9UNP1267HD_Joe_Lauer_WordPress
GMO Crops In The Midwest

- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, fifty times a year. Tonight is my pleasure to introduce to you Professor Joe Lauer. He was born in Waseca, Minnesota, and grew up in Staples, Minnesota, and went to St. John's University in Minnesota, and then he went to the University of Minnesota for his PhD. We've established our first theme here. Then he went to the University of Wyoming for nine years, and in 1994 came here, the University of Wisconsin Madison, and to UW-Extension where he's an Extension corn agronomist. 

His topic is transgenic crops and cropping systems in the Midwest. We are now finishing the 20th year of transgenic crops, including corn and soybeans, commercially produced in the United States. It's been an interesting two decades. Controversy, productivity.... controversy. I'm looking forward to hearing what Joe has to say. Please join me in welcoming Professor Joe Lauer to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. 
(applause)
- Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. I don't usually do this, usually what I do is I'm typically more in the field than I am oftentimes teaching in the classrooms at the university. 

But many of the things that I'm going to talk about tonight growers have already heard. So nothing's really new for them necessarily, but maybe for some of you. I thought what I'd do maybe to start with is just kind of explain what we do because it kind of sets the background or the context for some of the data that you're going to be seeing tonight as we go through the presentation. One of the things we do, my laboratory is not here at the university, my laboratory is really the state of Wisconsin. We conduct trials at anywhere from 13 to 15 locations around the state. We plant, typically, about 13,000 plots a year. And right now, this week, we're just starting with the harvest of those plots. We're starting with a silage harvest right now, and that's kind of where we're at. But we really do cover a large part of the state in terms of where my crew goes to and conducts research. A lot of the things we do have been in the whole area of transgenic evaluation, hybrid evaluation. 

We typically will test about 550 hybrids a year. And I figure we get about a third of the hybrids actually sold commercially in the state of Wisconsin. So there's a lot of them that we probably have tested and growers are now using them, but we typically test about 550. One of the main aspects of what we do as well, besides hybrid evaluation, is the whole area of what we call management of corn in various cropping systems. And you'll hear more about some of these experiments a little bit later. And my job, I've got a crew that helps me do all of this of course, but my job is really to do the field days, teaching, and working with the farmers. And this topic of transgenic crops and corn started in 1994, as was already alluded. This was year 20 of transgenic crops. We really saw the first commercial lines in 1996. So I've kind of grown up with corn, and this whole issue really, in my time here at the university. 

It's been a very interesting and fascinating one, really. So where we're going to go today, as mentioned, this is the 20th year. In corn, there's been about 24 different transgenic trait events that have been released and deployed commercially. Probably the technology that is kind of the state of the art right now in corn is what we call smart stacks hybrids. These hybrids have got eight different traits in them and a total of about 34 different trans genes. And so this is the kind of technology that's out there and that growers have available. What I want to do today is I want to talk a little bit about the yield march in corn because this is a very unique aspect of this particular crop. No other crop really has been experiencing the yield increases that we have been seeing. And this will set the context for talking about some of the different cropping systems later on. We now have a new world record in corn. 

I think 544 bushels is what I think it is. Well over 500 bushels per acre. And when I was in school, they thought the upper limit of corn production was around 600 bushels, so we're kind of knocking on the door, if you will, for some of these production records. That was set in Georgia, by the way, which is not really a Corn Belt state. So it's kind of interesting where it was set. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about transgenic crops. I'm not going to get into a lot of the details of individual performance and things, but I do want to talk a little bit about kind of where we're going with transgenic, really all crops. And then I want to finish up with just kind of how this fits into what I would just call sustainable cropping systems for the Midwest and some of the work we've been doing. And I'll get a little more detail once we hit that point. Alright, now, many of you have probably seen this slide before. 

