Saturday, July 5, 2014

industrial beans and suicide genes

http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx... "monsanto has never commercialized a bio-tech that resulted in sterile- or "terminator"-seeds."___________________________________________________________________________________________________the operant word here near as i can tell is "commercialized"...just because they haven't sold it...yet...doesn't mean it does not exist...and monsanto does require a "grower's ( no one is a "farmer" anymore...that word would be an index of a connection to the land and its soil rather than a connection to a bio-tech/chemical company ) license which basically means you license the seed ( read "intellectual property" not anything realistically natural ) to grow a single crop which will be harvested and sold...no seed saving...no seed replicating...that's the theory...the industrial corn behind the big box stores may be a bit behind but the beans next tot he supermarket are coming along on schedule this post-holiday saturday...all green ad leafy...there are a lot of "weeds" down the rows here...again there may be some municipal ordinance limiting atrazine use...and i spent a few minutes looking around for evidence that monsanto isn't lying and that there will be "volunteers" from the corn crop that grew here last season...there are certainly grasses sprouting between the rows...some is just crabgrass and i imagine there will be foxtail too..but there are a few out there that look enough like zea mays to warrant observation over the season...it will show its true colors soon enough if ti is dense yellow #2...my hope is that monsanto isn't lying and that there will be corn among the beans...if it's anything like what i have seen before there is no suicide gene...but the plants will still be non-productive mutants without cobs and degenerate husks that look more like the leaves they are than a specialized structure...i will be wading into this field more as the season goes on...fortunately it is next to he supermarket so errands will leave me in fairly close contact with the mutants.

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