The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (48 page)

Then one day, several years into the job, he was called into a meeting. “The department chair was sitting there, and the associate dean, and three guys from Monsanto. I walked in and I thought,
Oh, shit.
Right away, first thing they say? All the land grants are going to put Roundup in their wheat. It was like
, You’re going to do this, too
—essentially change the way wheat has been bred for ten thousand years—
and isn’t that great?
”

Roundup is Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide, developed in the 1970s and used widely all over the world. At the time of the meeting, nearly all of Steve’s wheat farmers used Roundup on their fields before planting (today, to farm wheat conventionally, there’s really no choice), but the group was suggesting something momentous for wheat. They asked Steve to breed a genetic modification into his wheat seeds to make them resistant to Roundup. This would enable farmers to spray both their crops and surrounding cropland with the herbicide—killing the weeds without killing the crops. The logic is simple: eliminate weeds when they compete most with the wheat, and increase harvests.

Genetically modifying other grains to withstand a dousing of herbicide had already been done successfully with cotton, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. Even though GM wheat was not approved for commercial release, Monsanto and others were lobbying for its development. Steve heard that they were reaching out to university wheat breeders around the country, confidently predicting an imminent change in policy. But he was still surprised by the tone of the Monsanto representatives, who assumed that Steve would happily comply.

“They said:
We want you to put these genes in your wheat, and then we’ll commercialize them together.
They had the scientists; they didn’t have the
germplasm,” he told me, referring to the genetic information stored in a collection of seeds. “That was their problem.”

He added that private companies still rely on public genetics for their seeds. “So they needed university breeders with access to the gene pool. And they needed the trust we have with the growers. We’ve been breeding wheat at WSU since 1894. For a hundred years, we’ve developed that trust. So they needed me for that. And they figured I’d be a willing participant because they were offering royalties.”

At the time, paying public breeders a royalty for their seeds was a relatively new idea. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act made it legal. For the first time in the history of land grants, breeders entered into the business of commercializing their work rather than simply making their seeds available to farmers for free. As Steve described it, the Bayh-Dole Act amounted to a friendly takeover of public research, with the devastating, if unintended, consequence of tilting universities toward profit-making projects.
*

By the 1990s, private industry had surpassed the USDA in the
funding of agricultural research at land-grant institutions. And the spending gap continued to expand. In a little more than a century, the spirit of a regional food system encouraged by land-grant colleges was effectively turned on its head.

Steve had a more immediate—and, in many ways, more far-reaching—worry as he sat across from the Monsanto executives offering him the deal of his life.

Wheat was (and still is) the last of the big grains to be bred almost entirely through the land-grant institutions, without the influence of corporate money. Why? Because seed companies sell commercial hybrids, which provide both higher-yielding and more uniform plants, and force farmers to buy new seed every year. Since wheat is self-pollinating, saving seed for the next generation is cheap, easy, and free from private enterprise.

“Wheat is the last frontier,” Steve told me. More than half of all wheat growers still save their seed, he said, “and if they’re not saving seed, a land grant is saving or improving seed for them. That’s an astronomical number from any modern agricultural context.”

Monsanto’s vision for a Roundup-resistant wheat would likely increase harvests and, at least initially, the farmers’ income. But because the seeds would be patented, farmers would no longer be permitted to save them, and, having lost that tradition, they would likely never return to it.

“The only way to control wheat is to offer something farmers can’t produce themselves,” Steve told me. “You Roundup Ready it and all of a sudden you’ve cornered the market on the big enchilada. I mean, can you blame them for wanting to do this? If you’re a shareholder at the annual board meeting and you hear the equivalent of ‘Next year our company will begin to corner the world’s wheat market,’ you’d be saying, ‘Right on, way to go, sounds great.’”

The longer Steve sat across from the Monsanto executives without showing enthusiasm for their proposal, the more confused they became. Were the Roundup-resistant wheat to succeed, Steve would profit enormously in the form of royalties for his work. Steve’s department chair would win, too, since the university receives a share of the royalty payments, helping to offset the steep reductions in government funding. Which is why Monsanto felt so confident in arranging the meeting. Each breeding program they visited
before Steve, and all the ones they visited after, entered into a partnership of some kind to profit from the research. Although at the time of writing this it is not yet commercially approved, genetically engineered wheat will likely flood the market—and dominate it—in the next decade.

The meeting descended into awkward silence. “They were basically waiting for me to jump up and down and thank them for the opportunity. And the head of my department, he just about wanted to kill me. But what I said is that for ten thousand years farmers have been improving wheat, saving these improvements and planting them again the following year. The right to replant what you harvest is among the oldest rights of humankind. Biotechnology removes that right. How can a land-grant university actively dismantle a ten-thousand-year-old tradition? The answer is: pretty easily. I didn’t want to be complicit in that. So I said no, and I walked out. That started eleven years of unpleasantness.”

