One of the most memorable farms visited by the recent Farmers Weekly Farm Study Tour to America was to a 17,000 acre holding in Idaho. As mentioned in a previous blog the area is officially a desert with only 8-10 inches of rain per year but has plenty of free water available for irrigation.
One of the main crops grown on the farm in question was sugar beet - well over 2,000 acres. Last year the farmer, Duane Grant, drilled half that acreage with Roundup Ready, GM, seed. This year he has planted his entire acreage with GM varieties and told us that what he was doing was probably reflected across the whole of the USA where sugar beet are grown.
He took us to see some fields that had been drilled a few weeks before. The beet plants were at the six to eight leaf stage and had not been treated with anything to control weeds. These consisted of fat hen, or sheeps tongue as he called it, and a variety of other weeds that were unfamiliar to the British party. They were growing vigorously and in places seemed to be in danger of swamping the beet plants.
"That's not a problem", he said, "we'll be spraying them with Roundup in a day or two and that will quickly sort them out". He told us he expected to have to spray the crops with Roundup twice during the growing season and that, based on last years experience, this would produce weed free crops. He estimated his total cost of spaying and chemical would be no more than £15/acre and that changing to GM had saved him well over 75% of his previous weed control costs.
The sting in the tail was that the GM seed was twice as expensive as conventional. Clearly, Monsanto know the precise benefits their chemical can provide and grab a fair slice of the margin for themselves. Even so, such savings could transform the economics of sugar beet in this country as well. And surely the cost of seed will soon have to come down. I just hope these things happen in time to save the UK sugar beet industry.