We actually have corn records in the U.S. and for each individual state that goes back to shortly after the Civil War. And up until the 1930s we really were at kind of a plateau. We really didn't see a lot of yield increases really due to the fact that we grew open pollinated hybrids or varieties of corn. Then in the 1930s, hybrid corn was commercialized, and for the first five years of that whole process, hybrid corn was really not enthusiastically embraced by farmers. It took a while for hybrid corn to kind of catch on among the farmers. Consumers weren't really aware of it, but farmers were, and many of them avoided it for a few years. But after about five years farmers quickly adopted it because they could see the yield benefits with hybrid corn. In 1996, we entered the transgenic era... and that's kind of where we are right now. But if you look at the yield progress for the United States, up until the 1930s there was really no progress. 

Beginning about 1930 to 1995 it was 1.7 bushels per acre per year, and then since 1996, in the U.S., it's been about 2.4 bushels per acre per year. And Wisconsin is very similar to this. Keep these numbers in mind here. This 1.4, 1.9 bushel per acre per year. We're going to come back to that in a little bit when we talk about the cropping systems a little bit. But around two bushels per acre per year in Wisconsin fits right in. In 2007, one of the companies projected that we would, by 2030, have a 300 bushel per acre average. Okay, and to get there we'd have to have about 6.5 bushel per acre per year progress. Well, you can see that slope there really hasn't gone that fast. But I think now the new estimate is something like 246 bushels or something. 

They're adjusting their trend line a little bit. But this year the first yield estimate that came out in August, we'll see another one tomorrow, but the first yield estimate that came out for Wisconsin was 163 bushels per acre. And if that holds, usually it's a conservative estimate in August, if that holds, it will be a new record for Wisconsin again this year. So we're having a very good corn year. But to get to that, we'd have to really increase the speed of our gain to get to that 300 bushels per acre. I think the significant thing here, though, is that nearly every county in the U.S. has significantly increased their corn yields since 1930. But there are large temporal and spatial differences as you move around the country. And that's kind of shown here. And I'm just showing you the last 20 years or so. So this encompasses a little bit of the years, about 14 years, the transgenic era if you will. 

But this legend here, anything in red is basically a flat line. In other words, there's no real yield progress. The slope is zero. As you get to the darker blue, it goes up to three to four bushels per acre per year over the last 20 years. So you can see there's four counties there in Iowa that have been, that are that dark blue. They have gained, on average, about four bushels per acre per year. So over the last 20 years their yields in those counties have gone up 80 bushels, okay? In the last 20 years. But you can see most of the progress that we've been seeing with corn has really been what we call the Midwest Corn Belt: Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, southern Minnesota. We only have one county in Wisconsin where we got a three to four bushel per acre per year yield gain. 

But as you go out from that, you'll see a lot of counties that there really hasn't been much yield progress at all.

So, again, there's a spatial and variability that goes on with the yield progress for corn around the U.S. But, again, if you look at some of the better growers in Wisconsin, these are just some yield results for different yield contests that are in Wisconsin from the National Corn Growers Association as well as the Extension PEPS program. But the yield increase has been somewhere between about 3.1 to 4.6 bushels per acre per year among those top growers. So there are a lot of farmers in Wisconsin making very good progress in terms of their productivity and production.

Okay, so, what I'd like to do now is just switch a little bit to this transgenic topic because this ties into this productivity gain.

As you go around the countryside...

...there's a real kind of dichotomy out there as to what transgenic crops mean in terms of agriculture in Wisconsin. Some people feel that it's just like motherhood and apple pie kind of a thing. And there's, like I said, just kind of a dichotomy going on. 

Wisconsin has got a very large number of organic farmers.

And that discussion of organic production versus the conventional transgenic production...

has really been very controversial, and I'm not sure why sometimes. I know with organic producers they can spray all the Bt they want, and yet when you put Bt into the genetics of the corn plant, that's not acceptable. And there's just a real dichotomy, I think, in terms of some of the practices that are used. We're involved quite a bit with organic production. We have the longest running organic hybrid evaluation program in the country. But I'm always getting both sides of this argument a lot. But it is kind of a grand experiment going on out there, and it's been going on for about 20 years. Now, there are a lot of different sources of GMOs and transgenic traits. 

We're doing an lot with just native gene selection.

