DNA on the farm

DNA on the farm
Rapidly evolving agricultural technology has produced unforeseeable research partnerships. But will farmers benefit come harvest time?
By Burney Simpson
Photographs by Fred Zwicky

For nearly half a century, farmers and scientists from the University of Illinois have gotten together to talk corn and beans. The annual gathering gives the scientists an on-the-ground view of agriculture. And it gives the farmers a look at the latest ag technologies.

But this summer, scientists from Urbana-Champaign decided to go the extra mile to show farmers what they've been up to in their labs. Or half an acre, to be precise. For this year's Agronomy Day, they planted half an acre of soybeans in the shape of the 20 pairs of chromosomes that make up a bean. Normally, the irregularly shaped soybean chromosome with its 100,000 tiny genes can only be seen through the lens of a powerful microscope. But the researchers concluded this creative visualization would give their farm colleagues some sense of the difficulty of finding and altering the DNA, the genetic blueprint, of the round yellow bean.

The point is not entirely academic. Biotech research can help Illinois farmers boost crop yields and fight diseases in the field. And it could produce healthier foods for the world's consumers. But though a farmer works season to season, scientists can work for decades without realizing any payoff. And that's what the scientists wanted the farmers to see.

"When farmers work, they see a field; they don't look in a microscope," says Professor Theodore Hymowitz, a pioneer in soybean gene research who works in the Department of Crop Sciences at the U of I. "It's hard to take 10,000 people in a lab. This was a sort of high-tech extension."

Biotechnology, a rapidly advancing science aimed at manipulating the genes of plants, has already changed American agriculture. A convergence of issues surrounding this endeavor has inextricably altered the way universities and businesses interact with farmers. And it has managed to put business and academe in direct competition.

The results could be a bitter harvest, in Illinois and elsewhere. Farmers who have latched onto genetically modified crops have traded record yields for products that have proven harder to market.

Almost every week there's a new headline. Last month, Decatur-based Archer Daniels Midland Co. told suppliers it wants them to separate genetically engineered crops from traditional crops. And Japan, Illinois' top ag customer, issued word that country will require labeling of genetically modified foods in 2001. Earlier in the summer, the backlash against new genetically modified organisms, once confined to Europe, spread to the rest of the world. Food giant Nestle said it will not use so-called GMO commodities. This came on the heels of an announcement from Gerber Foods that it would make all efforts to avoid using these crops. (Ironically, that baby food company is now a subsidiary of Swiss-based Novartis, a giant in the genetic engineering field.)

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman weighed in this summer, too, suggesting it might be wise to label products made from the GMOs, a complicated and expensive prospect for farmers. The department has been a proponent of the biotech discoveries, though. Through its own research, it is even co-owner of the patent for the not-yet- marketed "terminator seed," a one-use- only seed that would force farmers to go back to suppliers each year.

These developments have cultivated a new set of concerns for farmers as they head into their fields.

Despite the potential for long-range problems, the state's Council on Food and Agricultural Research will conduct hearings this fall on ways to further promote and coordinate the biotech efforts of pharmaceutical, medical and agricultural communities in Illinois.

The legislature created the ag research council in 1995 to boost farming research efforts at the state's public universities. This year, $ 15 million was allocated, with 82 percent of the funding going to projects based at the U of I's Urbana-Champaign campus.

Indeed, part of the council's mission is to help the state become a leader in high-tech crops, which now comprise a sizable share of American agricultural produce. Nationally, farmers planted about 50 percent of their soybeans and

At the U of I, Hymowitz has been mapping the genes of the soybean since 1987, and he estimates he has spent $1 million on the research so far. Like many scientists, his work has been funded through a variety of sources: federal and state governments, corporations and in-kind contributions — a $72,000 microscope, for example. But in the past decade, the soybean has become, after corn, the second largest cash crop in the state. Last year, Illinois farmers grew 469 million bushels. And these farmers — through such trade groups as the Soybean Checkoff Board — have contributed to his funding, as well.

Hymowitz's costs carry a distinct potential for benefit. It's possible, he says, that researchers building on his work will develop a bean resistant to the cyst nematode, which ruins about 5 percent of the state's crop each year. So Hymowitz has been testing the properties in a wild soybean from Australia that has a natural resistance to the nematode.

Making a bean resistant to a worm seems far from what developers of the land grant college system might have imagined. It also seems unlikely they could have envisioned the colleges sharing $550 million in federal dollars, as they do today.

The University of Illinois, like other land grant colleges, was set up with federal assistance shortly after the Civil War to help farmers become better producers. In the last half of the 19th century, for instance, the U of I helped Illinois farmers design and build better barns. In this century, they've introduced farmers to better tilling practices, high- yield seeds, fertilizers and pesticides.

But agribusiness has evolved drastically over the last century. And as a result, these universities are finding themselves in the same business as, well, business.

In this decade alone, already-large agribusinesses began to swallow each other up, until ownership was consolidated in about 10 major companies internationally And these companies have managed to create — then define as private intellectual property — a panoply of herbicides and seeds. At the same time, farmers have gotten more sophisticated, using their computers to get on the Internet to learn about new ideas and improved techniques — often without the help of the local university farm extension agent. And nowadays agribusinesses send their own reps out into the fields to show farmers how to handle seeds or herbicides — indeed, to advise them on which seeds and herbicides to use.

Thus, Illinois has had to fight just to ensure that its universities keep pace in this Brave New World of agriculture research. And here, the news hasn't been good, either. Illinois had been in the top 10 in spending on agricultural research but slipped to 30th in the early 1990s, according to Richard Warner, assistant dean of research at U of I's College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. "What's at stake to the Illinois economy is huge."

