Dear Editor,

          Recently, in the June 29, 2010 issue of the Ontario Farmer, there was an article written about a dozen corn fields in the Niagara area which had to be torn up, even though they had the potential of 200 bushels just a couple of weeks ago.  This is a mystery to Jerry Winnicki, the sales manager for Clark Agri-Service who has spent eighteen years as a soil and crop specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture.

          These fields “with similar symptoms in the Woodstock area, where excessive moisture played a part”, have the common denominators of being “all second year corn, planted to triple-stack hybrids, and all received manure either last fall or this spring.”

          Theories were mentioned of nitrogen in the nitrate form being leached out of the soil but “fields which got only commercial fertilizer didn’t show the same effect”.  Is someone trying to sell “commercial fertilizer” here?

          This isn’t the first time farmers have planted corn-on-corn, applied manure or have had heavy amounts of rainfall.  However this combination with triple-stack corn is novel.

          Just because they can synthetically engineer corn in a laboratory, doesn’t make it good.  Author, Jeffrey Smith of “Seeds of Deception” and “Genetic Roulette” explains how the promoter in GM crops may accidentally turn on other natural genes.  “These genes may overproduce regulators that block other genes.”  This may be a credible theory for why these fields were plowed down.  The fact remains that most of these farmers don’t have a corn crop to harvest, but the triple stack technology on the seed corn was paid for and that money has left the farm and has left our country.

Vince Trudell
London