We covered the GMO sugar fracas extensively last month, but here’s a quickie review: The USDA was forced to perform a court-ordered environmental review of the GMO sugar beet seed and to restrict planting by farmers until the review was finished. As it happens, this was a review that the USDA had failed to complete back in 2008 when it had allowed farmers to begin using the seed. This failure was in violation of law and was the grounds for the court’s intervention after several consumer groups filed suit. And though the agency flouted a court-ordered halt to planting out of concern about a sugar shortage, they did ultimately comply with the judge’s order to finish a full review.

The ruling came out of the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the division in charge of regulating genetically modified food. And, as if to stress the fact that the process is complete and GMO sugar beets are totally in the clear, the USDA declared in the announcement that “this is APHIS’ final regulatory determination in this matter.” So back off, people!

The review was released last month so there was little that was surprising in the final announcement. But the language that APHIS used this week explains a lot about federal policy on GMOs. As the agency put it:

After completing both a thorough environmental impact statement (EIS) and plant pest risk assessment (PPRA) … APHIS has determined that, from the standpoint of plant pest risk, RR sugar beets are as safe as traditionally bred sugar beets.

In other words, the only grounds on which the USDA judges risks with GMOs are their threat to turn into a “pest plant,” i.e. a plant that could cause trouble for other crops. What about all the other potential risks GMOs represent — health, ecological, economic, etc.? Well, the fact is that Congress has never written a law designed to regulate genetically modified food; GMO regulation has been shoehorned into existing law (by then-Vice President Dan Quayle, no less). And the controlling regulations for GMOs are the USDA’s “plant pest” rules.

This fact allows the USDA to keep the bar for approval very low — and it’s a bar that every GMO seed ever submitted for approval has managed to clear.

The sad truth is that GMO sugar beets are probably far safer than what’s coming down the pike. For instance, we’ve known that Agent Orange Corn — corn modified to tolerate the toxic and volatile pesticide 2,4-D — is close to winning USDA approval. Then, in early in July, the USDA indicated that Agent Orange Soy is on the way to approval, as well.

These last two GMO evil twins may be the genetically modified straw that finally breaks farmers’ backs, especially organic farmers and other non-GMO-using conventional farmers. On top of the risks from the seed itself, farmers will need to confront the fact that 2,4-D is notorious for drifting miles away from the farms on which it is used. Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott found a recent example of how bad the drift can get:

This past June, in California, a farmer who sprayed 1,000 acres of pasture with 2,4-D inadvertently damaged 15,000 acres of cotton and a pomegranate orchard, Western Farm Press reports. The drift reached as far as 100 miles away from the sprayed land.

One hundred miles! If 2,4-D use increases the way many think it will if USDA follows through on its intention to approve the two genetically modified crops, stories such as the one above will become commonplace. Yet despite the danger of drift and because of the growing scourge of superweeds — weeds resistant to Monsanto’s RoundUp pesticide — many farmers will be tempted to use the 2,4-D-resistant corn and soy. It beats abandoning a field to giant, resistant pigweed!

Because the USDA can only regulate these seeds in terms of whether or not they will interfere with other crops (thanks, Dan Quayle!) the agency likes to behave as if its hands are tied. This is what George Kimbrell of the advocacy group Center for Food Safety described to me a few months back as a claim of “regulatory incompetence.” Here’s his reaction at the time:

We strongly disagree with USDA’s claims of regulatory impotence … [This claim is]contrary to the statute and Supreme Court, in addition to being extremely bad policy. USDA’s job is to protect all farmers and the environment, not just biotech special interests.”

Well, the USDA won’t do that unless Congress forces it to. As for Congress, the Senate recently rejected an attempt to attach a GMO labeling law to the farm bill, and the Tea Party-controlled House is more likely to legislate mandatory GMO consumption  than it is to give the USDA powerful tools to regulate it. So no help there.

At this point, the only hope is empowering consumers — and California, with its GMO labeling referendum on the November ballot, may be coming to the rescue. Although the media battle over the ballot measure has barely begun, Prop 37, as it’s being called, is leading comfortably in the polls. Political blogger Kevin Drum, who lives in California, has a rule of thumb that a referendum has to have support of around 65 percent at the start of a campaign to maintain its majority by election day — which is exactly where the proposition is polling now.

Once consumers have the opportunity to see just how much GMO food they’re eating, it will be up to them to make different choices (or not). But if they do start to avoid buying foods with the GMO label, farmers may discover that the “simplicity” of GMO agriculture is no longer worth it.

