 Organic agriculture plays a great role in the agricultural system because it uses a huge agricultural waste manure and recycles it back to the land and grows crops. So that's a huge service that organic agriculture is playing in the agricultural system. Also, organic farmers are planting cover crops and the cover crops are helping to build soil and to fix nitrogen and that is an environmentally friendly thing to do and it also helps to grow crops. So those aspects of using compost and using cover crops are really beneficial to agriculture as a whole. And there are conventional growers that use cover crops as well and there are conventional growers that may use manure related fertilizers as well. But since organic agriculture is based on these things, certainly a lot of it gets used on organic land. So there are benefits then in terms of soil building and reduction of soil erosion, reduction of runoff of soluble nitrates, so those things are all good. The thing that makes it more complicated though is that there is a limited amount of manure available in the U.S. and in the world. And if you look at the USDA's estimates of how much manure is produced in the U.S. and how much of that is recoverable, a relatively small fraction of the total agricultural land could be fertilized with manures and that number, maybe it's somewhere between 10 and 20% of the land at best, could be fertilized using manures. So what that means is that organic agriculture, even under the most optimistic scenarios, isn't going to be able to be used on all the land, at least in terms of using manure as a fertilizer. The other aspect of using manure is that one, it's important to turn it into compost so you don't have weed seeds or human pathogens going into the field. And that process of making compost and spreading compost or buying compost is expensive. If I run the numbers it costs about $220 an acre to apply 10 tons of compost here in California and that compares maybe to about $100 an acre if you wanted to apply synthetic nitrogen. So it's not the most economic place, but it's doing other things. It's building soil, it's providing food for the microbes, it's building up the microbes. It has its benefits, but it has its costs as well. I think it certainly would right now, as an organic grower, if you have a nematode problem, you can do a number of things. You can rotate your crops and plant crops that are resistant to nematodes or you could have fallow periods which helps to reduce nematode populations as well. But if you want to keep producing, certainly the best strategy is to be planting nematode resistant varieties. And on the student farm here we select a number of varieties because they have nematode resistance. Now the funny thing is that there are some hybrid varieties that plant breeders and seed companies have a lot of energy into that have a variety of treatments that are beneficial including resistance to nematodes. And these seeds are fairly expensive and also are in the really traditional red slicer or canning tomato kinds of varieties that sell the most. If you have heirloom varieties or other kinds of open pollinated varieties that the seed companies haven't been that interested in, then basically you don't have any resistance to nematodes. And the gene for nematode resistance is well characterized. And there's a plant breeder on campus who has been working with that gene in processing tomatoes and he somewhat jokingly once said to me, oh you know I could put that gene into 20 heirloom varieties in three months and have those varieties available for people to use. And he could do that but of course he didn't do that because there are all kinds of regulatory issues associated with that. But it would be a very simple solution that the gene is available in tomato plants. And so it's really a matter of using a tomato gene and putting it into other tomatoes so more varieties have resistance to nematodes. And of course that gene could be put into other plants as well, peppers, whatever the crop is in order to provide nematode resistance. And what that does, it allows you to grow crops without having to fumigate your ground or apply soil or apply other pesticides to the soil in order for the crop to be healthy in the row. And organic growers can't do that but that's presumably in my mind one of the reasons that conventional growers continue to use soil fuel against and other chemicals in the soil is because they have a problem of like nematodes that are challenging to control. So the more alternatives you have to chemical solutions, the better it is for the environment and the more accessible these tools are to get a variety of growers to reduce pesticide use. The organic standards have allowed a variety of plant-based insecticides, including rocanone, but they've banned some others like nicotine-based insecticides. And the reason for the banning of the nicotine was that it was thought to be just too toxic to mammals in order to really fit into the model of organic. And as far as rocanone goes, it does have some possible health impacts on people. And that alone may be a very good argument for forbidding its use in organic agriculture. But that's not the only reason that you would allow or deny use of a pesticide. One of the things that rocanone does do is that it breaks down very quickly. It also is a fairly broad-spectrum pesticide, which is not ideal. It is one of the few plant-based materials that organic growers can use that have an impact on a variety of pests. If it were me personally, I don't spray a great deal. And in fact, in all the years of organic farming, I've never sprayed rocanone. Because I made a choice that my pest population wasn't bad enough that I should spray it. Or there were alternative things like pyrethrum-based insecticides, or BT, or depending on what the pest was, something else that I could spray. So I can't defend rocanone on a health basis. And maybe that's something that the National Organic Standards Board should look more closely at, to see that it really does fit into the organic model. I think that makes sense. I think it's important for consumers to understand that all farmers, whether they're organic farmers or conventional farmers or gardeners, everybody has some kind of challenge with pest and disease. And often they're very difficult to control. And that's why all farmers use some method of pest control and disease control. And it's also important to consider that the dose makes a poison. And that's more important than whether it was considered to be natural dug up from the ground or extracted from flowers. Those can be very toxic compounds. And sometimes synthetic compounds are not very toxic. So that's something that we would like to see a certified, sustainable type of label that would actually base. As Raoul said, so we're actually looking at toxicity of compounds rather than if they were gathered from nature or synthesized. Because that's really the part is the toxicity. And also whether farmers are using other types of integrated management approaches that might be as effective or complementary. Well, plant breeding is definitely a form of genetic improvement, which is a form of genetic alteration. So everything we eat three times a day, breakfast, lunch or dinner is made from crops that have been genetically altered in some manner. And there are many, many methods of genetic improvements. So 10,000 years ago, it was very primitive domestication, collecting seeds, replanting, selecting, replanting. And there was a acceleration in the last 100 years or more than 100 years using hybridization and