Probably just one of the ones that's really getting a lot of press, especially after 2012 when we had the drought year, that year there was a lot of interest in what we call water optimized kinds of hybrids. But these are basically developed with native regular plant breeding techniques. They're marketed under the AquaMax or Artesian brand, and there's a lot of effort still in regular native gene selection going on. We've also had tissue cultures selection of hybrids. Basically here primarily with herbicides where you would suspend cells in a test tube with a herbicide in it, and any cell that survived would be resistant to the herbicide that you were interested in. A couple of examples were the Clearfield brand or Pursuit and also a herbicide called Poast. Legally, the only definition for GMOs is something that is basically produced through irradiation or colchizine. That's really the legal definition of what GMOs mean. Everything that we're talking about here is really kind of GMOs, but the legal definition only involves irradiation or colchizine. 

And now, of course, we're getting into the transgenic, and there's a lot of different sources. Basically, with transgenic, what we mean here is that you're taking genes from one species and putting them into another species. We now have also another process called cisgenics where you basically take the genetics of the particular crop or plant that you're interested in and shuffle them to get the gene that you want. And a good example of this now has been the anti-browning event in apples and potatoes, for example. But the transgenic one has really been the one that's been the most controversial. And there's a lot of different sources of these genes. For example, the insecticide uses Bt from Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt is a very common soil bacteria that's found throughout the world.

The herbicide glyphosate resistance came from an agrobacterium. Some of these new drought resistant types of hybrids are coming from bacteria Bacillus subtilis, and actually one comes from an orchid.

And, again, wherever people find these genes for the different traits that they're interested in, they incorporate that into the corn plant through various transgenic processes. I'm not one that understands all that. I'm more on the field side of things, but I'm sure there's plenty of people in the room that can help explain some of these different techniques. But the transgenic one has really been the most controversial one. Now, one of the things that I try to get across to growers is that these traits that we are currently using in our hybrids, they don't add to yield. Why would a Round-Up ready trait add to yield? Or why would and insecticide resistant trait add to yield? What they're really doing out there is they're protecting yield. And that's really their purpose out there.

We'll typically have a hundred hybrids in a trial. 

We'll see transgenic hybrids at the top of the trial and the bottom of the trial. We'll see conventional hybrids at the top and bottom of the trial as well too. So basically what they're doing is they're protecting yield. There's a lot of pros about these things. These things work. They work well.

And there is some breakdown of some of the events going on right now, but they do work very well. And, really, what it's done is kind of disrupted some of the pest cycles. We used to have a seven-year cycle for the European corn borer. We haven't really seen that since 2002. 

It's really not a pest anymore out there. It's eased some of the management challenges that we've got out there, and there's just a tremendous potential with the transgenic crops. And you'll see some of this potential in a little bit. Of course, there are always cons. One of the things growers have been quick to embrace transgenic crops, oftentimes, but there's been a real slow consumer adoption of the transgenic crops. Farmers oftentimes perceive that all the transgenic hybrids sold out there are very high yielding, when, in fact, we know they're not. There's a lot of problems with incorporating some of these transgenes. When you've got 34 different transgenes in one hybrid, there's got to be some interactions that we don't detect going on out there, and we oftentimes see that. There's always been this yield lag or drag that goes on with some of these crops. I always tell growers to wait about two or three years before they buy some of these hybrids because it just takes that long to really find the best backgrounds to put some of these traits in. 

And for a while the yield march that we've experienced kind of stopped, or what I would just say is paused. There's about 12 years or so where conventional hybrids, we really didn't see a lot of yield increase going on with the conventional hybrids. I think there was so much effort going into converting a lot of these conventional hybrids to transgenic hybrids that the resources weren't really there to continue to develop the conventional hybrids, keep that yield march going. We're back. The last four or five years now conventional hybrids are yielding the same as transgenic hybrids in conditions where you control weeds and also control the insects. Probably the biggest issue, though, among growers has been the technology fees associated with these crops. Typically, a bag of corn seed used to cost $125 to maybe $175. Now, oftentimes, it's around $300 to $350 a bag for seed, and there are projections that it could go up as high as $400 to $500 per bag. So that's been a real controversy, but, again, the technology works. One of the things I should mention too is that many of these technologies or these transgenes now have gone off patent. 

