Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  Like Lee DeHaan, Crews is not dead-set against the use of GM technology. If GMOs could move genes between plants that already cross naturally (or cisgenically), “why would we not go there?” Crews said.

  “There could be a marginal improvement with GMO traits, but it’s still the wrong approach for addressing agriculture’s shortcomings. The overall sociological phenomenon is not addressing agriculture in ways that need to be addressed. If you take an ecological approach that solves things on this list, then we’re talking, whether it involves conventional breeding, or cisgenics, to develop ecological agriculture.

  “The way we’re doing things is long term and messy,” Crews said. “We are by no means simply trying to introduce a new species here or there to be the next superfood or fill some niche market. Our rather long-term ambition is to replace tilled agriculture with something that is far more ecologically complex and sustainable—agriculture ecosystems that humans could be proud of rather than the most compromised ecosystems imaginable.”

  9.

  Can GMOs Be Sustainable?

  No matter where you stand on GMOs, it seems reasonable to ask if our food system hasn’t somehow become too big to fail. If industrial farming is the real culprit in our national eating disorder, perhaps a solution can be found simply by scaling back. Not in the interest of purity, or in pursuit of utopian visions of food. Not to get rid of GMOs, or even to (completely) rid the world of pesticides. Perhaps it’s enough to have food produced on a smaller scale, by farmers who take excellent care of their land.

  To get to Jennie Schmidt’s farm, you drive east across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, then hook a left and head north through an endless tapestry of some of the most fertile land on the Eastern Seaboard. Her Maryland farm is just beyond a shooting range, out along Sudlersville Cemetery Road. When I arrived on a cold February day, the Schmidts’ dog Dozer met me out front. Jennie apologized for the carpet guys who were replacing the wall-to-wall carpeting that had been covering the floors of their modest home for thirty-seven years.

  The Schmidts work 2,000 acres. It’s not a huge operation, by Iowa standards, but consider this: Last year the Schmidts produced 12 million pounds of Roma tomatoes, enough to fill twenty tractor-trailers every day for two weeks. Over the years, the Schmidts have experimented with sweet corn, sweet peas, and lima beans, but given the risks—the Eastern Shore gets forty-five inches of rain a year, much of it during spring growing season—they have settled on their current mix: Tomatoes and green beans for the vegetable market. Soft red wheat, which they ship to a processor in Pennsylvania to make into crackers and pretzels. Twenty-two acres of grapes for local vineyards.

  And 1,500 acres of soybeans and corn, a good deal of it grown from GM seeds.

  As third-generation farmers, the Schmidts have found a sweet spot between small-scale farms that survive by supplying farmers’ markets, and industrial-scale operations that must invest millions into their own harvesting and canning infrastructure. Jennie Schmidt calls her farm a “supermarket farm,” but not because most of her crops go into the vegetable aisle. They don’t. She and her husband, Hans, grow for canneries, which turn their tomatoes into “value added” products like salsa and tomato sauce. Tomatoes harvested at her farm in August are trucked to Pennsylvania and are in jars or cans less than forty-eight hours after they are picked.

  Sitting as it does in the middle of the Eastern Shore—a lobe of beautifully fertile land stretching from near Wilmington, Delaware, all the way to the bridge to Virginia Beach—the Schmidt farm has had to adapt to the industrial agriculture that has grown up alongside it. Long considered to have some of the most productive soil on the Atlantic coast, the Eastern Shore is also situated near some of the biggest food markets in the world.

  “I’m not a ‘farmers’ market farmer,’” Jennie Schmidt told me. “If I took 12 million pounds of tomatoes to a farmers’ market, we’d flood the market. It wouldn’t work. We get better income from vegetables than from grain production. But we have the markets for diverse crops. Where in Iowa are they going to sell cannery-grade tomatoes? A hundred miles from a farm in Iowa, you’re still in the middle of nowhere. Here, in less than a hundred miles, we can be in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, or Philadelphia. We can be in New York City in three hours. Without the cannery and trucking infrastructure, we wouldn’t even be in vegetables.”

