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My thoughts exactly. As an agricultural reporter for the major western agricultural weekly paper, he was terribly uninformed on the issue...from not knowing that sugar beets, table beets and chard are all the same species. And not knowing that Oregon has the nation's premier vegetable seed producing conditions. These are so fundamental in understanding this issue. 

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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Monsanto pressed very hard to get ALL the sugarbeet growers in the valley to grow GMO. They didn't really have a choice. Not all of them wanted to go this way.

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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The trouble is, those of us who want to grow our own organic crops in our gardens will soon have gmo cross contaminated seed ...much of the organic vegetable seed is grown here in the Willamette Valley. Monsanto's Round up Ready genes are narrowing the diversity of our choices and food supply.

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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I totally agree. As are other faculty members at OSU.

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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Last year in Tangent, Oregon, a GMO sugarbeet grower sold his topsoil, laden with growing sugarbeet seedlings, to a landscape supply company in Corvallis. This was sold as fertile mix; hundreds of cubic yards of soil with growing gmo sugarbeets were delivered in "fertile mix" all over the Willamette Valley. The sugarbeet industry was informed of this; denied responsibility for this, saying it wouldn't happen. 

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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Well explained!

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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Sugar beets, table beets and chard are all the same species...Beta vulgaris. They are wind pollinated. The pollen travels by wind. The Round Up Ready gene is in the pollen. The characteristic is dominant, I've been told by beet geneticists. If the pollen lands on an organic field of blooming beets or chard, the crop becomes GMO, contaminated by the gene. USDA approved these beets without any studies....they "rubber stamped" Monsanto's data, saying that the gene is safe, it wouldn't escape. 

posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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