And now, because you’ve made it to the end of the post, you deserve to watch a fun Sesame Street segment about sugar beets from the ’70s.

So what’s the holdup? Now that both the Senate and House Agriculture committees have passed their versions of the bill, you’d think they’d get to work hashing it out, right? Wrong. Instead the Republican-controlled House is stalling.As Politico reports:

Never before in modern times has a farm bill reported from the House Agriculture Committee been so blocked. POLITICO looked back at 50 years of farm bills and found nothing like this. There have been long debates, often torturous negotiations … but no House farm bill, once out of committee, has been kept off the floor while its deadline passes.

As we’ve been reporting, neither farm bill reflects the goals of sustainable food advocates (in fact most in the good food movement think the bills stink and haven’t been afraid to say so). Both would continue to heavily subsidize industrial-scale commodity farming, cut funding to conservation, and short-shrift poor folks, just to varying degrees (the House draft is currently much worse on the latter). But the chaos that could descend if a bill does not get passed at all this year may be even worse than the House bill.

According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), it’s looking very likely that Congress won’t address the bill until it returns in September. By that point, “action on a short-term extension will likely take all of the short number of legislative days available in September, and may spill over into early October.” If they can pull an extension to the current, i.e. 2008, Farm Bill together, NSAC adds, “the working assumption is that then the leadership of the two committees will attempt to work out a final version of the farm bill in closed-door negotiations.” If they can come to a consensus (an image that’s become awfully difficult to conjure these days), “they would then attempt to attach the melded product onto one of several ‘must pass’ bills during the lame duck session of Congress in November and December.”

A number of officials have done their best to put pressure on House leaders to get the darn thing off the ground. Nancy Pelosi is calling on the House, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has made a handful of speeches urging Congress to get moving, and then, just this Friday, 82 members of the House sent a letter [PDF] to House leaders (namely John Boehner, who apparently “hates the farm bill”) urging them to send it to the floor for debate.

The drought in the Midwest is also turning up the heat on the process, as roughly a third of the counties in the nation have now been designated disaster areas. Of course, most of the corn and soybean growers we’re hearing about in the news already have federally subsidized crop insurance, but Vilsack has announced that he hopes the bill reinstates additional disaster funding. And while it’s unclear whether the farm bill would really do much of anything to help small farmers and specialty crop farmers — i.e. the ones with the most to lose and the smallest safety nets — there is some emergency assistance for livestock farmers in the 2012 draft bills.

I’m with the folks at NSAC, who seem to believe that getting this farm bill — or almost any farm bill at this point — passed seems to be the lesser short-term evil. And at least some members of the House seem to be leaning in that direction as well, such as House Agriculture Committee Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) who told Politico: “If this drought continues in the West and Midwest, it could drive members to want to see some action.”

Of course, I say the above with a huge caveat, because it’s also our job here at Grist to think beyond this year’s legislative battles. After all, the drought is impacting agriculture much more intensely than it might were we not growing huge swaths of industrial monocrops in the first place. And, as Tom Laskawy wrote last week, the system of commodity agriculture the 2008 and 2012 farm bills props up doesn’t even begin to allow farmers to prevent or adapt to future droughts. “The weather patterns which gave rise to the Corn (and Soy) Belt of the Midwest have permanently changed. And farming needs to change with them,” he wrote.

The current confluence of circumstances is forcing decision makers to weigh short-term solution against big, long-term consequences, such as: Do we allow farmers to sell hay grown on fragile, swiftly disappearing conservation land to those with nothing to feed their livestock?

Ideally, of course, our lawmakers would be moving quickly not just to pass this bill but to build a food system that is resilient, biologically diverse, supportive of small producers, and based on rich, greenhouse gas-absorbing soil — one where we don’t have to choose between growing food and protecting our environment. That has yet to happen, but we can — in the meantime — build a food movement that is big and flexible enough to allow room for both: A call to short-term action and a vision for long-term change.

Update: On Thursday, July 26, NSAC reported that a one-year extension was looking likely. They wrote: “the House Republican leadership decided this week to use the drought as a cover story for extending the current farm bill for a year rather than passing a new farm bill with substantial reforms.”

What do you say to a corn stalk ravaged by a heat wave?

Nothing. Its ears are stunted.

