Think of alfalfa and you probably visualize a salad adorned with the sprouts of this legume served up in a California style restaurant. But that is a minuscule use of this plant. The prime use of alfalfa is to produce hay for feeding dairy and beef cattle. Being a legume, the roots harbour bacteria which can convert nitrogen from the air into nitrogen compounds the plant can use. This provides for a hay with an exceptionally high protein content. There is always room for improvement though. Farmers would welcome a variety of alfalfa with a promise of increased yield and greater nutrient content. Well, in Canada, it’s here. In the U.S., it was here, but is gone. The new alfalfa was developed by inserting a gene into the plant’s DNA, making it resistant to glyphosate, a commonly used herbicide. This technology has been widely used with canola, cotton, soybeans and corn and allows for the spraying of fields with the herbicide, killing weeds without affecting the crop. Many farmers were encouraged when glyphosate resistant alfalfa was introduced since without weeds to drain nutrients from the soil, yields improved, as did the nutritional value of the plant. One study showed that dairy cattle produced about 8% more milk per acre of genetically-modified alfalfa feed. But not all farmers were thrilled with the new variety of alfalfa. Organic farmers were worried that pollen from fields planted with genetically modified alfalfa would drift onto their fields preventing their crop from being sold as organic.
The tenets of organic agriculture rule out the use of genetically modified crops. A number of non-government organizations, such as The Center for Food Safety, also opposed the introduction of glyphosate ready alfalfa and sought an injunction against its use. They made their case in California, a state that grows a great deal of alfalfa, and succeeded in having a judge issue an injunction against growing genetically modified alfalfa in the U.S. until the federal government examines the environmental impact of the crop in greater depth and issues an Environmental Impact Statement. Interestingly, just before the California case, a Canadian court dismissed a similar appeal by an organic activist group aiming to stop the planting of genetically modified canola. The fact is that such crops have over a decade of history of safe use with no impact on health whatsoever. Pollen drift can occur, that is true. But Monsanto, the producer of the alfalfa seeds maintains that if planting and harvesting instructions are properly followed, the chance of cross contamination is minimal. A distance of 1500 feet between conventional and organic fields essentially eliminates gene flow so that with appropriate crop management, conventional farmers wishing to make use of the benefits of genetic modification can coexist with organic farmers. Perhaps understandably, organic farmers do not want to take that chance. They are catering to a clientele that wants nothing to do with genetically modified crops and considers pollen drift as “genetic trespassing.” If such tainted crops are feed to cattle, the milk and meat cannot be sold as organic. While this may be a marketing issue, it is not a health issue. The milk or meat from such animals is no different from that of any other. Everything taken into account, the benefits of genetically modified alfalfa outweigh the risks.
