Word: agritech
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...Passions were no less intense on the Internet, where the music industry fought a rear-guard action against the forces--and free music--unleashed by an 18-year-old named Shawn Fanning and a piece of computer code he called Napster. Or on the front lines of the agritech wars, where the opponents of so-called Frankenfoods stirred a tempest in a taco shell when genetically engineered feed corn not deemed safe for human consumption (because it might cause allergic reactions) turned up at Taco Bells and other outposts in the human food supply. It was big year in space...
...street theater, agrees that when it comes to protesting, less can be more. "If you go too far," he says, "nobody pays attention." On the other hand, it's hard to argue with results. In December the biotech giant Novartis announced that it was washing its hands of agritech. And last week delegates at the Montreal conference agreed to require labeling of all genetically modified goods...
With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, agritech companies aren't eager to draw sweeping conclusions from the Cornell experiments. "Obviously the work is preliminary and inconclusive," says Monsanto spokesman Randy Krotz, minimizing the possibility that corn pollen could ever be blown far enough to affect monarch habitats. But it was just such a discovery--of pollen-dusted milkweed 200 ft. from the edge of cornfields--that prompted Losey's study in the first place. Says he: "We asked ourselves, 'What would happen if the milkweed would be dusted with Bt [corn pollen]?'" His experiments quickly gave an answer...
California has long employed all manner of drought technology, which enables its farms to flourish. It has built a strong $10 billion system of dams, canals, reservoirs and other tributaries. More important, it has pioneered in new agritech-nologies that carefully ration water. Many California farms use irrigation-scheduling programs, which parcel out the least amount of water necessary to produce optimum yields. So-called SWAP technicians, who rely on computers to analyze soil, water, atmosphere and plant conditions weekly or semiweekly, can tell a farmer how much moisture to use for up to 60 days...
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