Corn growers throughout the Midwest this summer are facing an extraordinary ordeal that climate scientists have predicted could become the new ordinary. This year’s growing season has been consistently dry and warm, leading to stunted stalk growth, and many of the corn-growing states are now sweltering through record-breaking heat during a critical stage of kernel development with nary a storm in sight.

As The New York Times reported this week, “the sweltering temperatures and a lack of rain are threatening what had been expected to be the nation’s largest corn crop in generations.” The business journalists — whose audience is those who gamble on corn’s futures — have also been reporting the story.

“About 50 percent of the corn-producing area of the Midwest is running significant moisture shortages,” says David Streit, an agricultural meteorologist and founder of Commodity Weather Group, which advises clients in the farming and energy sectors.

That’s a problem, because the plants have entered their pollination phase. That’s the “very critical time,” Streit says, when corn silks are pollinated and begin to grow into juicy kernels. But without water, growers are left with little more on their stalks than withering husks.

“When you have that kind of heat at this critical pollination period,” he adds, “you can lose several bushels an acre per day.”

Climatologists expect this summer’s hot and dry conditions to occur more frequently as the planet heats up. Inland areas, including the Midwest and other farming regions of the world, are expected to receive more than their fair share of temperature spikes.

“You have relatively moderate global warming, but it creates greater warming over land than over the oceans,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate specialist at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Diffenbaugh recently co-authored research in the journal Nature Climate Change that revealed that climate change will substantially increase the volatility of corn prices over the coming decades.

“The number of negative yield years increases substantially, even with just 1 degree C of global warming,” Diffenbaugh said.

Paul Bertels, an Illinois corn grower and vice president at the National Corn Growers Association, was downbeat on Monday when discussing this year’s expected harvest. But he characterized the hot dry spell as a “normal event” and said he is not convinced that the weather will change as much as Diffenbaugh and others predict it will.

Not that Bertels wants to downplay the reality of drought. “We’ve had bad droughts here before,” he says. “Eighty-eight was probably the last really significant drought that was Midwest-wide. My grandma will talk about 1934 and 1936 being really bad summers. So it’s not unprecedented, but people’s memories tend to be shorter.”

To help manage growing rainfall shortages, farmers are increasingly installing irrigation systems rather than relying on rainfall. But irrigation places additional burdens on the Ogallala Aquifer, as well as the rivers and streams in the area.

Meanwhile, Monsanto is testing DroughtGard on 10,000 acres across the Midwest. The genetically modified crop was panned last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which found that the product was only marginally effective in withstanding dry weather. A press release from the group reads:

DroughtGard — the only crop engineered for drought tolerance approved for commercial use — reduced crop losses by about 6 percent. By comparison, breeding and improved farming practices have increased drought tolerance by roughly 1 percent per year over the past several decades.

There’s also the fact that DroughtGard seeds work best during moderate droughts, despite the fact that climate change is expected to bring more severe water shortages to corn-growing regions, the UCS reported.

The larger problem, say some experts, is the fact that so much of what we grow in the Midwest today are monocrops.

Crops of yesteryear were diverse (many foods were produced on one farm) and the varieties farmers planted often had generations to adapt to each local climate. Today, however, the sweeping plains of the Midwest are dominated by just a few strains of corn, soy, and wheat. The genetically modified DNA of much of the corn being planted across the nation is virtually identical. That leaves farms and farmers especially vulnerable to changing weather patterns.

“Corporate control of agriculture has really driven a kind of one-size-fits-all production,” said Patrick Woodall, research director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch. “That obviously means a system that’s not very resilient.”

Woodall said the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should fund more research to help farmers transition to a broader diversity of “climate appropriate crops” — those that are better-suited to their local climates. He added: “This is going to require a lot of very intense thinking on the part of the USDA, farmers, agribusiness — and also on the part of consumers.”

If you’re an underwater creature living in the Gulf of Mexico, summer is not your friend. All spring long, rain falls on America’s farmland and floods the waterways around factory animal farms, creating a steady stream of nitrogen from excess fertilizer and animal waste that heads down the Mississippi River and out to the Gulf. These nutrients create algae that sinks, decomposes, and eats oxygen. The result is an oxygen-free area or underwater desert — a dead zone.

This year, one study from the University of Michigan estimates the Gulf dead zone might be a lot smaller than it has been in recent years — a mere 1,200 square miles, compared to 6,765 square miles in 2011.

