Wal-Mart – Biofortified

Written by Steve Savage

Eyes_of_gorilla — Eyes of Gorilla, from Brocken Inaglory.

There are some really cool improvements coming along in several crops that have been developed using the tools of biotechnology – GMOs if you will. Some of these innovations have consumer health benefits. Some expand ways to encourage greater produce consumption. Some reduce food waste. Some prevent crop losses through disease and reduce the need for copper sprays. These traits represent an expansion of biotech beyond the major row crops primarily grown for animal feed or for fiber to crops like apples, oranges, tomatoes, pineapples and potatoes. Whether these new options actually make it to consumers depends a great deal on decisions that will be made by gorillas. I don’t mean the kind of gorillas that Jane Goodall studied. I mean the kind in the expression “eight hundred pound gorilla.”

The eight-hundred pound Gorillas of the food industry

In many industries, there are players with disproportionate economic leverage who are often referred to as the eight hundred pound gorillas for their sector. Continue reading “Gorillas And The Future of Crop Biotechnology” →

Written by Steve Savage

We Americans love sweet corn – our uniquely national vegetable. We consume ~9 lbs of sweet corn per person per year (see how that compares to other vegetables in the graph above). The farmers that grow this crop for us do so on a much more local basis than for most fruit or vegetable crops. There are significant sweet corn acres in 24 states and a total of >260,000 acres nation-wide for the fresh market and >300,000 for canned and frozen corn (see graph below). Sweet corn can be difficult to grow for many reasons, and is often sprayed with insecticides. A biotech solution to this problem exists, but it is under-utilized, in part, due to campaigns by anti-GMO activists. In the end, the people most hurt by this are the American sweet corn growers. Continue reading “The Frustrating Lot Of The American Sweet Corn Grower” →