In fiscal 1998, Illinois farm products generated $7.7 billion in sales. Together, 1998 sales of corn and soybeans topped $5 billion. And the state is consistently ranked No. 2 behind Iowa in the size of its corn and soybean crops.

As the scientists and farmers headed into that soybean field on Agronomy Day, the state's research picture looked somewhat brighter. Through the ag research council, projects received funding at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois State University in Normal and Western Illinois University in Macomb, as well as the U of I. As a result of this increased focus, in fiscal year 1998 Illinois moved up in the ranks in funding of ag research, but only to 20th, still well behind 7th-ranked Iowa and 11th- ranked Indiana, according to U of I ag school statistics.

So, like other schools across the nation, the U of I has taken an if-you- can't-beat-'em-join-'em approach in an effort to keep up with both their academic cohorts and for-profit corporations. Recently, the university's ag school signed on as a partner in the $146 million Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. The center, which is scheduled to open in the spring of 2001, will combine the biological research efforts of the University of Missouri-Columbia, Washington University, Purdue University, the Missouri Botanical Garden and biotech giant Monsanto Co. Monsanto is kicking in about $81 million, and

The idea is to take advantage of the Midwest's natural leadership in agriculture research, says the center's spokesman Derrick Montgomery. "This kind of collaboration is the next wave. You might see work between a plant geneticist from Washington University, a structural biologist at Purdue and a plant breeder at the University of Missouri."

Such research links between academe and business are happening all over the country. In September, Minnesotabased Cargill Inc. announced it will give the University of Minnesota $10 million to expand research on microbes and plant genetics. The company put no restrictions on the gift, which is contingent on matching funds from the state legislature. Last November, Swiss-based Novartis and the University of California at Berkeley agreed to share resources. Novartis will devote $25 million over five years for unrestricted research on agricultural genomics at the school's Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. The company will share its proprietary technology and DNA database. Novartis will have the first right to negotiate for discoveries made through the research and get a discount on what it pays for the discoveries. The university will own the patent and earn the royalties from any discovery.

But some believe there's a risk attached to the celebrity that comes with conducting high-tech research. "There's a disconnect between land grant schools and farmers," says Rene Hunt, executive director of the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. The glory of the high-technology research leads scientists away from farmers and practical solutions to their problems, she says.

Eager to reap the results of cutting-edge research, Illinois farmers have taken to the new products. They have done so because, in the short term, the benefits of improved yields appear to outweigh the potential for future problems, says Bryan Hieser, who farms 600 acres, mostly with soybeans and corn, in Minier, a small community near Bloomington. Nevertheless, biotechnology does have the potential to mow down profits if the bottom drops out of overseas markets.

And, while the jury is out on the safety of these genetically modified products — Frankenstein foods, as they are called in Europe where they've met with rejection— the American Medical Association decided last summer to review its policy on the question.

There are environmental concerns, as well. Researchers from Cornell University in New York recently found that a modified corn could be deadly to the Monarch butterfly, an important pollinator. The tests were preliminary, but the findings added fuel to arguments that science is moving too quickly in redesigning the genes of plants, animals and bacteria.

The culprit in the Monarch research was Bt corn, which produces a toxin deadly to the corn borer, a pest that costs farmers $1 billion annually. Bt corn, created by splicing the DNA from a soil bacterium into the plant's genes, was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996 and accounts for about 25 percent of the U.S. crop.

Hieser argues use of altered seeds saves on toxic spray. "We must listen to our customers. The final word isn't in on genomics. But there is tremendous value if we can lessen the chemicals we put on plants," says Hieser, who heads the research committee of the state Soybean Checkoff Board, which spent $5.2 million, about 60 percent of its budget in 1998, on 47 research projects. "Maybe we can build a bean that can prevent kinds of cancer. That's a few years out, but the potential is there."

In fact, last August Michael Plewa, a U of I genetic researcher at the Urbana- Champaign campus, said he has found a compound in the soybean that may slow the growth of cancerous tumors.

As it happens, Plewa's research is being conducted in partnership with the federal agriculture department. But even some scientists are beginning to worry about a growing relationship between academia and business. While public sources still provide the bulk of the funding for ag research, that money usually goes to keep the lights on and the doors open. These days, most of the dollars for lab or field research come from foundations, industry groups and for-profit corporations.

"Corporations have plenty of influence, and it doesn't take much money to further that influence," says Elizabeth Ann Bird, executive director of the Consortium for Sustainable Ag Research and Education at the University of Wisconsin.

Money is an incentive in the research process, agrees Martin Kenney, a professor at the University of California at Davis and author of the influential 1986 book, Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex. But he argues funders can't just pay for the results they want. "Usually, a professor is doing research in an area and the corporation notices that and funds it on a small level."

The integrity of the research community can withstand such alliances, says Donald Holt, senior associate dean at the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Urbana- Champaign.

The U of I, which was ranked a top- level research school by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has ag projects scattered throughout various departments. Holt estimates about 25 percent of the $47.6 million in research in the ag college would be classified as biotech; more than $21 million of that is paid for with state dollars.

Meanwhile, Southern Illinois, among the second-tier of Carnegie-ranked universities, took in $6.8 million for agricultural research. Among those projects is one to manipulate the isoflavins in the soybean to create foods with the potential to lower the risk of heart disease.

Holt says universities and private companies each provide something the other can't. The universities may come up with the idea and do the research, but only the firms have the infrastructure to make, distribute and market something like a new seed.

A new seed, circa 1999, is unlikely to have been something Illinois' land grant college founders could foresee. On the other hand, it might have seemed less foreign than a field planted in the shape of a chromosome.