You’re making an extremely one-sided claim, and you’re not providing any facts to back it up. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I think it’s worth noting that the U.N. Environment Program, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization would directly and consistently disagree with you:

“Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and can raise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriate technologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different causal factors simultaneously … Organic and near-organic agricultural methods and technologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce high-quality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress.”

– “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa,” U.N. Environment Program and U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, 2008

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project led by 400 scientists and development experts (organized by the World Bank, World Health Organization, and United Nations) concluded that organic farming techniques are just as important in solving the world’s hunger crisis as conventional techniques. The IAASTD was so unenthusiastic about G.M. seeds that Croplife International (a trade group for the biotech industry) angrily pulled its support just before the study was published, as did the U.S. government (hm… lobbying? Monsanto does a lot of that).

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) pointed out in 2008 that “ecological agriculture” (A.K.A. organic and local farming) could “assist farmers in adapting to climate change” by making farm fields more resilient to stress. In the same year, the FAO listed a variety of reasons eco-agriculture hasn’t caught on yet:

“[L]ack of policy support at local, national, regional and international levels, resource and capacity constraints, and a lack of awareness and inadequate information, training and research on ecological agriculture at all levels.”

I’m not saying conventional agriculture is evil or that it should be outlawed. What I am saying is that the industry-propagated idea that only industrial agriculture can feed the world can be easily debunked:

http://www.grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-03-10-debunking-myth-that-only-industrial-agriculture-can-feed-world

What you’re saying is very informative, but how does it relate to the lawsuit I’m talking about? Or are you responding in a more general sense to the anti-Monsanto tone of my post?

Now you’ll find a lot of naysayers in the all-natural food and environmentalist movements. There’s all kinds of places online where you can find people making all sorts of horrible predictions about GMO crops and super weeds and bugs, etc. I happen to find it’s often the case that environmental activists often refuse or do not want to see the benefit of a new technology.

They will tell you that the “industrial” type of row crop farming that I do consumes more resources that it produces, when the fact is we are producing more all the time with less inputs thanks to technologies like the Bt toxin.

Here’s what Monsanto has to say about Bt:

“The Bt proteins in our corn are considered an environmentally-friendly way to control insects, because they are toxic only to a few specific types of insect pest. The Bt proteins and the bacterium that produces them are found naturally in soil. In fact, Bt proteins are used by organic growers to control these same insect pests; Bt proteins are the active ingredient in Dipel, the bio-insecticide most widely used by organic growers.”

Wait a minute. Organic farmers use Bt too? Why yes they do. I believe there is a common misconception by some of the non-farm population that a farm like mine hoses down everything with chemicals and that organic farms don’t use any pesticides. Neither of those is true. Keep this in mind while you are reading. I DO NOT take issue with organic farming. I only take issue with those who make false claims about what I do to make a living.

I don’t grow any sweet corn, but I do grow corn with the Bt trait so this new product is of interest to me. How can this new product be good for the environment? It allows the farmer to make less passes across the field for one thing. The need to treat for pests is greatly reduced meaning a farmer doesn’t have to make another trip across a field in a sprayer for application of insecticide. That’s less insecticide applied, less fuel for the sprayer, fewer hours on the sprayer slowing its rate of depreciation, less compaction in the field and so on.

You might wonder about those super bugs I mentioned earlier. Stands to reason if we go after all the pests with Bt, eventually resistance will build up. I covered that in Genetic Refugees. Now it is true that there are reports of some insects showing resistance, but one of the reasons may be that not all farmers are doing their part planting refuge acres. They should be. They are doing themselves and the rest of us a disservice by choosing not to plant a refuge. There are already rumblings of regulatory changes in this area. Farmers may need to show what seed they have purchased in order to show they purchased refuge varieties as well. I’m not a big fan of more government intervention, but I think this kind of thing is what government is for. Seed companies are at the forefront on this issue as well since they are beginning to provide refuge in a bag. That’s where up to 95% of the corn in a bag of seed is a traited variety and the remainder is a refuge. A simpler process than having two different bags. Although that’s not hard to figure out either. We do it all the time.

The biggest news to me on the Monsanto blog post wasn’t that they now have GMO sweet corn, but how much less insecticide could potentially be applied to sweet corn acreage with this new hybrid.

“Sweet corn makes up less than one percent of total corn acreage in the United States (field corn and sweet corn), yet accounts for 40% of all corn insecticide treatments. Our sweet corn allows farmers to reduce insecticide use by up to 85 percent while still providing fresh, tasty ears of the product.”

Seems to me that kind of puts a dent in the “Big Ag” companies only genetically modifying seeds to sell more chemicals. How about them apples? Let me know what you think in the comments.