It costs about $250 million to get one of these registered, but to maintain the patent is about $5 million a year, and some companies, Monsanto has agreed to keep and maintain some of the patents of these transgenes that have been retired. A good example is the MON810 event, which controls corn borer. That particular event...

was one of the early ones that have come out. It's been retired. It's not really used that much anymore except by smaller seed companies, and, again, it's going to maintained by Monsanto down the road, for a while anyway.

All right, so around the world, then, we see a lot of countries adopting biotech crops.

The U.S. is number one. We've got a number of different crops out there. About 70 million hectares are planted to biotech crops. 

Maize, soybean, cotton, canola, sugar beet, alfalfa, papaya, and squash have all been basically approved in the U.S. Number two is Brazil; number three is Argentina. And they both have about the same number, about 64 million hectares of biotech crops.

Canada is also a fairly large user of biotech crops. And you can see that around the world there are a number of different countries that are using it. In Europe, mostly in the eastern Czech Republic, Slovakia, those are places where they're using some of the biotech crops. France, Germany, others are not approved yet at this particular point. One of the things that we see is that this total area, for biotechnology, for these biotech crops, has been increasing. And over the last few years now we're seeing more acres in developing countries than we see in developed countries, which I think is kind of interesting. They just crossed the line in about 2011 there.

The main acreage is really with soybean.

Basically for Round-Up ready soybean. That's where most of the crops, most of the biotech acreage is is in that particular crop. Corn, though, is also big. Round-Up insecticide and herbicide traits are really the only ones deployed at this point. And cotton and canola are also kind of the big crops that are used. Most of the traits that are out there are herbicide tolerant. There are some that are insect resistant only. Again, cotton is a big one there. And then there are some that are stacked, herbicide resistance as well as tolerance as well as insect resistance out there. And, again, corn is certainly in there as well too.

And as far as the number of crops, again most of the acres is really in biotech. For soybeans, 79% of the acreage is in biotech crops. Cotton is about 70%, and maize is about 32% of the acreage is in biotech crops.

Now, this slide here, all of this information you can actually download. There's a website that's available, and you can actually sort this data the way you want. But there are organizations keeping track of this. These are the number of releases that were occurring by year. And it's been pretty steady. It's gone down a little bit over the last few years, but it's been pretty steady.

The company that's really doing most of the releases, of course, is Monsanto.

Pioneer is also very active, but Monsanto has really been doing most of the releases out there. What's kind of interesting, though, is where they're being tested and where they're being released. Hawaii and Puerto Rico are two major places where these releases are done. The reason is is because that's where a lot of the seed corn and generation advances are done in those countries there or those states and territories. Of course, Illinois, Iowa is also important, and Wisconsin has quite a bit of activity as well too. The big kahuna, if you will, in all the crops, really, is corn.

I think there's roughly a little over 22,000 different permits that have been out there, 8,000 of them are with corn. And then soybean and then cotton. But corn really is where most of the activity is. And, again, a lot of it is that you can recover a lot of the cost through the seed production process with corn. 

So corn is really where most of the activity is. And then as the different traits that are out there, we talk about herbicides tolerance, we talk about insect resistant traits, and those are the two big ones for corn, but there are a lot of other traits as well too. For example, nutritionally with golden rice in the far east and vitamin A production to prevent blindness is one that's very...

popularized, I guess. But there's a lot of different things. I think there's probably a lot of nutritional things that we can do. We're seeing this with alfalfa right now, with low lignin alfalfa. That's going to really revolutionize, I think, our dairy industry and the way we produce forages for our dairy industry here in Wisconsin. And, again, it's basically a nutritional kind of an event that lowers the lignin in alfalfa. But there are a number of different events.

And the agronomic one there that's kind of the second tallest there, that includes things like nitrogen efficiency,

drought resistance, those kinds of things...

in that particular category.

One of the things that I've always been curious about is where the activity is. I'm going to just go through kind of a timeline here of...

when these different permits are issued and things. This is 1987, and here's 1988. And then what we'll do is we'll kind of scroll through this a little bit here. But here's 1989-90. You can see where a lot of the activity is for these different tests that are going on with transgenic crops. 