  The Schmidts’ farm, while not enormous, still sits at the very center of the industrial food system, and not just because of their tomatoes and the trucking infrastructure. Their corn and soybeans go straight into the maw of giant agribusinesses, overseen and orchestrated by some of the largest and most influential companies in the world. The Schmidts’ GM seeds are engineered by companies like DuPont Pioneer, and they use chemical herbicides (like glyphosate) first designed by companies like Monsanto. And their harvested beans are sold to companies like Perdue, which, in addition to being one of the world’s largest chicken producers, is also one of the country’s largest grain companies. It has to be: the company has to feed most of the 569 million chickens that grow on the Eastern Shore alone.

  But the Schmidts also win awards for environmental stewardship. They practice a wide range of soil conservation techniques that would please even the crankiest environmentalist. Rather than strip their fields bare after a harvest, they leave withered plants to serve as “green manure.” They rotate crops. They use integrated pest management. Because they spray their weeds, the Schmidts don’t have to till their soil, which means they can reduce their carbon footprint—both by driving their tractor less and by leaving carbon in the soil, where it belongs. They plant cover crops, which both hold their soil in place for future crops and prevent erosion. This prevents both soil and the nutrient phosphorous that attaches to it from running off into the Chesapeake Bay. To avoid StarLink-style contamination of their soybeans, they flush out their combines and grain elevators whenever they harvest to make sure none of the GM beans intended for the chicken feed market get into the seeds grown for the tofu market.

  “The truth is, you will never get to zero,” Jennie said. “You can’t get rid of every soybean in your combine. But there are those of us who take the time to meet that level of due diligence. Our tofu beans don’t get labeled by the Non-GMO Project, but they get tested, and they are non-GMO. If they find half of 1 percent, they get sold on the Perdue market. If we can’t verify that they are non-GMO, they don’t get sold that way. Most people don’t think we pay that level of attention. They think we’re just blowing smoke, which is sad.”

  Given this level of scrupulous attention to soil health, conservation, and best weed- and pest-control practices, the Schmidts’ farm has been certified by the state for its “agricultural stewardship,” meaning it has met high standards for preserving soil and water quality.

  The Schmidt farm—industrial but local, pro-GMO but pro-sustainability—offers a glimpse at a kind of middle way farming that employs technology at a scale that minimizes many of the ills associated with corporate agriculture. Their approach doesn’t answer all questions, like whether we really need to be raising 569 million chickens on some of Maryland’s best farmland, or whether we need to be eating so many chicken nuggets in the first place. But until we tackle those larger questions, farms like the Schmidts’ suggest that the secret to better food production may lie not with enlightened global agribusinesses, but with enlightened local farmers.

  Providing the Crops That Industry Demands

  Jennie Schmidt received her bachelor’s degree in nutrition and food science, with a minor in international agriculture. She spent a couple of years with 4-H, teaching agricultural techniques to schools in Botswana. She later returned to graduate school for a master’s degree in human nutrition; her thesis looked at food and biotechnology just as the GMO industry was finding its legs. Today, she is the only woman on the board of the Maryland Grain Producers Utilization Board, and now the first female president of the U.S
. Wheat Foods Council. She is also past president of the Maryland Grape Growers Association and past chair of the Maryland Farm Bureau’s Specialty Crop Committee.

  Now that her husband, Hans, has been appointed Maryland’s assistant secretary of agriculture, Jennie relies more than ever on help from her in-laws and her brother-in-law. Still, Jennie herself has to do a lot more than just manage the family’s twenty-two-acre vineyard, oversee the farm’s crew, and keep the books. She also maintains a blog, The Foodie Farmer, on which she spends a lot of time trying to disabuse people of their fears over GMOs. Given the intensity (and in Jennie’s opinion, the ignorance) of opinions on the topic, Jennie got into the GMO debate reluctantly. “I just started writing about biotech this last year,” Jennie told me. “I didn’t want to bring that into my home. When you criticize a farmer for what they do or don’t do, you’re criticizing their home. In the blogosphere, it gets very personal.”

