Patricia Borns

pborns@newsleader.com





NEW HOPE – On a recent summer evening, the cornfields ranged along Battlefield Road as straight and orderly as military regiments, except for one field behind a weathered white barn.

The plants were perfectly fine but looked scruffy, more like a passel of Continental Army volunteers.

"That's how corn looks when it's grown naturally," Travis Reich said as he parted a row of his first crop from seeds that had not been genetically modified.

At a time when genetically modified, or GMO, varieties represent roughly 86 percent of Virginia-grown corn — 90 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture — Reich's White Barn Co. is part of a small but ardent Valley food movement that's growing against the grain.

"Our goals are as big as our farm is small," said Reich on a recent farm tour as week-old black and white piglets scampered around his feet. City dwellers with country dreams, his parents bought the 75-acre homestead in 1991.

Today, the family raises and sells Hampshire hogs for slaughter using a combination of pasture and conventional feed. But with the help of a Valley Conservation Council grant, they'll soon be harvesting and milling their new corn with GMO-free alfalfa and clover hay to feed the livestock, so they can offer all-natural meat.

"As a father, I want to give my kids good, healthy food," Reich said. "I know there's a demand for it. I'm farming for the growing population who care about what they're eating."

At the heart of his GMO-free business plan is an inexpensive hammer mill that can rough-mill all the grains together while running on household current if need be. It's a small farmer's alternative to the combine.

"Feed is four-fifths the cost of raising pigs," Reich explained. "That's why you have to grow and mill your own."

The Millers of Sunrise Farms in Stuarts Draft and Crummetts of Cool Breeze Stables in Mount Sidney are among the Valley farmers who've gotten behind raising GMO-free livestock.

Short for genetically modified organisms, GMOs haven't been shown conclusively to cause people harm, but they haven't proven conclusively safe, either. GMO plants are modified at the DNA level to obtain desired traits.

For example, the first and best-known GMO seed, Monsanto's Roundup Ready Corn, can produce a plant with its own insect-killing proteins while withstanding high doses of applied herbicides.

But since the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture approved the first GMO crops in 1994, a report by Swedish oncologists linked the main ingredient in Roundup, Glyphosate, to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2008.

In 2012, French scientists published a two-year study showing rats that regularly ate GMO corn and traces of pesticides developed tumors and died prematurely. Their report was retracted amidst global criticism, but recently reappeared in a small European journal.

And in February, a French court awarded damages to a farmer for brain damage he alleged were caused by Monsanto pesticides.

Still, genetically modified plants are a staple of big agriculture because of their promised ability to provide higher yields at lower cost, even as opposition to them gains momentum.

The backlash is about more than human health.

Fueled by a groundswell of consumers wanting more control over the foods they buy, 20 states introduced bills this year that would require GMO foods to be labeled as such. Fifty countries already require GMO food labeling, but only three U.S. states currently do.

One organic Valley grower not signing onto the label movement is Staunton's Joel Salatin, whose Polyface Farm has been an inspiration to Reich as well as alternative farmers around the world.

"You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit," Salatin wrote in "Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food." But he thinks government-mandated labels cost farmers too much while providing consumer information that's too minimal to be useful.

What Salatin, Reich and other small farmers passionately agree on is the danger of eroding the natural food supply with man-made plants to which patents apply. When GMO varieties cross-pollinate, natural varieties not only gradually lose their original traits, they also acquire patented traits. Non-GMO farmers unlucky enough to have a neighbor's GMO seed blow across their fields can and have been held liable for patent infringement.

Eventually, Reich wants to raise cows, turkeys and farm-raised tilapia on his non-GMO feed. But for now, "It's going to take a lot of work and investment on our part to create that GMO-free food base," he said.

If it takes a little more work, and costs him a little more, that's okay with him.

"I think healthy food matters," Reich said. "If we can help maintain the diversity of agriculture that's going on in America, then that's what we're going to do."