And it kind of bounces around a little bit, but there's a lot of states, Wisconsin has got quite a few tests every year with different crop transgenes that are out there.

Okay, this is last year in 2014.

One of the things...

there's a lot of regulatory issues with this whole area. USDA, of course, is involved, the Environmental Protection Agency is involved as well too, but also growers and companies have got responsibilities as well. One of the things that I've noticed in my tenure here, just to get seed sometimes I've got to almost sign my life away to be able to get and work with some of the different transgenes and hybrids that are out there. And it's not where I could just go and grab a pound or two of seed and put that in our trials anymore. We got to be very careful and document all of this, and so the company and the grower basically enter into a contract with... they're only going to grow it that year. There have been examples of growers trying to save the seed and grow it the next year. 

Well, that's illegal. You can't do that anymore. But it was a very common practice at one time. So there are responsibilities all the way down, governmental as well as industry and farmer responsibilities.

So that kind of brings us to where we're at in Wisconsin here a little bit and what I do in my job as far as recommending these products. Increasingly, the way we pick our hybrids really kind of dictates the way we manage the crop out there.

If you choose Round-Up ready, well you've got a bunch of options then. You can use Round-Up as well as regular traditional corn herbicides out there to control weeds, and we have to use those oftentimes in our production. But that decision is becoming more and more important. We always used to recommend using multi-location data and looking at consistency of performance. 

But we also now have to pay attention to these seed costs. We know that every hybrid has interactions that go on with the different transgenes that are a part of that genetic makeup now, and sometimes we don't know how those interactions are going to manifest themselves. For example, you might have a family, one hybrid, but that hybrid might be a conventional hybrid or another hybrid that's got a Round-Up ready trait in it or a Bt corn borer trait in it. Well, each one of those additional traits that are added oftentimes will interact with the underlying genetics of that hybrid, and you don't know how it's going to be expressed. And so we encourage growers that every hybrid has got to stand on its own. Don't buy hybrids based on families. And the other thing is I tell growers to buy the traits you need. Although, what we're seeing is that the industry is very reluctant to sometimes tailor transgenes for a grower. For example, in northern Wisconsin, we don't need what's called the corn rootworm trait because we don't have that insect up there. Yet, to buy a transgenic trait, a farmer oftentimes has to pay for that trait and grow it up in northern Wisconsin. 

It becomes a logistics issue for getting seed...

from the seed companies around to different parts of the country and things. And so that's what that comes in. But some companies are able to do it, and they're able to get hybrids with the traits that farmers need for an area and we encourage that. But the bottom line here is that traits don't add to yield. What they do is they protect yield.

Yes?

- 
[Audience]
 You talk about the yield of hybrids. 

What about the quality of the products?

- Okay.

- You're not mentioning the quality.

- Right.

Because in corn, quality oftentimes isn't as important. I mean, it's important, but oftentimes corn is used primarily as a livestock feed and in the ethanol industry. And if you got a light test, the biggest issue with corn oftentimes is test weight. And if you've got a light test weight type of a corn, oftentimes that's not going to affect quality in terms of feed value and that sort of thing. Where the quality has a place, though, is in some of the mycotoxin issues that we'll oftentimes see in various years. Like this year we have a big mycotoxin issue going on with the wheat crop. 

When you have, one of the things that you'd oftentimes see with corn is that whenever you have a dry year, you'll get a lot of corn bore tunneling in the plant, and that introduces fungi which later produce toxins on the kernels that will cause, basically, abortions in cattle and things like that. That was a quality issue. We just don't have that kind of damage anymore. And so the quality is improved, but in corn, the real issue is the yield. And that's what drives a lot of the decisions here with the traits that are currently deployed. Now, that doesn't mean that that's not going to change. There are a lot of quality traits that we can use in corn for various segments of the industry, but right now that's where we're at with this, with transgenic crops. The best example I can give of a quality issue is alfalfa, where they have low lignin alfalfa, which allows a grower to, instead of cutting alfalfa field four to five times a year, now it can produce the same quality forage with only three cuts a year. Every cut is about $150 production cost or so, and he can save himself $150 to $300 in terms of cost by having fewer harvests out there.