If this turns out to be the case, it won’t be the result of improved agricultural practices, but rather the result of what Reuters calls the Corn Belt’s “driest season in 24 years.” The article continues:

… this growing season is reminiscent of the summer of 1988, when the central Corn Belt had significant crop losses. Field conditions were hot and dry early this spring, similar to what happened 24 years ago when local crops, especially corn, were disseminated by lack of summer rains.

“Clearly it’s one of these nasty droughts. If it doesn’t surpass 1988, it certainly is going to rival it or be among the so-called great droughts we’ve had in the past 30 years,” said Bob Nielsen, extension agronomist at Purdue University.

Much less rain means a lower Mississippi River (17 feet below average for this time of year) and, most likely, fewer damaging nutrients washing into the Gulf.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a different projection. It’s using data from Louisiana State University that “accounts for the possibility of stored nutrients in the northern Gulf, such as in bottom sediments.” For this reason, it’s betting on a dead zone nearly as big as last year’s.

We won’t know the size of the disaster zone until researchers make an official announcement around the beginning of August.

In the meantime, some scientists are pointing out that while a smaller dead zone may give aquatic life in the Gulf a brief chance to rebound, our farm landscapes are still loaded with nitrogen.

“These dead zones are ecological time bombs,” Donald Scavia, professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, told Futurity. “Without determined local, regional, and national efforts to control nutrient loads, we are putting major fisheries at risk.”

This year, in addition to the usual underfunding of legislation that could make the food system more sustainable, the appropriations process has become especially charged, thanks to a one-paragraph addition called the “farmer assurance provision.” The provision — which the agriculture committee approved last week, but has yet to go to the full House — would allow farmers to plant and grow GMO crops before they’ve been deemed safe. Or, more accurately, if it passes, farmers will be able to plant these crops while legal battles ensue over their safety.

Groups ranging from the Center for Food Safety and the National Family Farm Coalition to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists are all opposing the provision. Food Democracy Now!, an online grassroots community, is calling it the “Monsanto Protection Act” and has collected over 300,000 signatures opposing the provision.

As it stands now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can suspend planting while the environmental impact of one of these crops is being assessed. Or that’s how it’s been in theory at least.

And it is what happened in 2007 when a federal judge overturned the USDA’s approval of GMO alfalfa, in response to a lawsuit filed by farmers and the Center for Food Safety. (Planting of alfalfa resumed again in 2011 when the USDA fully deregulated the crop.)

In the case of GMO sugar beets, another hotly contested crop, planting was supposed to be suspended, but by the point that suspension was ordered, the market had been cleared out and there were no longer enough non-GMO seeds. As we reported recently, “America faced the prospect of a 20-percent reduction in that year’s sugar crop. In response — and in defiance of the federal judge’s order — the USDA allowed farmers to plant GM sugar beets anyway.” Now, all this back and forth could be moot to most farmers (unless a crop is officially, finally deemed unsafe — and well, that hasn’t happened yet.)

Needless to say, producers of big commodity crops are excited at the prospect. As Businessweek reports:

The American Soybean Association, one of nine U.S. agriculture groups supporting the House provision, said the legislation would give farmers assurance they can plant and harvest modified crops during legal challenges.

The Center for Food Safety, which has sued over USDA approvals of biotech crops, called the bill’s language a “Monsanto profit assurance provision” that interferes with judicial oversight of agency decisions and has the potential to disrupt the global grain trade.

It only makes sense that the soybean industry would be glad to see these “legal challenges” disappear, since a whopping 94 percent of soybeans planted in this country are now genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant.

The sad fact is, the USDA’s oversight over the biotech industry has been eroding slowly for a while. If this provision makes it through the full House vote, the agency will have just about lost the reins completely.

Meanwhile, Bill McKibben called the event a “formulaic bureaucracy-fest” wherein the only real excitement was a walkout staged by young activists.

So where was food and agriculture in all this? Food was one of seven “critical issues” identified by the U.N. before Rio+20 began, as population growth (we’ll have another 2 billion people on the planet by 2050) and climate change have put the question of food access into sharp focus. But a quick look at the “issue brief” prepared before the summit will tell you most of what you need to know about the vast chasm that exists between the kinds of goals articulated in meetings like this and the level of real change occurring on the ground. “Global delivery of the food security and sustainable agriculture-related commitments has been disappointing,” the brief reads. And it’s easy to see why; a table reporting on target goals set as early as 1995 is filled with stalled progress, lack of funding, and a general dearth of political will. Here are a few examples:

Target: To develop and maintain in all countries the integrated plant nutrition approach, and
 to optimize availability of fertilizer and other 
plant nutrient sources.
Year proposed: 2000
Progress: Not achieved. Several areas are nutrient depleted.

