Um - AFAIK, there are no GM seeds for sale through seed catalogs - aren't they only available, wholesale & w/ a contractual agreement, to farmersâ¦.?

Heirloom seeds are Non-GMO...visit www.rareseeds.com

That's where I order all of mine. The catalog is free.

You can't truly know.

However, this is apparently true:

Shortly after NAFTA was passed, some extensive testing of maize in various fields in southern Mexico tested positive for GMO markers. This caused a big uproar for a while, you may recall it. Less well-known is that follow up testing in multiple years failed to detect it again, in those same regions and even fields. The conclusion of the geneticists involved is that local farmers were made aware that they should not plant corn imported from the US as food, and that they stopped doing so, and the GMO material quickly drifted out of the local populations that had been contaminated. Apparently most GMO traits are not advantageous to most crops in a traditional culture, IOW, where glyphosate is not being used, no irrigation, hand-harvesting, etc. Therefore normal selection by local farmers quickly removes the contamination.

So there may be less to worry about than you imagine. The thing to do is find a cultivar that produces well in your conditions and save your seed.

One must sign an agreement to purchase GMO seeds. You wouldn't do it unknowingly. The purveyors of such don't want to sell it to anyone without their knowledge because they then can't be held to the terms (and royalties) of the UNsigned agreement.

However, there's no accounting for every grain of pollen, which can travel for miles in the wind. Without testing what you've grown, there's no way to be sure there aren't any inadvertent GMO genes in any crops genetically tampered with so far (and grown within possible cross-contamination proximity.) If 'they" decide to test your corn and find any, according to historical precedent, you will be sued. Not a worry unless you are growing corn commercially.

So you can buy R-U ready GMO corn at the grocery, or grow what you can reasonably expect is not GMO corn, in the somewhat controlled environment of your yard, depending on which way the wind's blowing.

Also AFAIK, GMO corn is not sold for consumption by humans - that is, no corn you buy in the grocery store is RU ready...

Carol, since 1993, it's been legal to put GMO ingredients in food without indicating such on the label. How could you miss the controversy in CA last year about the referendum to require such labeling? Big Ag spent almost $50 million to convince people to vote against it. GMO ingredients are required to be labeled in most other countries because they are definitely in food. Do you not read labels on food products and wonder why every condiment is made from corn/soy instead of the supposed real main ingredient?

And what do you think they're feeding all of the 'beef' and 'pork' and 'chicken' we eat? Cows are supposed to eat grass, not corn, yet there are millions of acres of 'feed corn.'

These guys are not out to protect you, just to make sure their buddies make as much $ as possible.

Here is a link that might be useful: These companies are out to deceive you

Carol's point - I think - is that if you found dry (viable) corn seed in a food store it would supposedly be non-GMO. Of course, you won't find whole dry corn in any typical retail store.

The OP concern seems to be about whether heirloom corn seed is truly free of any transgenes. My understanding is that you can't know without paying a ton of money to have it DNA tested, but it's highly unlikely.

Exactly - I wasn't referring to all the foods in the pipeline, of which I am well aware, only the OP about buying seed for your garden.

Excuse me for misunderstanding, Carol! I've never seen seeds for sale at the grocery store, unless you call WM a grocery. If you mean fresh ears of corn, it's possible since last year. Then, according to this article it's unlikely. (This article, word-for-word, appeared/copied on many news sites. I didn't make the effort to track the original source.) The two don't mesh, at least not without more info. If 'they' grew an amount that constitutes 40% of the US sweet corn market, it went somewhere. There's no mention of this corn replacing other corn, so I don't understand if the market had extra corn, or what? Ears of corn weren't suddenly less expensive last year or this year, IDK.

Mandatory labeling would remove the uncertainty. Everyone who cares to choose these foods, or avoid them, should be eager for that to happen, and letting lawmakers know their feelings.

Another thing to remember is that the transgenes in GM variety make up a tiny part of the whole. So it does not take many generations for them to drift out if one is not intentionally selecting for traits associated with the transgenes.

Baker Creek just sent out the new catalogue. In it I ran across this (in part):
"..... Our company used to carry up to two dozen varieties of heirloom corn, until we began testing for GMO contamination in 2006. Now we are barely able to offer half that number, since the remainder have tested positive. That's half of these fine old historic varieties -- gone, until or unless we can find clean seed for them! This translates into hundreds of thousands if dollars in lost revenue for our company and the numerous small farmers that supply the seed we ship to our customers."

That's interesting.

Of course, because one sample of a cultivar is contaminated does not mean other samples held by others from different grow-outs are contaminated. Beyond that is the possibility that a contaminated sample could be made clean by multiple grow-outs - ideally under different circumstances - and random selection. The purists probably do not look on this as a viable option.

One shouldn't feel the need to delve into genetics to decide what to buy for dinner (and then wonder if the quandary was even necessary/valid.)

I may have been mistaken about the ease of de-contaminating material with sex-linked transgenes. Yesterday someone in the industry explained that it would require the same kind of rigorous breeding that was required to create the transgene in the first place.

It's all moot anyway since probably no gardener is going to pay to have material tested for the presence of transgenes. Florida is not corn country so at least if one has a pure maize strain to start with it is very unlikely to become contaminated afterwards, where as if you were in the corn belt it likely would.

There are numerous people around the continent who are tracking this kind of thing full time, and so some or possibly even most north american landraces in conservation have been tested, I suspect. I will know more about this shortly.

>Florida is not corn country

There are thousands and thousands of acres of ethanol corn (all Monsanto, I presume) in what used to be entirely sugar land out near Lake Okeechobee.

When you drive down 441 from Canal Point, there's not much cane anymore. The fields from there to Clewiston are pretty much all corn now.

(edited for typo)

This post was edited by writersblock on Wed, Dec 11, 13 at 9:46