- Per acre?

- Per acre, right. Yeah. So there are a number of examples of quality issues. Golden rice is probably the bluer of an example of a quality issue where we have increased amounts of vitamin A, which decrease blindness. Nearly a million people go blind in the far east because they don't have enough vitamin A.

This has not been deployed yet. It's being held up by a number of anti-GMO people... and for various reasons. It used to be there wasn't enough vitamin A; now there's too much vitamin A in golden rice. But anyway, it's not out there. 

But that's one nutritional one that would be very important in that part of the world. But in corn in the US, it's really all about yield primarily at this point.

Okay, so let's switch a little bit now and talk about how these transgenic crops kind of relate to the Midwest cropping system and, in particular, the corn soybean rotation. Wisconsin is very fortunate. We've got the dairy industry here, which allows us to have a more diverse landscape out there for the crops we grow. We grow corn, we grow soybeans, we grow winter wheat, which the straw is probably more valuable than the wheat because we use that for bedding in our dairy industry, and we grow a lot of alfalfa and hay out there, and that has really slowed down at our borders, basically, the problems that some of the other states have been experiencing. One of the main ones is really the breakdown of the insecticide resistant traits that are out there. We now have it in Iowa, northeast Iowa now where we have the MON863 event has broken down, and we now have corn rootworm that basically can live when they eat that particular transient when before they didn't. But it's probably a reason why it happened. They used that single event for six years on the same field. 

And that's probably why they weren't able to rotate very much. But there have been some documented breakdowns of insecticide resistance. The Bt technology in general, though, has held up pretty well. There are some straining on the edges a little bit and we're starting to see some of that, but so far it's held up pretty well. The other big issue is in weed resistance. We've had a number of different weeds that have become resistant, many of them before the advent of transgenics, but now we're starting to see some giant ragweed, which is resistant to glyphosate, coming into Wisconsin, and that's going to be an important issue as we go forward. Who's to say some of these resistances wouldn't have developed anyway, but it's probably being speeded up a little bit with this. We're putting a lot of pressure on Mother Nature, if you will, with these transgenic crops. One of the things that goes on with cropping systems in Wisconsin is that it changes all the time. Again, this goes back to 1866. 

Wisconsin used to be a major producer of wheat in the U.S. A lot of that went away. The wheat bar is right here. Of course, we produce oats and hay to power our farms for a number of years. In the 1940s, once we had tractors come in, a lot of that has gone away except for the dairy industry and with alfalfa. But corn and soybeans, soybeans primarily, have really become kind of the dominate, really replaced a lot of the different crops out there in the Wisconsin landscape. And as you go to the Midwest, it's primarily a corn/soybean rotation.

And if you look at this rotation, it's becoming tighter and tighter. More of our land is getting into this corn/soybean rotation. You compare 1972 to 1998 and even now, we have a lot of counties that have more than 85% of their acreage in the corn/soybean rotation and continuous corn. So it's a very, very tight rotation right now. 

And, again, there's a lot of concern about this because this rotation is relatively young in the scheme of things. It's really only come about in the last 20 to 30 years or so. You look at other rotations, cropping rotations around the world, the wheat/barley system of the mid east has been around for a couple thousand years. The rice systems of the far east has been around for 400 to 500 years. This corn/soybean system is relatively young in the scheme of things around the world. So there's a lot of concern about the sustainability of this system, and I think we're kind of working our way through it a little bit. Transgenics kind of fall into this a little. Now, Wisconsin again is blessed. We've got a lot of different crops that we grow by farmers around the state. We're also blessed in the fact that we've got a lot of long-term trials that have been going on for many years. 

Probably the granddaddy of them is at Lancaster. It was started in 1966. The objectives that those initial scientists started that particular trial with have changed completely, although the rotations are still in place. For example, we're evaluating greenhouse gas production now. Well, who would have thought in 1966 we'd be doing that?