  The Schmidts’ neighbors, who run a 350-acre farm across the way, sell their vegetables to local supermarket chains like Giant and Whole Foods. They run a farm stand. When people think about “local farmers,” it is the Schmidts’ neighbors they have in their heads, not the Schmidts. This is a source of constant irritation.

  “On Facebook, whenever a friend says, ‘Support your local farmer,’ I always chime in and say, ‘You know, if you buy canned tomato products, I was one of the significant growers,’” Schmidt said. “That’s the disconnect—our faces are not on those products. People don’t know who we are.”

  This “disconnect” between consumers and farmers lies at the very root of the GMO debate, Jennie Schmidt says. Forget about gene sequencing—plenty of people don’t even understand that potatoes and carrots come out of the ground.

  Jennie’s father-in-law, who still lives across the road, started farming in the 1930s, about ten years after the introduction of hybrid corn, which dramatically boosted the yields growers could get from their fields. Eighty years later, GMOs offer Schmidt Farms a similar boost. Using Bt corn, the Schmidts now get 221 bushels of corn per acre—more than 35 bushels (and $100) per acre more than they get for non-GM corn. It would be hard to persuade a farmer to give up such advantages, and indeed, it is this margin—more corn grown on the same acreage—that has made farmers enthusiastic about GMOs since they were first introduced thirty years ago.

  In recent years, the Schmidts have started planting a new GM soybean engineered by DuPont Pioneer called the Plenish. In addition to being good chicken feed, the Plenish beans, when processed for their oil, create a second market, for fast-food frying oil. Oil made from Plenish soybeans has zero grams of trans fat and 20 percent less saturated fat than hydrogenated vegetable oil, and is high in oleic acid. The oil is also “shelf stable,” and so is especially useful in the creation of processed foods that sometimes sit on store shelves for weeks or months. Perdue can use the soybeans to feed its chickens and then process the soybean oil to sell to the fast-food industry, which sees GM soybean oil as the future of fried food.

  “High oleic soy can help reduce lots of health problems, because if you don’t have high oleic oil, what you need to do is hydrogenate the oil to be suitable for frying and other cooking, and when you hydrogenate oils you end up with something that’s conducive to cardiovascular disease,” Paul Anderson from the Danforth Center told me. “High oleic doesn’t have the instability that requires hydrogenation. It’s very beneficial.”

  The Plenish beans have clearly been a boon for the Schmidts: they clear $263 per acre for these beans, compared with $124 for feed beans and just $62 for the beans they grow for direct human consumption, like the tofu market.

  In other words, GM seeds are good for the Schmidts. And because the grains they grow help form a significant block in the foundation of the country’s industrial food system, from its chicken nuggets to its french fries, the GM seeds are also good for the many food industries that use them. With GM products like the Plenish bean, fast food and processed food will be a bit less unhealthy. To those overseeing this industrial food system, this is a good thing.

  “We’ve had folks ask us, ‘Why didn’t the industry get started with a biotech product like this?’” Russ Sanders, the director of food and industry markets for Pioneer, has said. “We think it’s a great opportunity to help illustrate the positive aspects of biotech that go beyond farmer benefits.”

  Clearly, the companies that both provide the seeds and buy the beans from the Schmidts think the system is working. In the fall of 2014, DuPont Pioneer and Perdue AgriBusiness announced that Perdue would more than double—to about 50,000—the acreage contracted to Eastern Shore and Pennsylvania farmers for growing Plenish beans “with the intention of marketing the high oleic soybean oil by the food industry in 2015.” Nationwide, the United Soybean Board has set a goal of 18 million acres of high-oleic soybeans by 2023, which would make the beans the fourth largest crop in the United States, behind corn, conventional soybeans, and wheat.

  The move to expand Plenish beans in the Mid-Atlantic was hailed as “an important milestone for Pioneer in its efforts to bring product innovation to the food industry and complements solutions offered by DuPont Nutrition & Health to address the world’s challenges in food.”

