USDA quietly favors Monsanto again

[Tinker]

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011 ... m-philpott

[Demon of Undoing]

I'm afraid it is going to take a disaster like wiping out the African cassava to wake people up to this. Okay. More weight.

[skyhook77sfg]

YOGI THE BERRA'S DEJA VIEW




In the summer of 1968, when the nation was preoccupied with the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, and a divisive presidential election campaign, the first signs of trouble went almost unnoticed. Out in the heartland, on a few isolated seed farms in Illinois and Iowa, a mysterious disease was producing "ear rot" on corn plants. At the time, scientists thought the strange disease might be a combination of two familiar diseases called "yellow leaf blight" and "charcoal rot," but they were wrong. Yet only a tiny amount of hybrid corn seed was lost to the new disease that summer, so no alarms were sounded. Whatever it was, the new malady was probably a freak occurrence that would most likely die off over the winter. Diseases like that were one of the "normal" consequences of doing business with nature.

But in 1969, a few farmers and scientists noticed the same problem recurring in midwestern seed fields and hybrid corn test plots.. One account noted: "In the late summer and early fall of 1969, a few corn fields in southern Iowa began behaving erratically. Ears rotted inside husks. Stalks fell to the ground. Shortly, the same thing happened in isolated fields in Illinois and Indiana." This same scientist noticed that only certain hybrid corn varieties were susceptible to the disease. In Florida, too, a few seedsmen found that hybrid corn varieties growing there were particularly vulnerable. Yet there was no adequate scientific explanation for the new disease. Scientists knew it was a fungus, but they didn't know what kind or how it worked.

In 1970, the disease was first reported in February from southern Florida, near Belle Glade. Between May 5 and May 20, heavy infestations were cited in southern Alabama and Mississippi. By June 18, the disease covered the entire state of Florida, lower Alabama, and most of Mississippi. The lower third of Louisiana and coastal Texas were also infected.

Reproducing rapidly in the unusually warm and moist weather of 1970, its spores carried on the wind, the new disease began moving northward toward a full-scale invasion of America's vast corn empire. Later to be identified as "race T" of the fungus Helminthosporium maydis, it soon became known as the Southern Corn Leaf Blight. [Since reclassified as Bipolaris maydis.

The new fungus moved like wildfire through one corn field after another. In some cases it would wipe out an entire stand of corn in ten days. Moisture was a key factor; a thin film on leaves, stalks, or husks was all the organism needed to gain entry to the plant. Within twenty-four hours it would start making tan, spindle-shaped lesions about an inch long on plant leaves, and in advanced form would attack the stalk, ear shank, husk, kernels, and cob. In extreme infections, whole ears of corn would fall to the ground and crumble at the touch.

The fungus moved swiftly through Georgia, Alabama, and Kentucky, and by June its airborne spores were headed straight for the nation's Corn Belt, where 85 percent of all American corn is grown. By this time, however, unsuspecting Corn Belt farmers had already planted their crops and were largely unaware of the bitter harvest headed their way.

The fungus could begin reproducing within sixty hours of landing on a corn plant-yielding a new generation of its own kind every ten days-and its spores could survive temperatures of 20 degrees below zero and still germinate, which meant they could linger in fields and plant remnants through the winter. In some cases, the fungus could even penetrate corn seed, causing it to fail or produce blighted seedlings.

In its wake, the Southern Corn Leaf Blight left ravaged corn fields with withered plants, broken stalks, and malformed or completely rotten cobs covered with a grayish powder. When farmers harvested what they could, clouds of spores were thrown up into the air behind their combines, spreading the disease even farther.

In just four months-from May to September 1970—the disease had spread as far north as Minnesota and Wisconsin (it later entered Canada), and as far west as Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle. The nation's corn farmers were facing a full-blown crisis.What really panicked commodity traders and government officials was the blight's penetration of the Corn Belt; just three midwestern states-Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa-accounted for half the nation's total corn production.

At the beginning of the epidemic, there was no defense against the Southern Corn Leaf Blight because the new strain of fungus had found a "genetic window" that made its infestation rapid and wide spread. The genetic window in this case was a gene found in the cytoplasm, the watery material that surrounds the cell nucleus and makes up the bulk of most living cells. In terms of crop disease, that was a new twist.
Commenting on that discovery in 1971, pathologist A. L. Hooker noted that it was "most unusual" that the cytoplasm of corn plant cells played a major role in determining the disease reaction, since in almost all other diseases, genetic factors in the nucleus of the cell determined disease resistance or susceptibility. Because of this, explained Hooker, corn breeders and seedsmen had no reason to suspect that uniformity in the corn crop would pose any problem. But it did.

The cytoplasm found common in most hybrid corn at that time was called "Texas male-sterile cytoplasm," or "T-cytoplasm," after a Texas variety of corn in which it was discovered. For twenty years preceding the blight, T-cytoplasm was used by plant breeders and seed companies to simplify the process of hybrid corn seed production. Male-sterile cytoplasm produced tassels on corn plants that bore impotent pollen, which-in combination with a fertility-restoring gene in the hybrid cross-enabled scientists to crossbreed and pollinate large numbers of plants more easily. T-cytoplasm thus eliminated the time-consuming, labor-intensive, and economically expensive step of hand detasseling corn plants. It was a revolutionary invention in plant breeding. But what scientists didn't know then about T-cytoplasm was that it also carried a gene in the mitochondria (an organelle of the cell that produces chemical energy for the cell) which enabled the new strain of the corn blight fungus to do its damage.

T-cytoplasm was a man-made change in corn plants used to foster the quick and profitable production of high-yielding, hybrid corn seed. It was a change accomplished and advanced by science and commerce without full knowledge of the potential consequences. The new strain of corn blight fungus, Helminthosporium maydis, was a mutation perfectly keyed to a gene in that cytoplasm.

At least 80 percent of the hybrid corn in America in 1970 contained T-cytoplasm, which is why "race T" of Helminthosporium maydis laid waste to 15 percent of the nation's corn crop. "The USA in 1970 had 46 million acres of corn with Texas male sterile cytoplasm," wrote Iowa State University Pathologist J. Artie Browning in 1972. "Such an extensive, homogenous acreage of plants…is like a tinder-dry prairie waiting for a spark to ignite it. Race T was the spark...."


NEXT MAN MADE CATASTROPHE AWAITS THE SPARK

just like ma nature's punctuated equilibrium

mankinds progress has its ups and downs

trek up slow

down fast