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GMO Grass is Creeping Across Oregon

posted by martyb on Monday July 02 2018, @11:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-wait-until-the-Ents-get-loose dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

High Country News reports:

[...] Scotts got permission from the USDA to plant larger fields for seed production. Farmers sowed 80 acres of bentgrass in Canyon County, Idaho, and 420 acres in Jefferson County, Oregon, north of Bend. The Oregon Department of Agriculture picked the site - an irrigated island in the sagebrush sea - to keep the plant far from the Willamette Valley. There, on the western side of the mountains, farmers grow forage and turf grass for a $1 billion-a-year seed industry.

Then two windstorms swept through the eastern Oregon fields in August of 2013, scattering flea-sized seeds well beyond the designated control area. Roundup-resistant pollen fertilized conventional bentgrass plants as far as 13 miles away.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @05:05PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 02 2018, @05:05PM (#701462) Journal

    Clearly the copyright owners of this GMO

    GMO is not copyrighted. It is patented.

    with rounded corners!

    farmers should be in their rights to just pick it off the wild and replant it in their fields.

    There is a big problem with that. It is the same problem that everyone has been concerned about with GMO crops. If farmers could, with impunity, or even with punity, help the spread of GMO plant organisms, then the problem is accelerating! Faster.

    The problem is that GMO crops creep because they are better Darwinian competitors than natural plant organisms. Maybe just because of their resistance to insect pests they are more fit to survive. Or they are more immune to certain "illnesses" that spread through plant populations, which would also make them more fit for survival.

    Once only the GMO crops are left and the natural variants are extinct, our crops are all alike genetically. Once those "illnesses" or insect pests evolve to be successful at attacking the GMO crops, and they will, then the entire crop, planet wide, could be destroyed much more quickly than the natural variety of plants which had some diversity and thus natural resistance. The natural variety had survived for a very long, long, long time. GMO crops, probably not so much.

    Then we'll really be in trouble.

    But as long as it is profitable for Monsanto, then it's all alright.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 02 2018, @10:45PM

    by HiThere (866) on Monday July 02 2018, @10:45PM (#701610) Journal

    Actually, GMO plants are mainly spreading because the seed corporation (Monsanto == Bayer) gets more money from them, and they control the sale of plant seeds.

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