i was born and raised on the farm that i live on today and i officially started farming in one nine hundred seventy nine but i fell off the horse the first time when i was three years old and i was milking cows and it was fo take over the operation from him and he passed away a month after my wife and i got married and then came along the farm crisis of the eighty's some of you may have heard of that hundred i started using what was known at that time as alternative farming methods on our family farmer today we refer to it as one of the references is biological crop the good lord has given us an amazing creation to work with and when we in our very limited capacity in understanding understand part of it it's kind of like looking through a door with  very open just a little bit in your way far away from it and it's a small light and as you get closer it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and as your peer in through there it just it turns into such a vast discovery let's not stop and it's fun you get something new every day we use started in eighty nine we were fully implemented one thousand nine hundred ninety one ninety two i decided to start sharing this information and products with other farmers that were interested that's when i began the crop nutrition advisory work that i continue to do to this day and i can tell you i've been blessed in so many ways that cat conan to work with family farmers all across our country and the work that we have done in crop and livestock production focusing on alternative methods to do everything we can to get away from toxins and away from dependence on antibiotics and a lot of what we learned and what we saw caused us to pay closer and closer and closer attention w four we heard about the promise of genetically modified organism crops and i referred to it both as g m o genetically modified organism or genetic engineering it's basically wanted the same thing the promise was a tremendous draw and i started studying what i could find about it online and through different mechanisms and so a little bit too good to be true soon as we could research it on our farm we started to research it and put it to the test and that's what i'm going to share with you today the things that we have seen at the farm level hopefully you'll have a basic understanding of how it is supposed designed and how it's working to this point in time and the thing that really brought it all together was when the good lord saw fit to connect me with all of the scientists or most all of them i have had the privilege in the tremendous pleasure of working with the majority of these in some capacity there's a couple that only reference their work which is done cohesively with some other members on this team everyone on this list believes in the potential of the technology of genetic engineering the potential will be tremendous when the technology is refined and perfected and implemented with the desired goals that are stated by those who purportedly and that'll make more sense to you by the end of the presentation some examples of a g m o one of the first examples of genetic engineering to enter the food supply in the united states was known as mimics a natural hormone that is naturally present in the cow so they can't differentiate as to whether it not it was actually in the male and yet the natural hormone didn't come with the side effects that this one did the united states is the only country in the world that really allowed the use of this product i remember when they did the safety testing on it in canada the first thing they required was the safety testing on the cows themselves and the safety testing verified the fact that when the cows were injected with this they had increased infection in their they had problems with their the health of their feet and they didn't breed back well the conception rates were down they had to take them off of the hormone in order to get the conception because it was messing with the natural processes there were a number of independent scientists that also voiced a concern that said this could be detrimental for women because of the potential changes levels that could be in the milk as a result of this tinkering that was being done there was never a full safety test conducted on that but i can tell you that because of the concerns of the consumer in our country the vast majority of the fluid mail to date comes from cows that do not receive this any longer not still in the system there are ice cream products and cheese and butter and dairy products that are in the system that come from cows that have been injected with this and from the dairy farmer standpoint it's a benefit to him when those collars produce more mellow course they had to deal with the side effects i mentioned but the farmers are always challenged with the break even or making money so in the short cut that might be presented looks like a positive is a natural occurring soil bacteria are the natural version of bt organic farmers have used for many many years they could spread on their crop when they had an infestation of certain past the corn or would ingest this bt toxin this toxin eats a hole in their gut and they die the toxin then returns to the soil in a but nine manner jacked it into the plant so it's expressed in every cell of that plant it's not like a pesticide that is sprayed on that can we washed off it is in every single cell the plant another example of this in plant insecticide is known as c r w it was specifically diet designed to help control cord or there are further versions of the bt and the c r w for differing insects that continue to come up as a problem in crop production as the insects are adapting to these unnatural alterations in the crop herbicide tolerance is the number one most widely adapted for of genetically engineered crop use in the world the herbicide tolerant means they can insert a tree or a characteristic into this crop now we can spray a herbicide on there for example a good life of say based herbicide life is say is the active chemical ingredient in roundup purpose say the most widely used oversight in the world by having that herbicide tolerance in that plant that