EPA imposed the restrictions a year ago and required the industry to do annual surveys of compliance. The crop makes its own pesticide. The corn, known as Bt, contains a gene from a soil bacterium that makes the plant toxic to a moth larva. While the insects naturally develop resistance to the toxin as they are exposed to it, the trait won't be passed onto successive generations if they mate with moths that are susceptible to the poison. The requirements for farmers to plant conventional corn near Bt fields are designed to ensure that there are plenty of those nonresistant moths around.
Farmers receive brochures explaining the rules when they buy the biotech seed.
Both the size and distance requirements for plantings of conventional corn are equally important to preventing insect resistance, he said. A critic of the biotech industry said the survey results were disappointing. It appears to me that if they only got a collective compliance on the order of 71 percent then there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Fred Yoder, an Ohio farmer and a leader on biotech issues for the National Corn Growers Association, disagreed with Mellon's assessment. Some 501 farmers were contacted by telephone for the survey, which was conducted by an independent research firm, Market Horizons of St. Louis.