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Careful Wheat Farmers, Seed Purveyors Say Mistakes Still Happen

Connell, Wash.-area seedman, Dana Herron
Anna King
/
Northwest News Network

There’s been a lot of speculation but few answers so far about how genetically modified wheat ended up in an Oregon field. Northwest farmers and seed purveyors say they go to great lengths to keep each variety of grain distinct, tracked and pure. And yet they concede, mistakes can still happen.

Michael Jay’s family restaurant is an early-morning farmer hang out. We’re in downtown Connell, prime Columbia Basin wheat country. I’m having veggie omelets and coffee with Dana Herron. He’s a seed salesman. And as we talk I notice he’s a really clean guy. He carefully folds his paper napkin, and later he dons gloves to pump gas.

“My mom always used to say cleanliness is next to Godliness, so maybe it carried through,” Herron says. It’s a quality he needs in the seed business where putting the right crops in the right location is everything.

Herron’s business looks like a gravel farm yard with seed silos lined up in rows like portly, stainless steel soldiers. A chained up dog keeps watch.

Herron regularly sells commercially approved genetically modified crops like alfalfa and corn. These seeds are carefully bagged and stacked in a warehouse. When he’s done selling the seed for the year, all the leftover bags go back to the original seed company for safekeeping. When Herron’s crews clean out the mill or a bin to switch from one variety to another, Herron says they double check everything. “Even with all those protocols we’re human and we still make a few mistakes,” he says.

That’s when he has to get a crew to hand-pull foreign plants in fields. Herron says this is industry standard. Farmers and seed managers working with experimental genetically modified organisms have to be even more careful.

Just how GMO wheat plants got into a field in Oregon is the subject of an intense U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation. Herron says there are so many possibilities. Birds, mice, wind, tractor wheels, a bin that wasn’t cleaned properly.
 

Wheat Field Pasco, WA
Credit Anna King / Northwest News Network
/
Northwest News Network
A wheat field near Pasco, Wash.

Monsanto, the company that developed the GMO crop gene found in Oregon, says it’s been doing its own investigation. The company’s Robb Fraley says Monsanto has tested 50 varieties of seed stocks in Washington and Oregon to make sure the problem is not more widespread.

“It seems to be a random isolated occurrence,” Fraley says. “More consistent with the accidental or purposeful mixing of a small amount of seed during the planting, harvesting and during the fallow cycle in an individual field.”

That still isn’t comforting to the Japanese and other Asian markets who have delayed some shipments of U.S. wheat. At meeting this week at the Oregon Board of Agriculture, the topic was canola. But Japanese seed distributor Yukio Cato testified no matter what the crop, his customers will purchase seeds elsewhere if they aren't confident of the purity of the Pacific Northwest product. "The Japanese grower and also consumer is very scared about the GMO," Cato says. And that’s what alarms Northwest farmers.
 

Uniontown, Wash., area farmer Frank Wolf.
Credit Anna King / Northwest News Network
/
Northwest News Network
Uninontown, Wash., area farmer Frank Wolf.

It’s about quitting time on a wheat farm near the Lewiston Grade in Washington’s Palouse Country. Like the ultra-clean seed salesman from Connell, farmer Frank Wolf says he’s extremely careful about where his seed goes. He relies largely on noodle sales in Asia to sell his soft white wheat each year. Too many foreign grains in his field could render his valuable crop severely discounted. But it’s impossible to control for every tiny seed. And once a genetically modified plant gets into a field, Wolf says you wouldn’t be able to see it. “It could sneak into your noodle,” he adds.

Some farmers don’t oppose the idea of wheat, genetically modified to resist the herbicide Roundup. But Wolf’s not there yet. “I’m personally afraid of them on the farm,” says Wolf. “I think it’s like the ultimate weed.”

He says however this genetically modified wheat got into a field in Oregon; it’s an example to learn from – Northwest markets and livelihoods depend on it.
 

Anna King calls Richland, Washington home and loves unearthing great stories about people in the Northwest. She reports for the Northwest News Network from a studio at Washington State University, Triââ

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