  “We’re always looking for ways to bring new market opportunities to our grower customers,” a Perdue AgriBusiness vice president said. “By working with DuPont Pioneer on the production of Plenish high oleic soybeans on the Eastern Shore, we’re hoping to generate additional profit opportunities and long-term industry growth.”

  So here we are again: GMOs have always been pitched as “good” for farmers, and for farmers like the Schmidts, this is plainly true. They are also clearly good for the companies that make them. But are the foods these grains produce good for the rest of us? Processed foods fried in high-oleic-acid soybeans, after all, are still processed fried foods. Beyond this, are tens (or hundreds) of thousands of acres planted with these new seeds good for the environment?

  Jennie Schmidt can’t control the first question, but she can control the second. She has no interest in telling people what they should or should not eat. If the market demands Roma tomatoes, she will grow them. If the market demands high-oleic-acid soybeans, she will grow them. And she will do it in as sustainable a way as she can. And to her mind, GMOs help with this.

  Jennie and Hans first started using GM seeds in 1998, and like many GM farmers, they maintain that the crops—which are designed to withstand the herbicide glyphosate—have allowed them to dramatically reduce their use of harsher pesticides, like atrazine. “We’ve been farming with GMOs for seventeen years and have seen a real benefit,” Jennie told me. “A real reduction in the volume of pesticides for Roundup Ready crops. Using Bt corn has also eliminated a lot of insecticide use. We’re using softer chemicals and using less of them.”

  The Schmidts consider their farm synergistic, in that it uses techniques from all three forms of agriculture: organic, conventional, and biotech. Because they plant GM crops and use synthetic pesticides, the Schmidts farm cannot be certified as “organic.” The Schmidts still use some atrazine on their corn, to suppress weeds, and—given the forty-five inches of rain that falls during the growing season—they have to spray their vegetables with fungicides “just to deal with mold,” Jennie said.

  “There is no ‘one’ system that is ‘best,’” Jennie wrote. “There is no ‘one’ way of doing things that should be done carte blanche by every farmer, everywhere. There is no ‘cookie-cutter’ system that should be applied to every farm. What we farmers should be doing is maximizing the synergies of all best management practices that meld together the best for our soils while preserving our inputs and natural resources.”

  Jennie Schmidt speaks with honesty and precision about all parts of the growing process on The Foodie Farmer. She explains the difference between spraying and dousing, noting (right down to the ounces per acre) exactly what kind and how
much fungicide she and Hans apply to their fields. In one post, she showed her readers a photograph of a paper towel she laid down alongside a row of grapevines just before she drove by with her tractor-mounted sprayer. After passing over the towel with the sprayer, she snapped another photo. The towel is speckled, but far from drenched.

  “Because this is spraying and not dousing, I do not need to soak the paper towel,” she wrote. “The plants do not get ‘doused.’ There is no dripping off of chemical solution. They do not need to be soaked in herbicide to achieve good weed control. There is no saturation. There is no dousing.”

  This is precisely the kind of transparency that activists tried (in vain) to wring from the big companies on Kauai and Maui. The gamble for farmers like the Schmidts is that consumers will be willing to buy produce grown with chemicals—or with GMOs—as long as they trust that their farmer is both skilled and forthcoming about the work that goes into growing their food. For the Schmidts, this approach clearly seems to be working.

  Besides, Jennie told me, it’s not like the “natural” pesticides used by organic farmers are benign. The Schmidts have had as many as 100 acres of certified organic fields in the past, and even then (and even today) they still used “organic” fungicides like sulfur and copper sulfate that are, in the strictest sense, toxic.

  “The copper and sulfur we use on our grapes are ‘natural,’ but they are still very toxic,” Jennie told me, noting that nicotine, which tobacco plants generate to protect themselves from insects, is also a “natural” pesticide. “If ‘natural’ were safe, then smoking would be good for us,” she said. “I would love a GMO grape. Sulfur is not a fun product to work with.”