the passenger got out, climbed the embankment, and then knelt down in the dirt and began digging corn seeds out of the ground. When confronted, the man grew flustered and red-faced. He now claimed to be a researcher from the University of Iowa on his way to a conference. But before the Pioneer field manager could question him further, the man fled back down the embankment. He jumped into the waiting car and took off, swerving through the grassy ditch before fishtailing onto the gravel road and speeding away.
A few weeks later, during a routine meeting with agents from the Iowa office of the FBI, a Pioneer executive mentioned the incident. He explained that Pioneer enters into exclusive contracts with farmers to grow proprietary seeds. The exact genetic sequence of successful seeds is a tightly held secret, worth tens of millions of dollars. The Pioneer field manager had written down the license plate number and handed it over to company security. They had been able to trace the plates back to a rental car company at the Kansas City airport. Representatives there said the car had been rented by Mo Hailong, a Chinese national working as the Director of International Business at the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Company (DBN), a company with a seed division in direct competition with Pioneer in China.
The FBI launched a full investigation. Over a period of nearly two years, crisscrossing the United States, they tracked Mo and a team of five corn industry spies, including insiders at Pioneer research labs, from state-sponsored dinners in honor of the Chinese government in Iowa to secret research facilities in Florida to a covert test plot that Mo had established in rural Illinois for cross-breeding proprietary seeds in preparation for smuggling them to China. It seems like a lot of cloak-and-dagger for a few seeds, but biotechnology is now worth billions of dollars per year in sales—and the U.S. government believes that something much larger is going on.
This theft, they argue, stemmed from an undeniable and dangerous fact: despite its remarkable landmass, China simply can’t grow enough food to feed itself, particularly now that the country’s burgeoning middle class has acquired an appetite for meat. (Most corn in China is used as feed for livestock.) Water shortages and lack of arable terrain have forced their government to buy between 2 million and 5 million metric tons of American corn annually, approximately 94 percent of all corn imported into China each year. If China hopes to feed (and pacify) its growing population while also loosening the very real stranglehold that America has on its national food supply, its farmers have to start producing a lot more corn—not just enough to meet their domestic demand in good years but enough to maintain a stockpile to offset their global market impact during bad ones. The only tenable way for China to meet its own demand is by planting high-performance hybrids, which can single-handedly double or potentially even triple per-acre corn production.
In recent years, DuPont Pioneer has increased its share of the seed corn market in China from less than a tenth of a percent to 12 percent. The company has told Chinese officials that they should Americanize their agriculture: consolidate land, plant GMO seed, apply industrial fertilizers, subsidize the sale of planting and harvest equipment. DuPont Pioneer argues that they are striving only to feed a burgeoning global population. William S. Niebur, the head of the company’s operations in China, asked, “Without China’s food security, how can we ever imagine an effective, realistic, sustainable global food-security system?” But many, including the Chinese government, expressed concerns that DuPont Pioneer’s goal was not global food security or feeding the Chinese people, but rather increasing market share and profit by keeping China as a customer. Whatever the reason, the FBI pursued Mo, who was eventually charged with conspiracy to steal trade secrets from Pioneer and Monsanto and sentenced to three years in prison.
Ever since that case, Rick said that security had grown even tighter. “See the tag on every bag of seed?” he said, pointing to a stack of sealed bags waiting to be opened and loaded into the planter. He said that they used to put a rubber band around those tags and put them in a plastic tube at the field’s edge for the agronomist to pick up periodically. “Now those tags go into a manila envelope,” Rick said, “and as soon as you get done filling the planter, you call them to get it. A lot of times they’ll come out while you’re still planting. They check the seed depth and the seed population, but really they’re just double-checking to see how everything looks at your field. They’ve got it figured down to a gnat’s ass on how many seeds you should have, and they want to make sure none go missing.”
