GMO field trials total 431 in Oregon

Last week, Oregon Department of Agriculture director Katy Coba wrote the Governor to outline the state's authority to regulate genetically modified crops.

The bottom line: Once the feds have "deregulated" a crop, Oregon officials can't find out if or where it's being grown, much less regulate it.

"We don't know how many acres of a particular deregulated crop is grown in the state," said Stephanie Page, ODA special assistant to the director. "It's treated like anything else."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture notifies the state of proposed GMO field trials. But the notifications don't include the county or field where the trial will take place.

It's the same information available to the public on USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection website.

APHIS data show that Oregon has been home to 431 field trials over 83,235 acres during the past 23 years.

The first was Monsanto's potatoes in 1991.

Thirty-six other companies and universities followed with crops including: alfalfa, apple, barley, beet, corn, creeping bentgrass, Easter lily, grey poplar, iris, Kentucky bluegrass, melon, squash, oilseed rape, pear, petunia, poplar, rapeseed, raspberry, soybean, St. Augustine grass, strawberry, sugarbeet, sweetgum, tomato and wheat.

Eight field trials are currently underway in Oregon:

• Oregon State University is testing two acres of genetically modified sweetgum, 24 acres of poplar, and another 24 acres of poplar.

• Boise, Idaho-based J.R. Simplot has three separate potato trials, consisting of 745 acres, 10 acres and six acres.

• Brookings-based Easter Lily Research Foundation is testing just under an acre of Easter lilies modified to withstand the herbicide phosphinothricin.

• The Swiss company Syngenta is testing one acre of sugarbeets modified to be resistant to beet necrotic yellow vein virus.

Coba's letter came in response to the Governor's directive last October for ODA to use its existing authority to deal with conflicts between growers of genetically modified and non-GMO crops.

The Oregon Legislature has banned counties from prohibiting GMO crops, with an exception for Jackson County, which passed such a prohibition in May.

tloew@statesmanjournal.com, (503) 399-6779 or follow at Twitter.com/SJWatchdog