CORVALLIS, Ore. - There was not much common ground among farmers during a recent USDA public meeting about genetically engineered sugar beets.
Critics railed against the possibility of unrestricted cultivation of the crop while proponents emphasized its environmental and economic benefits.
Farmers who grow the transgenic crop, which can withstand glyphosate herbicides, stressed how much it simplified weed control and improved efficiency.
Kerry Bowen, an Idaho farmer, said that before Roundup Ready sugar beets were introduced, he had to use six chemicals to discourage weeds in the crop.
"I called it chemotherapy because I'd bring my crop to the brink of death then revive it," he said.
Bowen and other sugar beet growers urged the USDA to allow them to grow the biotech crop without restriction, as they had before August 2010, when a federal judge overturned the agency's previous approval of the crop.
The USDA has continued to allow the crop to be grown on a restricted basis and has identified full deregulation as the preferred alternative in a court-ordered environmental study released last month.
Organic farmers who fear that biotech sugar beets will cross-pollinate and contaminate related plants, like Swiss chard and table beets, opposed unrestricted commercialization of the crop.
"If the accident happens, it can't be turned around," said Katy Stokes, a small farmer in Benton County, Ore.
Sarah Kleeger, a vegetable seed producer near Sweet Home, Ore., said the current partial deregulation restrictions are not being enforced.
Biotech sugar beets are already a plant pest for her operation, which leases land where the crop was likely grown previously, she said. "We have discovered hybrids of sugar beet volunteers."
Frank Morton, an organic seed grower near Philomath, Ore., said the isolation distances between biotech sugar beets and compatible crops would not be sufficient to prevent cross-pollination.
"We are not being protected," he said.
Morton rejected the idea of allowable "tolerances" of biotech contamination in organic crops.
"We don't want (genetically modified organisms) in our seed and our customers don't want it in their seed," said Morton, a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the original deregulation.
Opponents of biotech sugar beets pointed out that similar concerns about canola cross-pollinating other seed crops has prevented it from being freely grown in Oregon's Willamette Valley - a major seed production area.
Supporters of biotech sugar beet deregulation said they grow the crop under contractual conditions set by the Monsanto Co., which developed the technology. The conditions are designed to prevent cross-pollination.
"Sometimes our fear of the unknown is our biggest problem," said John Perdue, who farms 700 acres in the Willamette Valley and said he has successfully prevented contamination between sugar beets and table beets.
"We raise sugar beets on the same farm as we raise table beets," he said. "We've raised sugar beets all these years and never had cross-pollination problems."
Carol Mallory-Smith, a weed science professor at Oregon State University, said coexistence between sugar beets and other crops is possible but "gene movement will occur at some point."
She also said that cultivation of glyphosate-resistant sugar beets will create "tremendous selection pressure" that favors the development of weeds that can also tolerate the chemical.
The phenomenon is already happening with Roundup Ready cotton and soybeans, Mallory-Smith said. "Glyphosate-resistant weeds are an ongoing and increasing production problem."
Farmers on both sides of the issue should come up with an agreed-upon level of inadvertent presence of biotech genes in nontransgenic crops, she said.
The expectation of a zero threshold - the complete absence of biotech genes in conventional and organic crops - isn't realistic to attain or to verify, Mallory-Smith later told the Capital Press.
"The decision can't be based on emotion," she said. "There will be no solution until both sides are willing to compromise."
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