Pioneer is so worried about leaking information and stolen biotech that Rick doesn’t even know what variety of seeds he’s planting, just its codename. All of his communication with Pioneer refers to that alias and the field number. He said that in recent years Pioneer wouldn’t even release another pallet of seeds for planting until the company could confirm that the planter was almost empty. In May, when planting gets going full steam, many farmers are planting late into the night. Rick said that waiting around for seed can add hours to the process, but Pioneer will do everything it can to keep farmers working. “A while back, Dave called at ten-thirty at night, and they ran him out a couple extra bags,” Rick said, and when he was done planting at 2 A.M., he called again, and the seed rep said that a field manager would be out to meet Dave first thing in the morning. “As soon as you get your planter cleaned out, they’re there, and even if you have a fourth of a bag of excess seed, they want it back.”
At the far end of the field, Dave wheeled the tractor around and lined up the planter again, running another set of male rows coming back in our direction. For all the hassle, Rick wasn’t complaining about raising seed corn for Pioneer. He was the first to say: it had become the anchor for his whole operation and the one sure source of income, buffeting against bad times, like the current market downturn, when other farmers were forced to rely on commercial crops. “The seed corn is much more lucrative,” Rick said. “And it’s a lot less work. I mean, we have to plant it, of course. And midsummer, a week or two after they’re sure the pollination is completely done, we take the sprayer and attach this big shredder. We go through, and we destroy every male row. That’s a little time but hardly any expense. But that’s it. We don’t do the harvesting ourselves. They have contracted different farmers, three or four guys, to do the harvesting. We have to be there to move the pivots for them. Then there are trucks that are contracted—maybe twenty trucks—to haul it away, and that’s it. So we don’t pay for any of the seed. We don’t pay for any of the harvest. We don’t have any storage. And the price is set just under the Board of Trade for commercial corn in whatever month you choose to market it. So it’s almost all of the profit with none of the usual expense or risk. It’s so much easier.”
I asked Rick how they paid out for the seed corn fields. With the inbred varieties producing such small and often scraggly parent plants, you wouldn’t think that the yield would be enough to make it worthwhile. Rick laughed hard. “The first year we planted seed corn, we got so worried. The plants were only about yea big,” he said, gesturing to mid-thigh. “I went out, and I saw ears half-filled. Oh, man, I thought we were going to be in big trouble. No one told us! It was like, ‘Jeez, what did I do?’ It turned out we were their biggest producer for that variety that year. They were thrilled.”
He explained that DuPont Pioneer knew to expect tiny yields compared to commercial fields. Where a good field now might produce 250 bushels to the acre for commercial corn, you’d be lucky to get 60 to 80 bushels to the acre for seed corn, so the company compensates farmers for what the seed corn would have produced if it were planted to comm
ercial corn and a top yielder. “You have these PBY fields, they call them. PBY is a ‘production-based yield,’ ” Rick said. “And that sets the mark for yields for the seed corn fields, so you choose your very best ground and put your very best hybrid with your very best fertilizers, and all the other producers do the same. Those that are chosen then, in the fall, they go in and they harvest those. That gets your base yield for the year. They pay you for the seed corn fields at the rate that your PBY fields yield. The last couple years it’s been right around two hundred fifty bushels.”
On top of that base yield price, DuPont Pioneer also offers a premium for what they call the Big Dog Award. They compare the yields of groups of seed corn producers, farmers in a certain geographical area, what they call a “block,” who planted similar varieties around the same time, and they rate them. “Say you were in the middle of the pack in a block of six,” Rick said. “Then every acre, male and female, would be counted at 250—just average. But if you won out of those six, if your field did the best, then you’re the Big Dog and would get some premiums. It’s an incentive to not just plant the seed corn but to do your best to make the field produce.”
Later, when Kyle was in the shop removing counterweights from the tractor after the end of planting, I told Meghan that I couldn’t believe all of the know-how that goes into farming. Kyle had chosen the balance of what to plant, the varieties to plant and where. He had chosen how much fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides to apply and when to apply them. And going forward, as the two of them took over the operation, they were going to be in a position of trying to amass their own land and build their own operation. They were constantly racing to get ahead, but it never seemed to be enough.