Target: National systems for environmentally sound management of chemicals, including
 legislation and provisions for implementation
 and enforcement, should be in place in all
 countries to the extent possible.
Year proposed: 2000
Progress: Some progress made. Limited resources and political will hamper progress.

Target: Globally harmonized hazard classification and 2000 compatible labeling system, including
 material safety data sheets and easily
 understandable symbols, should be available, 
if feasible.
Year: 2000
Progress: Harmonized system developed. Uptake is slow.

Target: Improve the efficient use of water 
resources and promote their allocation
 among competing uses in a way that gives 
priority to the satisfaction of basic human
 needs and balances the requirement of preserving or restoring ecosystems and their functions.
Year: 2005
Progress: Not achieved — several areas are running out of water.

Target: Halve the proportion of the world’s 2015 people whose income is less than $1 a 
day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Year: 2015
Progress: On track to reach poverty but not hunger target.

You get the idea. Every few years, the international community comes together to think big about how agriculture could and should really change. And then they let a few years pass before they meet again to reiterate the same goals.

In Rio last week, food did end up in the final document — in the form of something called a Zero Hunger Challenge — but it appears that to save themselves the embarrassment of missing the mark later down the road, the negotiators kept the targets nice and vague.

The Zero Hunger Challenge comes with a list of five worthwhile goals, including “all food systems are sustainable,” along with food security (or an end to hunger through redistribution), support for small farmers, and the reduction food waste. But, as The Guardian adds, “there is no reference to how [sustainable food systems] could be achieved” and “no deadline has been set for achieving these aims.” The Rio+20 draft outcome document also mentions the need to “address the root causes of excessive food price volatility.”

There was also a whole daylong event in Rio dedicated to food and farming, but it too was full of grand, vague messaging about sustainability. (Ever since companies like Monsanto started using “sustainable agriculture” to describe their work, it has become especially difficult to tell if and when the term has any teeth.) Try reading this Huffington Post blog entry, written by a representative from a food and climate NGO, and you’ll see what I mean.

To feed a global population of 9 billion people by 2050 will require a 60 to 70 percent increase in global food production and a 50 percent rise in investments in food, agriculture, and rural development. Unabated climate change could cost the world at least 5 percent of GDP each year and seriously undermine the ability of small-scale farmers to provide food for their families and national and global markets. We must take heed of the reminder from Dyborn Chibonga, CEO of the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi, that “the hand hoe is an instrument of mass urbanization,” and step forward to develop and disseminate appropriate technologies for meeting gaps in yields, in livelihoods, and in climate resilience.

The “dissemination of appropriate technologies for meeting gaps in yields”? In this context that phrase could refer to something as simple as adding a mule to the farm, or something as complex as introducing a combined program of GMO seeds and the pesticides they’re engineered to be used with.

Especially confusing in this regard is the use of the relatively new term “climate smart agriculture,” which was established at the U.N. conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa, last December. The plan was to reduce and sequester carbon emissions while conserving soils and feeding people in Africa. That sounds great, right?

But, as Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau writes in Climate Connections, these aren’t the same as true agroecological practices.

International social movements like La Via Campesina had argued compellingly for years that “small farmers cool the planet,” relying on many studies that ecological agriculture can reduce climate change. Ecological agriculture or “agroecology” uses no chemicals like fertilizers or pesticides derived from fossil fuels, and biodiverse agriculture systems greatly reduce carbon in the atmosphere while maintaining local resilience in the face of climate change.

Meanwhile:

 “Climate smart agriculture” still uses fossil fuel-based chemicals. A U.N.-commissioned panel of experts issued a report again touting the climate change reduction potential of sustainable agriculture. The Montpellier Panel report advocated a transition to agroecology, but defined it as a technique that can be used with existing industrial practices like “transgenic crops, conservation farming, microdosing of fertilizers and herbicides, and integrated pest management.”

But as prominent agroecology scholar Miguel Altieri has recently written [PDF], “Agroecology does not need to be combined with other approaches … it has consistently proven capable of sustainably increasing productivity and has far greater potential for fighting hunger [than industrial agriculture].”

