Monsanto and our food supply

Battle over beets

Organic seed producer Frank Morton has been warning people for years that genetically modified organisms pose a serious threat to the Willamette Valley’s vegetable seed industry.


Now he thinks his worst GMO nightmare may be coming true.


Roundup Ready sugarbeets — a patented variety engineered by Monsanto to tolerate the company’s widely used Roundup herbicide — have turned up in a soil mixture being sold to gardeners at a Corvallis landscaping supply business just a few miles from Morton’s fields.


He fears some of those roots may now be sprouting in area gardens. If so, they could soon start to bolt, sending out clouds of pollen that could fertilize his crop of golden chard — a closely related plant — and render it worthless for the organic seed market. It would also negate years of breeding that went into producing an especially cold-hardy line.


Worse still, Morton says, the GMO sugarbeets could cross-pollinate the fields of other chard growers in the area who supply seed to major bagged-salad distributors in California, potentially introducing genetically modified chard into the food system without the approval of federal regulators.

Do you really want to eat a vegetable that has a link to a chemical lab? Do we really need to promote the use of Roundup? Be aware of where your food comes from. Be aware of the source of your seeds.

Thanks to Little Homestead in the City for bringing this article to light.