crossbreeding between different species. There are many types of approaches, embryo rescue, mutagenesis. That's why in the book we like to use the word genetic engineering because it's a little bit more clear in the sense that genetic engineering, you can put, for example, bacterial gene into a cotton plant. And so we use the term genetic engineering to be a little bit more clear. But everything we eat has been genetically altered in some manner. And I think what's important for consumers to know is that there are risks of unintended consequences no matter what type of genetic alteration you use. So for example, if you use a method called mutagenesis, which is you take seeds and you dip them in a carcinogenic solution that induces mutation, the farmers, the breeders will then take that seed, plant them out, look for those that have traits of interest and then use that to do breeding. And what you end up with are often very interesting new traits, but you also end up with hundreds of uncharacterized mutations. Now, the food that's produced from that is not going to cause cancer, it's perfectly safe. However, there's a risk of unintended consequences in the sense that one of the other, you may have mutated another gene that changes something about the crop. And so that is a method that's considered by the National Academy of Sciences to be the highest risk of unintended consequence compared to any other method of genetic alteration. And a higher risk as compared to genetic engineering, even putting a bacterial gene into a cotton plant. And the reason is that when you put a bacterial gene in a cotton plant, the gene is very well characterized, and so you know exactly what you're getting. So for example, organic agriculture allows seeds developed through mutagenesis, but they don't allow seed developed through genetic engineering. So there's no correlation between whether a particular method is certified organic or not in terms of risk of unintended consequences. Another example is hybridization, which has been used since the 1920s. And this is where breeders can take two different varieties and make a pollination. And then what they do is they sell the seed to farmers. And farmers really like that because these hybrid seeds make the plant more resistant or perhaps higher yielding. They have hybrid vigor. So hybrids are very, very popular. However, the farmer can't really replant the seed. They can replant the seed, but then when they harvest that seed, it has lots of different traits. So they don't actually recover the hybrids of the parent. So for that reason, farmers go every year to the seed company to buy their seed. And that is a process that was developed long before genetic engineering. And it also is something organic farmers use. So that's something sometimes that consumers aren't aware of hybrids as well. Well, supposedly the BT organism, we apply it to a plant, is viable for about 24 hours in sunlight. And then it starts to break down rapidly. And one, it's no longer effective. But two, it's no longer the material that it was. I'm not sure what the breakdown products of it are. But they're teenage proteins. So they're not going to kill the caterpillars, but they're also not going to impact people. But that said, the BT bacterium itself is a soil-borne bacteria that was found in the soil. And people spraying it are exposed to it. And it has a mode of action that doesn't impact mammals. The BT that we spray can kill a relatively small range of butterfly and moth pests. And that's it. So the toxicity of the material is low no matter how it's used. It's low if it's used as a spray and it's low if it's used in a plant. Because it doesn't impact mammals. You know, I don't think that is going to happen. Many people are buying organic because it doesn't have genetically engineered seed. And so I think it's kind of perhaps important for people to have a place to go. So what we advocate really is a new agriculture. It's certified sustainable that uses the best agro-ecological approaches and the best most appropriate seed technologies. Of course it makes sense to have genetically engineered seed in organic agriculture because it's the same goal, which is an ecologically based system of farming. But I'm afraid that too many people have heard that there is something dangerous about genetically engineered crops and it would be very difficult to change the organic label in the United States and abroad at this time. Yes, it would be difficult to change. But at the same time it would be very interesting if there were genetically engineered plants allowed in organic agriculture. Because one, I think it might open things up for research to be focused more on organic pests. So genetically engineered plants could be developed specifically for organic problems. And I think that would be beneficial for organic overall. It would improve yields and reduce losses to pests. So it's a very interesting opportunity. But it's one that is very likely not going to be taken up because of the, one, USDA national standards, organic standards prohibit the use of genetically engineered plants. And I think that the organic community as a whole still has enough doubts that they're not going to support that. And it's true that somewhere down the road if there were insect past or disease past or nematode past or some other past that was viral past that was so severe that it was impacting organic agriculture on a wide scale. Maybe that's an opportunity for genetically engineered solutions. But in the short run that's not likely to happen. But what we do hope happens though is that growers, that conventional growers who are interested in farming more sustainably will not only use genetically engineered plants, but will use some of the organic farming practices like crop rotations and cover crops and increasing the biodiversity in their field. Doing a number of those things which will make an impact on agriculture to make it more sustainable system. And in an absolute benefit to agriculture set that those kind of changes may be more important. I mean it's funny to realize that despite the impact of organic agriculture on our society in a land sense it's still less than 1% of the agricultural land in the U.S. The way it spins out is that 6% of vegetable crops are organic and 4% of fruit crops and then when you get to the field crops it's fractions of 1% of corn or rice or soybeans are actually organic. So while allowing genetically engineered crops to be used in organic agriculture would help organic getting that other 99% of the land to use more sustainable farming practices along with genetic engineering is going to have a much bigger impact overall. We really feel strongly that when we are considering new methods for agriculture or old methods that we consider the three pillars of sustainable agriculture which are the social, economic and environmental impacts. And we believe that rather than be distracted on how a seed has been developed that we should ask whether we can produce safe and nutritious food. We need to ask if farmers can make a good living. We need to ask if we can enhance soil fertility and biodiversity and we need to ask if we can reduce harmful environmental inputs such as toxic insecticides for example and we also need to conserve land and water. And we really believe we have the tools and the know-how to greatly enhance the sustainable agriculture but we really need everyone at the table including consumers and farmers and educators like yourselves students that are interested in agriculture and philanthropists and government organizations as well.