Sugarbeet Exclusion from GMO Labeling Law Ensures Sustainable Future

Source: Farm & Ranch 

In December, the USDA announced that sugar and other highly refined products would not be subject to a mandatory genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling law, which caused a sigh of relief among those in the sugarbeet industry.

“Because the beet is so heavily processed to be turned into pure sucrose, there’s no protein left,” said Rebecca Larson, Western Sugar Cooperative vice president, chief scientist and governmental affairs during a telephone interview Monday. “The product itself is not genetically modified, the GMO is just used to farm more efficiently.”

While other row crops have had genetically modified variants for quite sometime, the adoption of GMO sugarbeets, which are resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (known commercially as RoundUp), has been relatively recent. The first commercially available GMO seeds were introduced in 2007, however did not reach wide deployment until 2008.

Beyond helping farmers reduce input costs, GMO sugarbeets provide many environmental benefits.

“The farmer is saving money, but they’re also able to adopt conservation tillage practices that weren’t possible prior to RoundUp Ready technology,” she said. “Our farmers have cut their water usage by a minimum of a third. They cut their fuel usage in half. They’ve driven yields up about 33 percent, so the land use efficiency is greater. And the environment impact is that we’re using safer and fewer pesticides for weed management.”

And as concerns about climate change enter political debates in Washington and the world stage, the use of GMO sugarbeets has shown benefits for carbon sequestration in the soil.

“The conservation tillage is a big player in that,” Larson said. “We’ve found that if you go from a conventional tillage to strip-till, which is enabled by that GMO technology, it reduces carbon emissions from the soil over 80 percent. It’s extreme.”

Larson said that there’s been a shift in the industry in terms of people seeking organic or conventional products. Instead, the focus has become centered on the environmental impacts and sustainability, regardless of the technology that’s employed in the field.

“I think that’s going to be quite good for sugarbeet farmers, because if you look at our cultural practices compared to the way the rest of the world produces sugar, we’re pretty darn sustainable,” she said.

But despite the environmental benefits presented by GMO technology, there’s still no shortage of disinformation about GMO products being disseminated daily by bloggers. While some consumers are savvy, others might not be able to sort the fact from fiction.

“The biggest thing I think the consumer needs to understand about GMO is that it’s really a tool to help people farm more efficiently,” Larson said. “It’s not something scary or gross that’s being added to their food. It’s really about doing what’s right for the environment.”

Unfortunately, farmers are a very small percentage of the population, and far too often their voices are drowned out in the din of social media, the majority of which is negative toward GMOs.

“When it comes down to brass tacks, the facts and figures behind the environmental impact of producing sugar using GMO sugarbeets compared to any other production method — whether it’s conventional or organic — it’s far more sustainable to use that GMO technology,” Larson said.

Considering that the world’s population continues to increase, the demand for food is going to skyrocket with it. It’s going to be increasingly important that farmers use the most efficient and sustainable means to feed those people.

“One way that we’re trying to combat the misinformation is, as consumer packaged goods manufacturers are becoming more concerned about what it takes to produce the food going into their supply chain, we’ve really opened the door to transparency,” Larson said. “If you want to know what we’re doing, we’re really happy to show you. We’ve actually gone through third-party audits on farm to assess our production practices, so that way when we make claims about sustainable production, they’ve actually been audited and verified.”

“We’re always in conversation with people that are utilizing our sugar to see if there are newer or better ways to be able to share our story and what our farmers are doing.”

And Larson said she thinks it’s a positive that consumers are concerned about where their food comes from.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for us, because I really believe in what our farmers are producing — that they’re safe and healthy nutritious products,” she said. “It’s just getting that transparency there so that when the consumer does have questions, they have resources to go to that help them feel confident with the decisions they make at the supermarket.”

In other news, when the 2018 Farm Bill went to reconciliation with the House and Senate, it included $1 Million earmarked for sugarbeet research within the USDA, which Larson said is a positive.

“We really appreciate the publicly funded research that advances our industry,” she said. “Now we’re waiting to see what happens in appropriations about whether that will make its way to where it’s supposed to go, but that was a real boon for the entire industry.”

If the money does show up, Larson said it will hopefully go toward pest and disease tolerance, an issued of concern for growers.

“We’re pretty proud of our integrated pest management that we employ within Western Sugar Cooperative,” she said. “The only way that will remain viable long-term is to continue to release germplasm with good pest and disease tolerance in it, or to come up with a new disease prediction modeling. A lot of the folks within the USDA are focused on that today.”