Source: KMVT
You could say beet sugar runs through Luke Adams’s blood.
“I grew up a sugarbeet farmer,” Adams says. “My parents grew sugarbeets, so I’m a second-generation sugar-beet farmer, third-generation farmer here in Idaho.”
Adams says he has seen the changes in growing firsthand, from irrigation to GPS harvesting. It’s all helped his job get easier. But nothing has helped quite like the genetically modified seed. Adams says growers are spraying less herbicide, using less water and diesel, and have better soil.
On top of all that, they have a lot more beets. Before genetically modified seeds, growers would yield anywhere from 25 to 30 tons of beets per acre. Now it’s closer to 45 tons per acre.
“Still with really high sugar content,” Adams adds.
This technology hasn’t just changed life for the grower, but also for the researcher.
Don Morishita is another expert on sugarbeets—or rather, an expert on their No. 1 threat. He’s a weed scientist at the University of Idaho, and he was brought on in 1990 to help growers with their biggest issue.
“At that time, the sugarbeet growers considered weeds as their No.1 pest problem,” Morishita says.
He saw the transition from conventional sugarbeets to GMO sugarbeets, and he confirms what the Adams says: It changed everything.
“They went from having to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort and resources controlling weeds in sugarbeets to it becoming very simple for them,” says Morishita.
That means his job has changed a little, but there’s still plenty to do. He says there’s potential for issues with GMO crops in that a seed being resistant to one herbicide means that’s the one farmers rely on, and that could alter the types of weeds we see. That means growers need to be careful with their weed control, but consumers don’t need to be scared about eating the crop—especially with sugarbeets.
“When those beets are processed, that sugar is extracted from the beet roots… That whole processing destroys any of the DNA of the GMO that’s in those beets,” Morishita says.
Even if the beets weren’t processed, Morishita cites a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that failed to find substantiated evidence of a difference in risks of GMO crops and conventionally grown crops.
In Idaho, sugarbeet processing happens at Amalgamated Sugar. It’s one of the Magic Valley’s largest employers, and it’s the only place southern Idaho sugarbeets go.
The company says its end product is molecularly identical to any other refined sugar, and Morishita agrees. If you put it under a microscope, you wouldn’t be able to tell which sugar molecule is from a conventional sugarbeet, a GMO sugarbeet or sugarcane.
Amalgamated says that doesn’t seem to matter to some companies that have stopped buying their sugar in favor of non-GMO cane sugar.
“I would say that there is a growing percentage of companies that are shifting in that direction,” says Jessica McAnally, the company’s communications specialist. “It has impacted Amalgamated Sugar. Not to the point where it’s hurting us drastically, but it’s alarming.”
It’s hard for McAnally to not take this personally. Not only does she work for Amalgamated Sugar, but she comes from a long line of sugarbeet growers. She says the choice to switch to genetically engineered seeds was not easy. It was a decision that no grower took lightly.
“It’s important to remember that farmers are mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers,” she says. “Why would they make these choices to grow this crop if it’s going to be detrimental to their land, their livelihood or their families?”
If the market demands it, Luke Adams says he’d go back to conventional sugarbeets, but he’d be a minority. He says most growers wouldn’t.
“It’s just part of our way of life,” he says, “but it would be a significant challenge to basically go back and take steps backwards as far as our sustainability, our efficiency, and it would be a really difficult thing to do as a farm.”
Instead he’s working to educate, inviting people to ask him questions about how GMOs have impacted him and how that impacts the consumer.
“Then when they go to the grocery store, they know if they reach for a bag of White Satin sugar, they know that we are looking out for the consumer and would only produce a safe, healthy product,” Adams says.