Hippies versus GMO monster

Travelling for 3 weeks in Brazil as an organic farmer and still feeling at home? I believed this was possible by taking my grey wooly goats socks with me during the journey. The socks are a kind of a reward to the people that initiated the organic farming model in Holland as many conventional farmers named them ‘grey wooly goat sock farmers’. For me the socks have become a symbol for the basis of a what I call a ‘common sense’ farming model. They opened my eyes and let me rethink about the way we farm for the longer term.

By introducing myself as an organic farmer during the visits that we made to several farms and companies in Brazil, I observed that the people we met got confused. First I believed my English was not well received, but after trying it in Portuguese it become only worse. Only till we met Pedro I started to understand the reason why. Pedro is a farmer and precision farming technical specialist in the South of Brazil. He explained to me that I did not look and talk like an organic farmer, as in Brazil they are better known as Hippies! Small scale garden farming, some vegetables and tomatoes, but certainly no large scale farms.

Pedro explained that he is growing soy beans and corn, using both GM varieties and high tech equipment. The farm model is relative simple: in one season soybeans are grown in a rotation with corn. This rotation is only taking place since a few years after varieties becoming very susceptible to rust. Finically less interesting as soy beans have a higher financial yield. The soybean is made resistant by genetic modification to Roundup, so weeds can be controlled by spraying glyfosfate , and also expresses Cry1Ac protein from Bacillus thuringiensis.

So there we are…’hippie’ confronted with a ‘GMO monster’. The funny thing was that we were both surprised about the person (believe me…Pedro is a very serious and humorous person) and motivation of each other’s farm model. Pedro explained that by using the farm model he is using currently he has been able to develop his farm and is spraying about 70% less than his parents did. The same comment was made by Australian crop farmer Huge, which even sprayed 80% less chemicals in his cotton crop by using GM varieties. Pedro could hardly believe the size of our operation and how tidy and clean our fields looked. I explained that a wide and balanced crop rotation gives us the basics to keep soil and plants healthy and by using high technology precision farming we can prevent compaction of soils, have clean crops and stay efficient.

2 different parts of the world, backgrounds, climates and crops to grow..but both looking for the best farming practices within our own context. It is clear that we have that both in common. But what is right? Is GMO a monster…and is organic something for hippies only? Listing to Embrapa (research institute for farming in Brazil) GMO is a great tool, but is not a one solution only. Rust is becoming a major issue now and it does not look that there is coming a ‘technical’ solution for it. Also some GM resistance has already been broken. Clearly some serious concerns if a farming model is becoming too depend on these single tools. This beside maybe even a bigger concern over who controls the ownership over seed, seed prices and with that controls possibly the supply chain.

Organic farming for sure is possible in our colder climates in northern Europe with also having a wide market for crops that form the wide crop rotation we apply. But sweating a full season in a tropical climate might make it more difficult or even impossible to do what we do? The improvement on less use of chemicals in the current context of farming in Brazil seem to me some ‘common sense’ although I cannot oversee the longer term effects of the use of GMO. Clearly Pedro and myself are triggered to find out more about the subject and learn from each other. It almost seems to look like carnival at Copa Cobana…hippies dancing together with ‘GMO monsters’!