After his meeting with the Monsanto executives, Steve became known as something of a renegade. He talked openly about his opposition to genetically modified crops, and large-scale farmers increasingly questioned his work. Convinced that genetically modified wheat would be accepted soon and that other university breeding programs were ready to release seed, they feared that Washington state wheat would be left behind.

Steve’s colleagues, for their part, became more spirited in their opposition to his leadership. “Finally one day I went to my department head and I said, ‘Look, I can fight this for another twenty years, or I can move on and make way for someone else to do this job.’ He agreed. And that was that.”

Steve decided to leave the department. Even though his relationship with WSU had become fraught, he landed another job with the university, as director of the Mount Vernon Research and Extension Center, a six-hour drive to the west. Given that he had chaired the famed wheat-breeding program on
the main campus, the move was a little like leaving a vice president position at General Motors in Detroit to run one of the branch offices in Kalamazoo.

The position did not call for an expertise in wheat breeding. In fact, the research center had never in its history been involved with wheat breeding. “I was hired to direct the center. I was done with wheat. I was there to serve the needs of farmers with a very rich tradition of growing specialty fruits and vegetables.”

But on the drive to his final interview for the position, Steve noticed a wheat field and pulled off the freeway. His wife, Hannelore, took photos. A few hundred yards down the road, they saw another wheat field. And then another. “I thought,
Holy shit. There’s wheat all over this place. Why don’t we know about any of this?
”

It turned out that the Skagit Valley wheat was all soft wheat bound for places like Korea and Singapore, to be made into noodles and soft breads. The farmers of Skagit were using wheat rotations in place of buying expensive fertilizers.

“What these farmers recognized,” Steve said, “and I stress they recognized it not because they’re modern-day hippie-dippies but because they’re dead set on improving fertility, is that small-scale wheat harvests are both very good for the soil and surprisingly profitable.”

Except that, before Steve came along, there wasn’t that much profit. Exporting wheat on the cheap is more economical than purchasing fertilizer—but just barely. “When I grow wheat,” one farmer confessed to Steve, “I just want to lose less money.”

Steve started asking himself a lot of what-ifs. What if the wheat remained local? What if, instead of growing anonymous wheat in Skagit, wheat could be bred for good yield and exceptional flavor? What if there were a local market to support these distinctive varieties? Might it be possible to improve both the return for the farmer and the quality of the flour for the bakers? These questions had never been asked, because the operating assumption was simplistic: wheat was wheat, in the same way that that fresh fish had been
considered indistinguishable before chefs like Gilbert Le Coze and Jean-Louis Palladin came along and created a market for small fishermen.

Steve learned that, in fact, there was a strong history of wheat in the region. From 1850 to 1950, he discovered, there were more than 143 varieties of wheat grown in Washington. And Whidbey Island, just west of the Skagit Valley, had set the world record with one wheat crop of nearly 120 bushels an acre.

“People say wheat is ‘out of place’ around here,” he said. “I always get a kick out of that. A place like Kansas is considered real wheat country. But that’s not correct. It’s not that Kansas is the best place to grow wheat—it’s that wheat is the
only
thing that will grow in Kansas.”

Steve brought up his idea of breeding specialty Skagit wheat with the farmers and found them surprisingly open-minded. They had nothing to lose, after all, and there was a local tradition of innovation.

“We had a breakfast with all the farmers real soon after I was hired,” Steve said. “A big, scary-looking farmer guy stands up and asks to say just one thing. I was like,
Here we go, I’m going to get it about not embracing Monsanto or something.
The guy starts pointing his finger even before they can get the mic in his face, and he says: ‘No matter what you do, whatever research you do, we expect your work to remain in the public interest. We don’t want you commercializing anything.’ All the other farmers in the room nodded. I started to laugh, you know? It was crazy. I’d been fighting for that very thing for twenty years, and I’d been losing the fight. Here I was,
ordered
to do it—the demand was that I do the right thing. I mean, I wanted to just throw my arms around the guy and hug him.”

On our way to the greenhouse to see the Aragon 03 cross, Steve took me through the eight-acre research field just steps from his office. Agriculturally,
it was the most arresting display of diversity I’d ever seen. The field was divided into an orderly grid of four-by-twelve-foot rows, but the overall effect was dazzling in its variation. Each row held a unique kind of wheat, creating a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes. Even Glenn’s fields looked bland by comparison.