Farmers disagree on impact of GMOs

There was a celebration on the Statehouse steps in May when Gov. Peter Shumlin signed a bill into law that made Vermont the first state to require labeling of genetically modified foods.

There was music, people were smiling, and Ben & Jerry's Chief Executive Officer Jostein Solheim handed out free ice cream to the crowd of about 300 people. Ben & Jerry's is in the process of going completely GMO-free.

One of the celebrants that day was Sen. David Zuckerman, P/D-Chittenden, lead sponsor of the GMO labeling bill. Zuckerman, an organic farmer by trade, first introduced GMO legislation as a representative in 1999, to ascertain from the University of Vermont how much money the school was receiving to research GMOs. In 2003, Zuckerman was the lead sponsor of a series of bills on GMOs, one of which required labeling. Now, after 11 years, full disclosure had won the day, in Zuckerman's view.

Real progress, big questions after GMO law

Shumlin signs GMO bill into law

"As individuals, do you wish to be part of this experiment, when we've had so many experiments in the past lead to not such good results?" Zuckerman said on his farm last week. "While questions exist, I firmly believe we should have the labeling."

But not everyone was in a celebratory mood after the gathering on the Statehouse steps that day in May. The Grocery Manufacturers Association gave notice that it would file suit in federal court against the state of Vermont to overturn the law. And at the Green Mountain Dairy in Sheldon, Bill Rowell was wondering why no one was speaking up for GMOs.

After all, he thought, genetically modified seeds had done great things for the large farming operation he owns and operates with his brother, Brian. There are only 17 large farming operations in Vermont, out of about 950 total dairy farms.

The Rowells milk nearly 1,000 cows, producing 25 million pounds of milk annually, and grow corn on 1,000 acres and hay on 500 acres for their 1,800 animals, including replacement heifers. The brothers began using GMO seed for their corn and hay fields in about 1996, when the seeds first became available.

"We see a greater yield, and the yield is drought-tolerant," Rowell said. "Two years ago, most of the country was under drought. We didn't see a complete failure because the seed was drought-tolerant."

Then you have a year when disease is a problem, Rowell said, and the GMO seeds are also disease-resistant.

"The fact that they additionally use less pesticide or less herbicide to grow a crop means you end up using less fuel and less labor," Rowell said. "I would think the community that appears to be opposed to GMO seeds has some other reasons, because it's doing a lot of things environmentally they should be championing."

Rowell said he thinks opponents of GMOs are basing their opinions on sentiment rather than science, which remains inconclusive on any detrimental health effects from GMOs after nearly 20 years of use. Rowell believes that with an estimated 3 trillion meals eaten without documented harm, the scientific verdict is essentially in — GMOs are no different than conventional crops when it comes to human health.

"You can't base your society to a large extent on science and then ignore it when it doesn't suit you," Rowell said. "What I'm trying to look at is, how do we do this in a straightforward, scientific manner, so we promote the human species for the least cost possible, and the least cost to the environment.

"If you simply rule by sentiment and then find you're taking a big step backwards, that didn't get us anywhere, but we were all warm and fuzzy doing it."

Sticking to the precautionary principle

The terrain around Green Mountain Dairy is wide open and relatively flat, with big fields and silos dotting a landscape reminiscent of farming country in the Midwest.

The wind blows more or less constantly at Rowell's farm, which is why he oriented his milking barns to take advantage of the breeze to strip the heat from the barns. The "overshot" roof includes an opening just below the peak where heat can escape.

"Lactating cows produce an incredible amount of heat," Rowell says. "They're racehorses."

About 50 miles south of Green Mountain Dairy, in terrain more evocative of the green and mountainous Vermont depicted on postcards, David Zuckerman and his wife, Rachel Nevitt, run Full Moon Farm in Hinesburg, an organic vegetable farm with pigs and chickens.

The couple grows about 30 acres of vegetables on their 150 acres, which includes a wood lot and open land poorly suited to agriculture. Their chickens live in "tractors" — metal boxes that allow the chickens to move around in the pasture but keep them more tender than free-range chickens tend to be.

