Let's grasp the GM nettle (From Essex County Standard)
Get involved: send your pictures, video, news and views by texting ECS to 80360, or email »
Let's grasp the GM nettle
2:13pm Friday 23rd September 2011 in Farming
With most harvesting now completed, the race is on to get the fields prepared for the planting of next year’s crops.
It is a hectic period of the year as hedges are trimmed, the ploughs or cultivators are hard at work and basic fertilisers are applied.
Whether plants are being grown organically or conventionally, in the garden or in the field, they need food.
Fertilisers are used to enhance general fertility and to replace chemical elements removed by previous crops.
Chalk is used to correct soil acidity, but the main food elements required are nitrogen, phosphate and potash.
Phosphate and potash are generally derived from rock deposits and, being fairly insoluble, they can be applied at this time of year and will last for two years or more.
With the world’s farmers trying desperately to increase production, fertiliser prices have rocketed and almost any industrial byproduct is now being sold as fertiliser.
Basic slag, bone meal, waste paper, sewage sludge, and even ash from power stations is being spread on fields at present.
Most of the nitrogen used today is “synthetic” or “artificial” ammonia. In this form, it has the great advantage that it can be spread accurately as granules or liquid and, to avoid leaching from the soil, it can be applied at exactly the time plants require it.
More traditional forms of nitrogen fertiliser are farmyard manure, or sewage sludge. Nitrogen is released much more slowly in this form, so it can be applied in the autumn and it improves overall fertility, but it is not so easy to apply and, of course, it smells, so it needs incorporating into the soil.
The most interesting source of nitrogen comes from plants themselves. Some 80 per cent of the air we breathe is nitrogen, but it is not available to plants until converted to nitrates or ammonia.
One group of plants, called legumes, has an extraordinary liaison with some bacteria which live in their roots and convert nitrogen from the air into nitrates.
Legumes, therefore, need no artificial nitrogen and when they are harvested and the roots return to the soil, its fertility is enhanced.
For centuries, farmers grew clover, peas and beans for this purpose.
This truly is a sustainable source of fertiliser and scientists now think that, by using GM technology, they can breed leguminous strains of grasses and cereals.
Surely it is time for the UK to set outdated prejudice aside and instigate proper GM crop trials.
Comments(2)
Roger Mainwood
says...
6:52am Sun 16 Oct 11
1) The idea of nitrogen fixing GM crops was first proposed over 30 years ago in the 1981 report by the US Office of Technology Assessment which first led to major investments in developing GM crops: http://www.fas.org/o
ta/reports/8115.pdf
2) Developing GM strains of grasses and cereals is still an active area of research but even enthusiasts for this approach think it will take more than 20 years' additional research to deliver nitrogen-fixing cereal crops. (See Table 1 in: http://www.sciencema
g.org/content/327/59
67/812.full written by members of the U.K. Government Office for Science’s Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures). The Royal Society, whilst supporting research in this area, has described it as a "high risk" approach (Report on: http://royalsociety.
org/WorkArea/Downloa
dAsset.aspx?id=42949
67942 ).
3) Legumes have evolved over millions of years so that Nitrogen fixing bacteria form nodules on their root systems, which convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrate, and it is this form that the plant roots can take up and use for growth. Thus GM wheat would have to work for the bacteria and the wheat. The problem is that the genetic changes require several genes to be changed and then to work in harmony with the rest of the plant’s genes. This makes them far more complex than the single gene changes used to achieve, for example, herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Nitrogen fixing is very complex because it involves making the plant and the N-fixing bacterium work in harmony as they do in legumes. Major changes like these could impact on more than one biochemical pathways and can produce unexpected outcomes in the plant.
Roger Mainwood says...
6:19am Sun 16 Oct 11
This is a reference to nitrogen fixing cereals and is actually an old chestnut for GM scientists going back 30 years (1). It has proved extremely difficult to advance, and even the Royal Society have stated that trying to get GM nitrogen fixing cereals to work is “high risk” and therefore unlikely to be undertaken by commercial companies unless they are heavily subsidised by the public purse.(2)
Peter Fairs implies that GM crop trials are being blocked by "outdated prejudice". But there is no blanket ban on GM crop trials in the UK. The reason that no trials of GM nitrogen-fixing cereals are happening is because no such crops exist to trial!
The idea that they will one day be developed has been used as a PR message by the GM industry for over thirty years, because they want farmers to believe in future benefits rather than to know about the real problems with current GM crops in use today. US farmers are already struggling to deal with herbicide-tolerant superweeds which are spreading across their land due to large-scale sprayings with weed killer associated with GM herbicide-tolerant crops. Yields are going down and the GM companies have been hiking up the prices of their seed, leaving farmers locked into a system that is unsustainable.
What is wrong with using leguminous crops (clover, peas, beans) in rotation with cereals? (3) This has been used and advocated by many in and outside the organic movement for years. Under sowing wheat and barley with clover has also been practiced and produced benefit. These techniques are available to us now, we don't need to hang on for another 30 years, soaking up public funds on a technology whose benefits are proving elusive.