Meanwhile corporations like Pepsi Co. were also present in Rio, where they were trumpeting food investments that purported to support developing world farmers while going after cheap raw materials for their own needs. Take this promising-sounding initiative to address malnutrition in Ethiopia. It would “dramatically increase chickpea production” as a “locally sourced, nutrient-rich, ready-to-use supplementary food (RUSF) to address malnutrition” through “modern agricultural practices” (there’s that vague term again). And, of course, the company also admits that for PepsiCo, “chickpea-based products are an important part of the company’s strategy to build a $30 billion global nutrition business by 2020.” (Remember that the Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade, and Frito-Lay brands are all now under the Pepsi Co. corporate umbrella.)

The company’s official, full-color brochure [PDF] tells us that the effort is “part of a global strategy to make Pepsi Co. a leader in sustainable agriculture around the world.” Just like Monsanto. We can all rest easier now.

Perhaps you heard the story going around today. A genetically modified grass started pumping out cyanide gas, killing a herd of cattle. CBS News had the scoop, as seen at WTVR.com in Richmond: “Genetically modified grass linked to cattle deaths.” It’s basically a story custom-built for rapid spread around the internet.

And it is basically completely wrong. The grass at issue, Tifton 85, was not genetically modified at all, but rather is a hybrid. Confusion between hybridized crops (which is a process that is basically as old as the idea of “crops”) and GMOs is not uncommon.

Nor did the plants suddenly start pumping out cyanide. Examiner.com was one of the first sites with a refutation of the story from which we excerpt this explanation:

According to local station KEYE, Abel first knew something was wrong when the cows started bellowing. He thought he was about to witness a calving but instead saw his unfortunate animals staggering around, obviously dying. Others in the area have also since tested their grass and found the same results—the grass has started venting cyanide.

True: Cattle died after eating grass that suddenly started venting cyanide [Update: the animals died of prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide poisoning.]

False: The grass was genetically modified

Reports indicate that the culprit was indeed prussic acid poisoning, a well-documented, if uncommon, threat to cattle.

The University of Wyoming writes:

Prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide poisoning arises from the release of emulsin, which is found primarily in plant tissue of the sorghum family, and interaction with dhurrin, also found in these same crops. Damage to plants, such as freezing, trampling, chewing results in the interaction of these two plant compounds and the creation of hydrogen cyanide (HCN). …

Probably the most common cause of prussic acid poisoning in sorghums is drought. Drought-stricken plants consist mainly of leaves. Animal poisoning can result from grazing or green chop feeding. Regrowth following drought can have deadly concentrations.

Tifton 85 is not a sorghum, but the point is clear: There is a risk to livestock from the mixture of plant compounds that is likely what caused the deaths in Texas. The culprit, though, is poor livestock management, not a scientific Frankenstein that took it upon itself to gas cattle.

Oh, the culprit may also be, in part, Texas’ crippling, climate change-related drought. If you’re going to scaremonger, it’s probably better to do so with actual threats.

There isn’t enough time to consider all these amendments, so farm-state senators have worked furiously to pull off a deal involving votes on a package of amendments followed by a vote on the complete bill. It will all culminate today, in what’s called a vote-o-rama: votes on 73 amendments in quick succession. (Here’s the guide to amendments to watch we published last week on Grist — although several of the most reform-minded did not make the cut, nor did the amendment to ban battery cages in egg production. The GMO labeling amendment led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will get a vote, however.) While this process will only get the bill through the Senate (the House is another story completely), it looks like it’s the best hope we have this year.

As important as it is for the Senate bill to move forward (the current farm bill expires in September), there are still some deeply troubling aspects to the legislation. As we’ve been reporting on for the last six months or so here at Grist, the expansion of crop insurance as a subsidy for large-scale farmers is a particular concern to many critics because it involves both a premium subsidy for farmers and a government guarantee to backstop losses for the insurance companies.

This dual subsidy makes it a steal for the insurance industry. In fact, as agricultural economist and crop insurance critic Bruce Babcock observes in this piece on MSNBC by the Food & Environment Reporting Network (full disclosure: I’m the organization’s executive director), the program “as currently designed has ‘zero benefit’ to the public.”

Babcock estimates that “for every $2 the government spends on crop insurance, $1 goes to the insurance industry.” The amount of federal dollars flowing to the insurance system led another economist, Vincent Smith of Montana State University, to declare that “the agriculture and insurance industries are stunningly overcompensated.”