"I would point you to 10 or 20 customers who say we have the tenderest chicken around," Zuckerman said.

Zuckerman served 14 years in the House before running for the Senate and winning in 2012. With his two-year term up, he plans to run for re-election to the Senate in the fall.

"I know David; he's a good guy," Rowell said. "He sees it different. I'm not going to say he's wrong, and I'm right. I'm going to say, 'I don't know how we do this if we don't pay attention to science.'"

Zuckerman agrees there is no scientific evidence proving GMOs are harmful to human health — but neither is there evidence proving they're safe, he said. The fact is that unbiased studies have yet to be undertaken and will require many years of research once they are begun, he added.

But Zuckerman pointed out that 64 countries, including Japan, China, Australia and the nations of Europe, require GMO labeling.

"Most of these countries work under what's called the precautionary principle," Zuckerman said. "You go slowly with these new advancements and technologies. You don't do them and then find out the problem later. Our country has been very much the opposite way. We put out all kinds of things then find out later: 'Whoops! Turns out that wasn't such a good idea.'"

Zuckerman also has concerns about GMOs that hit much closer to home — or farm. One of the few pesticides he can use as an organic farmer is a naturally occurring bacteria called bacillus thuringiensis, effective for certain moths and worms.

"As an organic farmer, I might judiciously spray areas that are bad, or once in a while spray the whole field," Zuckerman said.

Turns out, bacillus thuringiensis is one of the tools being utilized in GMO crops, and that has Zuckerman worried.

"When it's in a plant and there for the whole season at concentrations 500 to 1,000 times higher, then those bugs can become resistant," he said. "If three bugs live out of 500,000 in the field because they happen to be genetically resistant, they're going to find each other and breed. Eventually there will be a built-up resistance to that pesticide."

If that happens, Zuckerman said, he has few options.

"I have very few pesticides that kill those moths and worms," he said. "Non-organic farmers have a range of tools they can use. My concern is with tools that will eventually become obsolete."

Although it's not a concern for him right now, Zuckerman is also worried about contamination of non-GMO crops by GMO crops through cross-pollination carried on the wind.

"In Vermont that would be organic sweet corn being contaminated by pollen from cattle corn," Zuckerman said. "If nobody tested, nobody knows, but if someone does test, that farmer will not get the price for product they were expecting."

And unlike the bull that jumps a fence to "pollinate" a neighboring cow, Zuckerman said, where the owner of the bull is held responsible, if his fields are contaminated by GMOs from a neighboring field, it's his problem.

Show me the impact

Both Rowell and Zuckerman are meticulous farmers. In an entertaining parallel, Zuckerman interrupted an interview to pick two weeds he saw growing in his rows of chard, missed by his crew during transplantation. Rowell veered away from an interview to pick up a single piece of trash in the grass near his milking barn.

Green Mountain Dairy appears to have not a single blade of grass out of place in its large complex of five barns that measure 400-500 feet long apiece.

A massive, insulated tank, buried 16 feet in the ground, requiring 750 cubic yards of concrete, collects the manure produced on the farm every day to power a methane generator that cranks out 2 million kilowatts of power annually to the grid under Green Mountain Power's Cow Power program. That's enough juice for about 400 homes for a year.

Rowell and his brother spent $2.75 million on the methane project, which includes nearly $250,000 for 3.2 miles of power line. Any excess methane is automatically burned off, preventing greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.

This spring, Rowell invested in a drag line system to spread manure on his corn fields. The manure is essentially odorless after going through the methane digester.

"The system amounts to a big pump sucking out of the manure pit and a line out into the field as much as 2 miles long being dragged behind a tractor," Rowell said. "You can inject the manure into the ground so there's no runoff. We're trying all these things."

But one thing he refuses to try, Rowell said, is getting along without GMO seed, unless there's good reason to do it.

"If you can show me it has an impact on the human body, then I'm interested," Rowell said. "If you can show me these GMO crops interfere with the human endocrine system, your thyroid gland, or that it has something to do with disrupting homeostasis, we need to change. But science says we find nothing there that tells us that we should, so why should we?"

Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.