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Round Up Ready means the sugar beet plants are resistant to Round Up.  These fields can be sprayed with Round Up and it will kill weeds without damaging the sugar beet crop. 

Crops have been modified for specific traits for thousands of years.  Before the ability to modify crops at the cellular level, crops were modified by many different methods which could take years to decades to develop.  Plants were grown and seeds from the individual plants with the best trait, be it color, insect resistance, drought tolerance, most fruit production or whatever would be singled out and cross pollinated with other plants with the same or other desirable traits.  The seeds from these plants were collected, grown into plants and the process of determining the plants with the best traits was repeated.  It can take many generations to produce the desired results.  This is a slow process.

Basically, modifying crops genetically is finding the genes which give a plant a specific trait.  Once these genes are isolated, they are put into plant cells.  The plants which are produced from this and have the desired trait are used to develop more plants with the specific trait. Only after the trait is found to be stable and after much testing and scrutiny is the crop placed into production.

It is not as scary a process as some make it out to be.  Many crops we regularly consume are genetically modified such as corn and soybean grown throughout the Mid West and Southern United States.

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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