Since the crop insurance system isn’t capped in any way, the government is virtually guaranteeing that large commodity farmers won’t lose money, no matter how much they plant. It’s such a sure bet that even Wall Street is paying attention. As the Financial Times [Sub req] reports:

Institutional money managers have emerged as unlikely beneficiaries of a subsidized safety net for U.S. farmers set for expansion by Washington.

… “The fact of the matter is that you can insure your crop at a level which means your farmer isn’t going bankrupt. I’ve got a government-backed counterparty,” said Hunt Stookey, head of farmland investment at AEW, which manages $47.5 billion in real estate. “I can’t have that bad a year.”

… Big asset managers such as AEW and GMO have joined TIAA-CREF, UBS and Hancock Agricultural Investment Group in the farmland investment niche. Institutional investors still own only 1-2 percent of U.S. crop land and are barred from land purchases in some states.

Crop insurance is “just one of many factors that we consider,” said Jose Minaya, head of natural resources and infrastructure investments at TIAA-CREF, the $487 billion money manager.

In agricultural investment circles, the importance of the heavily subsidized crop insurance program is nonetheless acknowledged.

I bet it is. An unnamed investment adviser goes on to say that he doesn’t know “of any other business where you can insure 90 percent of your P[rofit] and L[oss].”

The way these investors are talking about farmland reminds me a lot of the way they talk about big banks in the post-financial crisis era. If this farm bill passes as is, the federal government will have effectively declared large-scale commodity farms too big to fail. And Wall Street knows it.

Of course, not all senators support this crop insurance subsidy. Several have proposed amendments to cap insurance premiums as well as to place limits on payouts. There’s even a proposed amendment that would limit the crop insurance premium subsidy to only farmers making less than $750,000. That’s not a small number, but as soon as it was proposed an agricultural “risk manager” came out with suggestions for ways farmers could avoid it.

With these crop insurance “reforms,” the Senate’s farm bill would take a bad system and make it worse. And we’re told that this might be the best Congress can manage right now since the House version will likely be even more favorable to corporations. Yet the Senate’s version does a pretty good job of padding the pockets of insurance companies and big Wall Street investors on its own.

This farm bill could really do with a little more “farm” and a little less “free cash for corporations.” Hopefully, the Senate will oblige.

Climate change may be wreaking havoc on ecosystems and food supplies around the world, but there are also some things it’s really great for — like weeds.

According to research published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, weeds love carbon dioxide. Or, more precisely, they’re learning to love CO2 because they can adapt quickly to most conditions. Crops grown for food, on the other hand, don’t adapt because they’re designed not to — you want things like rice or wheat to have the same reliable taste, right? That’s why farmers take great care when they’re choosing the kinds of seeds they want to grow.

Now, thanks to climate change, that consistency is also a huge risk. The study in PLoS ONE, conducted by some forward-thinking researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), found that as CO2 levels rise, weeds fare better than their domesticated crop counterparts. That’s because the weeds adapted. But that’s not all: It turns out exposure to CO2 also makes them behave a little like zombies. In other words their weed-like qualities were also contagious (via gene transfer), and the actual crops began behaving more like weeds.

There’s already concern about genetic contamination from GMO food crops to weeds. Now there’s evidence that weeds could compromise food crops. (And we’re not even talking about “superweeds,” which are pretty scary in their own right because of their rapid growth and resistance to herbicides.)

The science

The USDA researchers grew two types of rice side by side — a wild, weedy variety (known colloquially as “red rice” for the color of the grains) and a cultivated variety called Clearfield 161, which is chemically altered (but not genetically modified) to be herbicide-resistant. As they raised carbon dioxide levels at the test site, the researchers found that the weedy rice did better, but not because it grew faster — what it did was transfer genes into the cultivated crop, making the Clearfield rice “essentially a weed,” said Lewis Ziska, a USDA plant physiologist who co-led the study. The weedy, wild rice isn’t what most people consider “wild rice.” Ziska says people could eat it if they had to, but most of us wouldn’t want to. And rice from the plants that were genetic cross between the weedy and crop rice tended to be more fragile (with the hulls cracking easily) with a lower nutrient content.

“That’s sort of the science fiction aspect of this,” Ziska told Science News. The article says he “likens the scenario to Invasion of the Body Snatchers” when he says, “Whatever [seed] the good plant produces is now going to be bad seed.”

