Side-by-side in Brad Graham’s field stand two LibertyLink 5440 canola plants. One of them is visibly burned and dying after a recent glyphosate application.
The other one is still tall, vigorous and already forming seed pods, well ahead of the immature plants from a reseeded second crop of the same variety that surrounds it.
What annoys Graham is that there are thousands of others just like the tall healthy plant scattered every five metres or so across his160-acre field near Wellwood, Man.
Somehow, the plants from the first crop seeded on May 7 managed to survive two treatments with glyphosate, even though the Bayer product is resistant only to Liberty, the trade name for the herbicide glufosinate-ammonium.
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Hail in early June weather pummeled the first crop that had been stunted by weeks of cool weather, so he reseeded the field on June 11, a portion of the 700 acres of canola that he planted this spring.
“We went in with a glyphosate and sprayed it out, but it didn’t kill the majority of the plants,” said Graham.
He waited four days after spraying, then reseeded the field and harrow packed it.
After that, he noticed that there were still many canola plants that had survived the first application. Thinking there might be a problem with the glyphosate he used, he contacted the local Dow representative, who gave him more product.
“We applied it again and it made absolutely no difference,” said Graham.
He then contacted the local Bayer representative, who took samples of the plants for testing. He was told that the seed had somehow become crossed with a Roundup Ready canola variety and had inherited traits that made it resistant to both glyphosate and glufosinate-ammonium.
“Somehow it was crossbred so that it had the Roundup Ready trait and the LibertyLink trait in the plant,” he said.
He was also told that this could be the result of bees travelling between seed production fields.
Graham said he is not opposed to genetically modified crops and has grown them on his farm for years.
What irks him, he said, is that the company had apparently sold him contaminated seed mixed in with the original 17 bags he bought for seeding the quarter section.
When he raised the issue with the local Bayer rep, he was given three bags of seed as compensation, based on their estimate that the seed contained only nine percent contaminated product.
“It’s going to shell out when I go to harvest. So I’m going to have all these volunteers out there that are Liberty and Roundup tolerant,” said Graham. “I’m out $6.50 an acre for the glyphosate. Who knows what expenses I’ll have next to try and control the volunteer canola.”
Graham also wondered how many bad seed lots may have been shipped out this spring.
Had he not been forced to reseed due to bad weather, he suspects that he never would have noticed that the crop was resistant to both herbicides, he said.
That a GM trait was able to cross over from one plant to another should be of concern to farmers, he added, because the companies have argued that the risk of that happening was negligible.
“If I was an organic grower and it wound up in my field, then there would be a big problem,” he said.
Wilf Keller, a research director with the National Research Council’s Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon, said that “a lot of questions would have to be asked” before concluding that the canola plants are harboring genetic resistance to both herbicides.
Seed propagation fields are kept apart from each other, so cross-pollination by bees or wind would result in little gene transfer, he added.
“Without the molecular data, I wouldn’t comment,” said Keller, who added that it might instead be a case of “intermingling” of two types of hybrid seed.
“If there was one plant in a thousand, then you could say that it was because of cross-pollination. If it is eight or nine percent then I think you can’t discount intermingling,” said Keller.
“People are pretty careful, but it’s possible that somewhere in a bin somewhere something got mixed up.”
Derrick Rozdeba, a communications manager for Bayer CropScience, said that due to privacy laws, specifics of the Wellwood case could not be discussed.
Lionel Lamont, Bayer CropScience’s product manager, said that reports of plants manifesting two herbicide resistant traits are not new, and mainly occur when volunteer plants appear in a field after hail damage or some other unusual event during the crop year.
He added that the guidelines used by Bayer’s seed grower exceed the standards of the Canadian Seed Growers Association with regard to isolation by requiring at least one mile of separation from other canola fields.
“We cannot, and do not, guarantee the absence of another herbicide trait within a LibertyLink bag of Invigor seed,” said Lamont.
“Insects move, pollen moves in the air with the wind, and because of that we cannot guarantee the absence of any other trait.”
He cited a document from CropLife, a biotech lobby group, stating because of pollen movement, farmers should assume that some glyphosate resistant volunteers are present in any field, whether or not they had ever been planted there.
“From a pre-burn seeding perspective, there are other things that you can add to take out the glyphosate tolerant volunteers,” he said, adding that the old standby 2,4-D is one option.
“Growers are routinely doing this now. This is not an uncommon occurrence.”
One explanation might be that the 5440 canola variety may have become contaminated or mixed with a small amount of Roundup Ready seed, he added, but that would be unlikely because separate seed treating facilities are used.
“While it’s a possibility, I don’t think it’s a strong possibility,” said Lamont.