enables them to spray that crop with this herbicide that's designed to kill everything it touches the crop survives and the weeds are grow so to the farmer it was a tremendous drawing card it looked like a simplistic easy fast simple way to go we sick resistant so i've been scorned canola sugar beets and if alpha in production in the united states today there's also something known as liberty link corn the liberty link corn has a different active ingredient that life state it's blue fascinate it's the chemistry slightly different and the but the approach of the herbicide is the saying that it's designed to kill everything it touches with the exception of the genetically engineered crops that's decent to a standard the goals of genetic engineering the number one goal that we've been told is to increase the ills of the crop to feed the world's growing population i doubt that anybody would argue with that as being a novel goal another goal that we have been told is we're going to improve the nutrient content of the crop so that we can hopefully solve some of the illness issues and in the case of the improved nutrient content the poster child of this has been the golden rice well that's been talked about from day one it still is not developed in finalized and in production the golden rice the objective was to increase the vitamin a content of that crop and that by doing so then this would enable us to introduce that rice to the poor countries where rice is a staple crop and as a result this should help subside some of the blindness in the poor children well there's two things three things actually on the golden rice that we have to analyze a little bit from this perspective number one they did slightly increase the vitamin a content in the rights but you need to consume twenty to twenty five pounds of rice per day in order to get the vitamin a level that they're purporting that this is going to solve the problem the golden rice has not performed economically it does not compare with the conventional varieties that the farmers are currently using so it's not going to have an appeal for them to want to use the other thing that's happening the mothers in the third world country of these children do not want anything to do with it because they have not conducted transparent safety testing on whether or not it would have an adverse effect to the children and i guess i can't blame them for not wanting their children to be used as guinea pigs they're  also told we will have drought tolerance with genetic engineering the implant insect protection with the b t n c r w the goal of that is to reduce insecticide use and i don't think anybody would argue with that approach the herbicide tolerant so the goal of that is to reduce herbicide use improve weight control as i mention this absolutely happened in the beginning so let's review some of what has taken place as far as increase deal in the very early years of the introduction of the genetically engineered crops our land grant universities had access to the seed they could have the conventional variety and the genetically engineered variety to put into test plots and do comparisons and then today they don't have that capability because of the restrictive language on the technology agreements by the company that owns the patent on that seed the researchers cannot access it without express written consent we know of more than one instance where the research has not come out advantageous towards a genetically engineered crop and the researchers are not allowed to release that data but in the early days when it was allowed to compare there was something known come to be known as yield drag the university under nebraska had multi year testing to document this the conventional soybean was traditionally yielding more than the genetically engineered it was an eight to ten percent yield direct the union of concerned scientists in two thousand and nine studied all of the data that they could access that was can ducted at the research level in their early years and they put out a report entitled failure to yield they documented the fact that as much as ninety three percent of the time the genetically engineering would yield last sometimes it was the same in one or two percent they would see increases any genetically engineered seed and we put this into a plot side by side with its very fine grit you probably can't see it from the back but i'll explain the important parts of the conventional was one forty nine and the bt was one forty six so it was three bushels last but the biggest difference that year was the more secure difference the harvest noise of the bt was five percentage points whether as a result that cost us money you have to take a dock on that moisture when you sell that grain and it cost us twenty five cents a bushel so the end result was we lost fifty seven dollars and ninety nine cents an acre as a result of using that bt we also did another little experiment with that coronet first year we had heard from the early use of bt in nebraska that the cattle shied away from the b stocks in the bt core so we took some of the conventional corn and some of the bt and put it into opposite ends of the feed bucket we've turned a couple cows in there they consumed all of the conventional core and they smelled the b and walked away from it that's not normal for a cow the following year we repeated this test plot we got the seed again from the seed company we had the conventional and the bt again ten well back in those days corn was only a dollar and eighty cents a bushel so all that calculated into a fifty eight dollars ninety five cent per acre loss this was one of our old reliable favorite hybrids it was really bred well the plant breeders did a super job of dotting their i's and crossing their t s if you do a good all around job of developing a hybrid it will have a natural past tolerance in it in a big way this hybrid had natural resistance and tolerance to corn more and the bt didn't pay the seed company had other hybrids who some of my customers referred to as corn magnets and it kind of made you water did the plant breeder dot the last guy in the last three forties or did it take a short