The damage done by the Bundy clowns wasn’t enough suffering for Malheur County. Now they’re dealing with longer-term damage caused by Scotts Miracle-Gro. Oregon’s billion-dollar grass seed industry is in peril. Who’s the villain? Besides Scotts, you can blame golfers, Japan, and Monsanto.
Scotts invested heavily in developing a strain of creeping bentgrass, the preferred choice for golf courses, that would be resistant to Monsanto’s pesticide Roundup. The benefit would be that greens keepers could use one product, Roundup, to kill everything, including other strains of grass that might invade. As was inevitable, in 2003, wind scattered mutant seeds into other fields near the town of Madras, in central Oregon. The U.S. Department of Agriculture fined Scotts $500,000 in 2007 and ordered them to control and eradicate the altered grass. The same thing happened in 2010, blowing seeds from western Idaho into Malheur County. Grass-seed growers in the Willamette Valley, the heart of the industry, expect the seeds to show up in their fields eventually. They worry that they will lose foreign markets, where genetically modified produce is banned.
Meanwhile, interest in golf is waning and Scotts has given up on the product, and is working to wheedle its way out of the deal, contending that an informational web site meets their responsibilities. Politically conservative eastern Oregon growers and environmental advocates have become strange bedfellows.
And Monsanto? In 2003, the company was busy suing Oakhurst Dairy, a small family-owned operation doing business in Maine since 1921. Oakhurst proclaimed on its cartons that its milk products were free of growth hormones, specifically rBST, or recombinant bovine somatotropin. Monsanto claimed the dairy’s labeling was misleading, that rBST was proven to be safe. Across the border, Canada’s health board, Health Canada, refused to approve rBST for use on Canadian dairies, citing concerns over animal health.
An old business adage has it that if you’re small and are sued by someone big, you’ve already lost. At the time of the suit, Oakhurst had revenues of $85 million and 240 employees; Monsanto $4.7 billion ($13.5 billion in 2016) with 13,000 employees. The suit was settled out of court. The dairy agreed to add to its labels a statement that the U.S. FDA claims there is no major difference between milk from rBST-treated and non rBST-treated cows. Monsanto’s lobbyists have been active getting other states to mandate the same language.
Apparently, consumers like milk produced by non-rBST cows. Oakhurst is still in business, with 375 employees and $207 million annual revenue.
