When Monsanto announced its plans to introduce a new strain of herbicide-resistant soybean seeds and cotton seeds and a new type of herbicide to accompany them, the company promised that its next generation of products would give farmers better control of weeds, “especially tough-to-manage and glyphosate-resistant weeds,” or the so-called Superweeds resistant to Monsanto’s current Roundup herbicide.

Superweeds, likely caused by the heavy use of weed-killing herbicides, have created major headaches for farmers, but agriculture companies like Monsanto insist that spraying a different type of herbicide is the answer.

Monsanto’s next generation of seeds would be resistant not just to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s current Roundup weedkiller, but also the chemical dicamba, a potent ingredient to be used in the Roundup Ready 2 Xtend formula.

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“Dicamba is highly drift-prone,” meaning that Dicamba has a tendency to evaporate in the days or weeks following its application and travel to other crops, wrote Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with the Pesticide Action Network. When Dicamba drifts onto other plants, the results can be disastrous, she and others argued. “Dicamba is extremely toxic to virtually all broadleaf plants,” or plants that are not grasses, Ishii-Eiteman wrote online.

Happy New Year! As we begin the New Year, it’s a good time to look back on significant events related to non-GMO and organic in 2016.

1. The DARK Act becomes law. President Obama signed the controversial Senate Bill 764, aka the DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act. Instead of clear label statements, the law allows food companies to obscure their use of GMO ingredients by using complex QR codes.

2. Dannon goes non-GMO. The U.S.’s largest yogurt maker made a huge commitment to use non-GMO ingredients in its products, source non-GMO dairy feed, and improve sustainable agriculture for its dairy supply. A few months later, large California dairy producer Clover Stornetta announced a similar non-GMO commitment, and other dairy companies may follow suit.

3. Campbell’s commits to GMO labeling. The soup manufacturer announced it would label its products containing GMOs and support mandatory labeling. It was the first big company to label GMOs and led Mars, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and other big food companies to follow.

4. More Big Food companies go non-GMO. Along with Dannon, Del Monte, Nestlé, Hellmann’s, and others committed to using non-GMO ingredients.

ALBERT LEA, Minn. — Non-GMO and organic corn, soybean and alfalfa seed are getting a clear separation from traited seeds in the Albert Lea Seed business.

Earlier this fall, Albert Lea Seed announced its Viking Corn & Soybeans would become a 100 percent non-traited brand that develops and markets non-GMO and organic corn, soybean and alfalfa seed.

To serve customers who want traited seed, Albert Lea Seed has become a distributor and dealer for NorthStar Genetics traited corn and soybean seed.

“This means that Viking will no longer develop and sell traited seeds such as Roundup Ready soybeans or Genuity SmartStax corn,” said Mac Ehrhardt, who co-owns Albert Lea Seed with his brother, Tom. “Instead, Albert Lea Seed will be supplying them through NorthStar Genetics.”

For years, health advocates have urged the public to read the ingredients and ignore the marketing. For years, consumers have ignored the health advocates.

But lo! It looks as if they’re finally listening.

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But Nielsen also created a separate category with its own, narrower criteria. For that category, market researchers took a closer look at ingredients, store placement (is it in the “Natural” aisle?), and the rest of the brand. Anything USDA-certified organic, for example, was in; anything with genetically modified organisms or artificial or synthetic ingredients was out. The growth in that narrower category was nearly triple the growth in the broader one, at 11.2 percent.

Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf. Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.

CRISPR/Cas9 gene drive (CGD) promises a highly adaptable approach for spreading genetically engineered alleles throughout a species, even if those alleles impair reproductive success. CGD has been shown to be effective in laboratory crosses of insects, yet it remains unclear to what extent potential resistance mechanisms will affect the dynamics of this process in large natural populations. Here we develop a comprehensive population genetic framework for modeling CGD dynamics, which incorporates potential resistance mechanisms as well as random genetic drift. Using this framework, we calculate the probability that resistance against CGD evolves from standing genetic variation, de novo mutation of wildtype alleles, or cleavage-repair by nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) -- a likely byproduct of CGD itself. We show that resistance to standard CGD approaches should evolve almost inevitably in most natural populations, unless repair of CGD-induced cleavage via NHEJ can be effectively suppressed, or resistance costs are on par with those of the driver.

Citizens/environment will not be impacted by novel experiment releasing millions of GE mosquitoes

WASHINGTON— The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will not move forward with the controversial release of millions of genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes in the community of Key Haven in Monroe County, Florida. The release of the GE mosquitoes would have been the first-ever in the United States, but FDA failed to conduct adequate testing for potential impacts to people, threatened and endangered species, and the environment. During the November 2016 election, local citizens voted against the release of the insects.

A coalition of public interest groups – including Center for Food Safety (CFS), Friends of the Earth (FOE), Foundation Earth, the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, and Food & Water Watch – yesterday received a response to their 60-day notice of intent to sue FDA under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for failing to take into account impacts to federally listed species in a fast-tracked approval of the release of the GE mosquitoes.

Missouri’s largest peach producer has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto Co., alleging that the biotech company bears responsibility for illegal herbicide use suspected of causing widespread crop damage in southeast Missouri and neighboring states.

The suit filed Nov. 23 on behalf of Bill Bader, who operates Bader Farms near Campbell, Mo., seeks compensation for extensive damage to the farm’s peach trees suffered over the last two years — an interval which coincides with Monsanto’s release of crop varieties resistant to the herbicide dicamba.

Despite the Creve Coeur-based company’s rollout of dicamba-resistant Xtend crops in 2015, the corresponding herbicide was not approved for use until last month. Its absence meant that some farmers are suspected of using highly volatile, unauthorized forms of dicamba, prone to vaporizing and drifting to surrounding areas where nonresistant crops can be harmed.

The case was filed in Circuit Court of Dunklin County, an area of southeast Missouri’s Bootheel region where alleged dicamba damage has been especially pronounced. Many soybean farmers in the area have reported diminished yields due to suspected drift, and Bader thinks the same has happened to peaches and other crops around his farm.

An example of the benefit of gene drives is that they can be designed so that female mosquitoes express infertility eventually reducing the spread of mosquito-borne pathogens such as those that cause Zika, malaria, dengue, and yellow fever. However, this ability to rapidly alter wild populations could also be misused, which poses novel security risks for entomological warfare, agro-sabotage, and ecocide. The authors offer a case study of how scientists could use synthetic engineering to change the eye color of subsequent generations of mosquitoes.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Organic Standards Board voted unanimously on Friday to update U.S. organic standards to exclude ingredients derived from next generation genetic engineering and gene editing.

This recommendation to the US Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program will ensure that ingredients derived from new genetic engineering techniques, including synthetic biology, will not be allowed in the production or final product of foods and beverages that are certified organic. Synthetic biology is a new set of genetic engineering techniques that include using synthetic DNA to re-engineer organisms to produce substances they would not normally produce or to edit DNA so as to silence the expression of certain traits.

“The Board’s hard-fought proactive stance on synthetic biology will both help preserve the integrity of organic standards and raise awareness about this virtually unregulated and unlabeled form of genetic engineering,” said Dana Perls, food and technology policy campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “It’s critical that organic standards treat new types of genetic engineering that are rapidly entering our food and consumer products as rigorously as the first generation of GMOs.”