This column has been edited to add a parenthetical explanation to the end of the second paragraph.

Last December, Adrian Card ruined grocery shopping for me. Card is the CSU extension agent to Boulder County, and was the lead author of “Economic, Environmental and Social Implications of Cropping Systems in Boulder County,” a 2015 briefing paper for the county commissioners. I discovered it researching the commissioners’ decision to ban genetically engineered crops on county open space.

It’s a snapshot of data gathered from six Northern Colorado farms between 2011 and 2015, and it documented organic crops that had released six times more sequestered carbon from the soil and used 10 times more water than genetically engineered varieties. GE crops also decreased pesticide use by 80 percent compared to their conventional counterparts. I was paralyzed. I had always self-identified as a good Boulder environmentalist, and figured that meant that non-organic was a non-starter (and the organic definition excludes GMOs). Now where was I supposed to buy my kale? (Currently, there are no GMO varieties of kale.)

My doubts about the GMO ban’s merits blossomed. After all, the ban’s loudest supporters claimed to be fighting for reduced pesticide use and more sustainable cropping methods. Commissioner Deb Gardner specifically cited researching carbon sequestration as a top priority of the transition. If on county land the currently approved GE crops could actually be making positive progress toward those goals, why was there such a strong desire to outlaw them?

The open-space farmers themselves had always voiced near unanimous opposition to the ban. They explained that it would create economic instability and that it contradicted their generations-deep study of how to farm Boulder County sustainably. Many felt powerless in the debate.

“We are at an all-time low on relationship between farmers and the community in general,” said Jason Condon, one of the most successful organic farmers on county land. “I don’t know what will happen.”

Commissioner Cindy Domenico, who grew up on a farm in Lafayette, appreciated the value of their expertise. “What they’ve learned over time and their stewardship of the land is extraordinary,” she told me. Yet, in a 2-1 vote, Domenico and the farming community was overruled.

Given all of that, how on earth had the decision to go forward with the ban been possible? As it turns out, mostly because it had very little to do with the actual GMOs.

This is probably a good time to pause and talk about what “GMO” means, and why they are so hotly debated. GMO stands for “genetically modified organism,” one that has had its DNA directly altered to present a specific trait. Cross-breeding for desired traits has been around for centuries, but in 1973, the first direct gene transfer was successfully executed. GE insulin hit the market in 1982.

Since then, biotechnology has rapidly assimilated into and helped develop the medical and pharmaceutical fields. Mapping the first human genome, completed in 2003, cost $2.7 billion. Just 14 years later, researchers peg that price at $10,000, meaning that precision medicine and individualized treatment of serious diseases could become widely accessible in the near future.

Yet when it comes to GMO agriculture, the topic is so controversial that a 2010 European Commission report dubbed it “the Achilles Heel of biotechnology.” Why is it so divisive? After all, 88 percent of scientists agree that GMOs are safe for human consumption, and when grown responsibly they can bear environmental and economic benefits.

It may start in the gut. “Many people look at the food they eat not just as a lifestyle choice or a health choice, but almost as an expression of who they are as people,” said Robert Fraley, the chief technology officer at Monsanto, in a 2014 Intelligence Squared debate.

The idea of lab-altered food is also a handy lightning rod for broad fears like societal change or corporate control. Though we eagerly anticipate technological advances in many areas of our lives, “We don’t want farming to change; we want it to go back to this previous world, this idyllic image of it being a perfect life,” argues Domenico. “The world is not the same as it was back in 1910 or 1930 or even 1950, so farming needs to evolve too.”

Nathanael Johnson of Grist, an online environmental news magazine, compares the way that distaste for agribusiness morphs into anti-GMO sentiment to another emotional, ideological controversy — access to contraception. “Just as teens are going to keep having sex, our unsustainable food system is going to keep on chugging along whether we allow the use of mitigating technology or not,” wrote Johnson. “I think it makes sense to support the GMO uses that give us small environmental improvements. Insisting on abstinence-only farming is a non-starter.”

It also turns out that “organic” doesn’t mean “pesticide-free.” The pesticides just come from natural rather than synthetic sources — and apparently some of those are harmful to honeybees, too. Given that the purpose of an herbicide is to kill weeds, and an insecticide to kill insects, any crop protection practice won’t be completely benign. Some natural pesticides are less effective, requiring more frequent applications, and higher overall life-cycle toxicity.

Boulder’s GMOs were engineered to be resistant to glyphosate — an herbicide that is of huge concern for anti-GMO advocates. Yet both the Environmental Protection Agency and the European Food Safety Agency do not believe it poses a danger for humans. The LD50 value, a measure of toxicity, of glyphosate is gram-for-gram 4 percent — one twenty-fifth — that of caffeine (which has actually been studied as an organic way to enhance the efficacy of organic insecticides), and the amount used on an area the size of a football field would fill a soda can. Farmers prefer glyphosate because of its efficacy — they are able to use much smaller quantities of a less toxic substance for the same result — but that efficacy is only harmful to weeds where it disables a protein needed for growth that isn’t found in humans.

This isn’t to brush off the value of organic, but it is to say that agriculture is rarely black and white — and that’s actually why diverse approaches are important. Really, the only way to know what is being put on your food is to know the farmer who grew it.

“It’s just such a complicated web in agriculture,” third-generation county farmer Scott Miller told me. “You can’t just say you’re going to block one thing and that is going to fix it.”

Clearly, Boulder is fertile ground for this debate. Our attachment to “organic,” “sustainable,” and “locally grown” has a near-religious fervor. Our distaste for bowing to business is such that we are embroiled in a seven-year quest to separate from Xcel Energy. Additionally, Boulder, the Silicon Valley of natural foods companies, now houses an army of bigger-than-morals activists with financial skin in the game. One, Steve Demos, founder of Horizon Organics, said in a 2009 interview that the “organic mecca” allowing GMOs was “almost as effective in diluting a brand as if Rolls-Royce announced it was making an economy-model engine for airplanes.”

Anti-GMO activist Mary Smith admitted plainly in a 2016 KUNC interview that genetic engineering itself isn’t the problem. For Smith, “This is about our right to have access to good, healthful food.” Some said it is about taking a stand against agribusiness, or simply core ecological ideals, or a vision that Boulder could point the world’s environmental compass. For others, it’s about personal finances, politics, or even reputation.

Yet very few start from an actual opposition to GMOs themselves, and that is a problem because when we ban GMOs as a punching-bag proxy for a thousand other ills, we set ourselves up for some seriously unintended consequences. As a proxy, GMOs fail.

The county’s Cropland Policy defines sustainability with a balance of environmental, economic and social terms. The GMO ban sacrifices potential environmental gains, destabilizes the economic livelihood of individual farmers and threatens the ability of multi-generational families to continue tending the land in community with one another and Boulder County. With this decision, we have chopped our three-legged stool of sustainability into a plank of wood on the ground.

Email: abbottmarak@gmail.com