Why farmers buy GMO seeds from ‘evil’ corporations

Amanda Zaluckyj | April 20, 2015 | Geneticteracy Project

Around our home, spring is also known as planting season. Starting in a few weeks, and lasting a couple months, we will be planting full time. From early in the morning until late in the evening, our farmers will be in the field planting our corn and soybean crops. You can bet that those seeds are going to be genetically engineered varieties. Some of the seeds may even been varieties developed by Monsanto. Or Monsatan, according to its harshest critics.

But what you may not realize is that’s exactly how we as farmers want it.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be! Before farmers can plant their crop, they have to pick out their seeds. I’ve heard this criticism many times: farmers are either forced to choose genetically engineered seed by the big bad biotech companies, or we’re too stupid to make better choices. In other words, we aren’t making an informed and knowledgeable decision to cultivate genetically engineered crops; we’re being told we have to plant them.………To Read More…..

My Take – I grew up on a small farm owned and run by my grandparents.  They made some money off the farm, but they primarily raised everything for home use.

My grandmother made all the fruit preserves, canned all the vegetables, made her own mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard and I can’t even begin to tell all she was capable of doing.

And she never started school until the third grade, didn’t speak a word of English, didn’t go past grade school, and yet she learned to read and write English and became an American citizen – when you had to take a test to do so, and it was the same for my grandfather.

The problem with the old ones in our families is they die before we grow old enough to fully realize just how great they were. We raised chickens, pigs and a cow or two. My grandmother made our own butter, cheeses, we had fresh milk and the best eggs you ever ate. 

My grandfather worked the farm while working in the coal mines full time. He was amazing, and he could do almost anything! So it irritates me when I see these activists - who can’t do anything but shoot their mouths off about thing they know nothing about – telling the world  farmers aren’t very smart. 

A farmer has to be a mechanic, a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician, an agronomist, an amateur veterinarian and a bit of a biologist. All of which is usually self taught. Sounds smart enough to me to believe they know how to make good decisions about GMOs,  yet they keep touting the idea farmers are "too stupid to make better choices".