The research also has some eye-opening implications for our entire food supply: Ziska said he expects that what happened to rice will happen to other crops, if and when CO2 levels rise. Many cultivated crops have weed counterparts that are almost identical genetically. They also often look very much alike — making them hard for a farmer to fight.

In other words, the crops we rely on for sustenance could be dominated by bigger and more aggressive weeds as climate change worsens. And that’s leaving aside any issues with genetic modification and changes in water levels or temperature, all of which have been linked with falling crop yields or the rise of superweeds.

What is it about weeds that makes them seem so indomitable?

“You are selecting for weeds in particular because what weeds do is they come up quickly. They generate a lot of seed; they have very quick growth cycles,” said the scientist. “They’re constantly growing and producing new DNA. And over time, that DNA is going to be selected for. What we think has happened is that that DNA is being selected for by the change in CO2.”

When in the zombie apocolypse …

The news isn’t necessarily all bad. The upside, says Ziska, is that if these wild rice relatives are behaving like weeds because of natural selection, then the possibility exists to use traditional breeding methods to find ways to give productive crops weed-like qualities that make them more resilient.

“The weeds are doing what weeds have always done, and that is adapt very quickly to a very sudden change in circumstance — and maybe that’s our role model. Maybe that’s the thing that we should look at as a strategy for being able to very quickly adapt in agriculture to what’s happening to the globe as a whole,” says Ziska.

That’s the focus of some follow-up research the scientist has been involved in. He believes that allowing cultivated crops to adapt to changing conditions — as the weeds are doing — could be an easy, cheap way to manage the increasing pressures on the global food supply. Not that emulating weeds would be a magic-bullet solution; but it could be a part of a larger approach to dealing with both climate change and an explosive demand for food as the world population climbs ever higher.

And because it relies on principles borrowed from nature — rather than trying to defy nature, as much of biotechnology does — the potential for success seems that much greater.

“Can we do what nature’s been doing for the last 50 years, and can we do it in an accelerated way so that we can begin to take advantage of this additional resource in terms of making more seed yield?” Ziska asks, optimistically. “This is particularly imperative at a time when there is so much pressure being put on the global food supply.”

This isn’t a theoretical or arcane concept. Here’s how that process played out just this week.

Last month, Reuters told the story of an unexpected economic windfall for farmers in India’s northern deserts. The seeds from guar beans, which look like bean/pea hybrids and for which the region is the primary source, can be processed to create a powdery gum. This gum is used in a variety of products: ice cream, sauces — and the liquid employed in hydraulic fracturing. Guar gum is an emulsifier, a thickener. In the fracking process, it’s generally combined with kerosene to create the fluid forced deep into shale deposits. (This video shows how the compound is made.)

As hydraulic fracturing has exploded (figuratively!) (so far!) in America, so has demand for guar beans. Between 2011 and 2012, prices for the beans shot up tenfold, prompting Indian authorities to investigate how the market was operating. The farmers had fewer concerns:

“Guar has changed my life,” said Shivlal, a guar farmer who made 300,000 rupees ($5,400) — five times more than his average seasonal income — from selling the beans he planted on five acres (two hectares) of sandy soil in Rajasthan state.

“Now, I have a concrete house and a color TV. Next season I will even try to grow guar on the roof.”

Demand and prices spiked. Until the market reached the point at which the demand cracks.

Earlier this week, Halliburton announced lower-than-expected profits for the second quarter of the year due to a shortage of Indian guar beans.

The giant oilfields services company attributed the bigger decline in its profit margins to a shortage of guar beans in India. … Halliburton has said the guar system can now account for as much as 30 percent of the overall fracking price.

“They’ve been passing along the cost incrementally, but because there’s been such a burst in pricing, it’s been hard to keep up with,” said Grant Fox, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach.

It’s not clear what happens next. The Indian farmers — and the company Vikas WSP, which has been passing out free guar seeds in an effort to increase supply more rapidly — clearly hope to maintain the bean’s popularity and price. Halliburton, meanwhile, is marketing CleanStim, a non-guar-based fracking fluid “made with ingredients sourced from the food industry.” (Please read the footnote provided: “Even though all the ingredients are acquired from food suppliers, the CleanStim fluid system should not be considered edible.” Good tip, guys!)

In the world’s most advanced economy, one in which transactions hinge on microsecond gaps between online systems, a massive, multi-billion dollar company still gets tripped up on how fast farmers in India can grow beans.

Economic fundamentals at work.

* Alternate title — Guar: What is it good for?