cut if they put the bt into that type of hybrid they would see a ten or fifteen maybe even twenty bushel yield increase depending on the year and the amount of pressure you had from the insects if they had a shorter path to take to get it to market and a little higher priced seed which improves their margin which one do you think they may be promot as i said life estate taler crops are the number one used herbicide tolerant crops in the world roundup herbicide was the only option for this in the beginning one nine hundred seventy four was when roundup was introduced and patented as a herbicide in one nine hundred ninety four that patent wore off so they have twenty years protection once that happened then there are all sorts of generic versions that came into being if they were tailing they would make a simple tillage past prior to planting plant the crop the crop came up they sprayed the crop in the weeds in the weeds all died and life was good herbicide was cheaper in the beginning by two thousand and ten with continued use of this same herbicide the weeds were becoming harder and harder to kill in one thousand nine hundred six i knew of farmers in west central ohio that were applying ninety six ounces of a glyphosate based herbicide in a single application and would put two to three of those applications on some soybean fields to try and control weeds that they were not able to kill dr charles bedrock from your state did a study he looked at the records and he looked at all of the past aside use in our country before the introduction of genetically engineered crops up to three two and through that thirteenth year over that thirteen year time period there were overall in the country there was a quarter pound per acre increase in overall pesticide use but in the thirteenth year he  conventional crop and the genetically engineered version and there was a twenty six percent increase between the two in that year because as we went forward the need for more pesticide continued to increase he did a sixteen year that looked at from start to finish and that saw gave us a seven percent increase of total pesticides in the country in argentina they introduced the guy for say resistant soybeans in one thousand nine hundred six they were using two leaders perfecter by two thousand and ten they were up to as high as twenty leaders perfecter because they could not control the wheat the insecticide use before genetically engineered crops were in or ghost there was no such thing as an insecticide treatment on corn and soybean see the soybeans came as we would know as naked seed today with no treatment on it the corn had just a mild fungus a treatment on today it is just about impossible to get a genetically engineer seed in corn or soybeans without a ne a three to form of time period is at risk neal nikka to noise have been banned in several of the european union countries because of the direct scientific proof that they are contributing what about the problem insects that we were going to control this is a picture of a corn play out you see the leaves in the stock here's the emerging ear but there is no sill coming out the top of we all know the chicken came before the egg so that's why start with this one the larva will be in the soil or the egg will be in the soil when the soil warms up enough the egg hatch and chews on the roots of that core and as you can see this corn is not standing up the reason it's not standing up is because it has no root system that root or larva have chewed off the roots and the corn is suffering dramatically when the after they go through their stages the larva they had vanished to the adult beetle they go through a cocoon state they come out as the adult beetle if they chew all the silk off then it can't catch the pollen with no pollen all you get is a cob there's no grain to harvest there are sea r w resistant that's the term for the  plant genetically engineered insecticide there are c r w resistant root worm in iowa nebraska south dakota minnesota and illinois there was just another article in reuters published the twenty eighth of august further documenting how widespread this is become in illinois the farmer the corn is literally severely damaged as a result of these brought up insects in our part of iowa a lot of the farmers have recognized that this trait is failing so they have gone back to applying the in furrow insecticide when they plant the crop and in many cases they're applying higher rates than what we ever did before because of the resilience of  collect on every single bag of genetically engineered seed that a farmer purchases to raise a crop he pays that that royalty on every bag of seed every year in the beginning i showed you the b t and that difference was approximately ten dollars per acre that changed by two thousand and ten and it had escalated to quite a level and it hasn't slowed down tremendously since then but in two thousand and ten i thought i'm going to sit down and figure this up i presume did you notice i said presumed not assume i presumed that all of the acres in the us would be planted to the latest and greatest technology seed for corn soybeans cotton canola and sugar beets and i figured those tech fees based on the planting rate given crops now the planting rate was in the eighty to ninety percent tile range so my numbers are going to be a little bit high but i again to have consistency i wasn't going to guess at the planting rate i just said what if we planted one hundred percent that year in corn we had eighty seven point nine million acres of corn the technology fee or the royalty per bag of corn amount sixteen dollars per acre the seed cost was only forty dollars per year so figuring that at eighty seven point nine million acres that generated one hundred percent of the years again being planted five million two hundred  seventy four million dollars check fee soybeans we had seventy eight point nine million acres the tech three rate was twenty four dollars per acre that was just under one point nine billion dollars tech feet cotton we only had ten point nine million acres in the tech three was seventy eight dollars an acre so that added eight hundred fifty million