These have been in place. They're very difficult to maintain oftentimes because institutionally there aren't very easy ways to get funding for these things. But the Lancaster trial has been in place for a long time. It's got corn, soybeans, corn, oat, alfalfa in some of these trials, as well as wheat.

There's a number of corn/soybean trials that have been around since 1983.

Some of them 10 or more years or so. We've also been trying to add a third crop to this corn/soybean rotation, adding wheat in this case here. And these trials have been around since 1984. We've got a corn/alfalfa trial that's more recently started, and then there are some other what I would just call system trials that have been in place. Soil Science has one that was started in 1958. There's a few others that are out there as well too. I'm going to talk here about two of these: this Lancaster trial and this corn/soybean trial that was started in 1983. And I'm going to present data that basically includes most of the transgenic time frame here. One of the things we need to kind of get our head around a little bit is just what is this rotation effect that's out there. This slide here is kind of a complicated slide. 

Once you get used to it, it's not too bad. Along the bottom here, I've got corn and a corn/soybean rotation. So this, over the years, this is 20 years of data, 1994 to 2013, and over those years it's yield 212 bushels to the acre.

Now, in this trial we grow five years of beans on a piece of ground, and then we grow five years of corn. So this would be the first year of corn following those five years of beans. And you can see that the yield is 214 bushels per acre over those 20 years. Basically the same, statistically, for those two cropping systems. Now, when you grow the second year of corn on that piece of ground, yield drops. It drops about 6%. No, I'm sorry about 11%, and it's down to about 194 bushels. 

And if you'd grow it a third year on that same piece of ground, you would lose yield again and you'd be at about 184 bushels. But after that, the yield is basically the same as continuous corn that's been grown since 1983. So that's over 30 years of continuous corn on those plots. So the rotation effect lasts at most two years. You'll see it that first year and you'll see it the second year, but by the third year of continuous corn you're basically at yield levels that are very similar to long-term continuous corn. Okay, so that's what we see with corn. One of the things that we've got in here as well is we've got a conventional tillage versus no till. No till is a widely accepted practice for controlling soil erosion. Transgenic crops allow us to do more acres with no till because we can control weeds with glyphosate. What we see in this trial, though, is that conventional till will typically out-yield no till in corn, but there is an interaction. 

Usually we see, when we get into it, lots of residue. After years of corn, that's where the conventional till really shines. Now, when we look at soybeans, we see, basically, the same thing except the story is a little bit different.

Here we see soybeans in a corn/soybean rotation. It yields about 56 bushels to the acre. But when we grow that first year of soybeans following five years of corn, we actually see a yield increase over the soybeans in a corn/soybean rotation. And this is because we're able to drive down the amount of disease that's in soybeans. Soybeans are very susceptible to soybean nematode and various diseases out there. We're seeing that this year. White mold is really starting to show up in the fields.

But when you can have another crop in there, you should see yield increase. So that first year of soybeans following five years of corn is better than soybeans in a corn/soybean rotation. The next year it goes down, and then that third year it's basically at continuous soybean yields, and that's, again, 30 years of soybeans in these plots. So, again, the rotation effect lasts at most two years. By the third year, it's gone. In that particular crop. And when we look at the no till, conventional till, there's really no difference. In fact, our data has shown that no till is actually better for soybeans than conventional till because we control all the weeds with the glyphosate resistant soybeans that are out there.

So this is kind of what we're dealing with this rotation effect and talking about the cropping systems. If you can add a third crop, like wheat, to this, it improves the yield of all the crops. 

So, here's continuous corn, here's corn in a corn/soybean rotation, and here's corn/soybean/wheat. Yields continue to go up. The order makes a little bit of difference. The sequence makes a little bit of difference. The same thing with soybeans. As you add wheat to that yield of soybeans, soybeans go up. And, of course, the wheat crop is pretty high when you've got all three crops in there as well too. Okay, so that's kind of what we're talking about with the rotation effect. Now what I'd like to do is just talk a little bit about this sustainability using this experiment from the Lancaster trial. Again, this was started in 1966. 

The objective changed quite a bit since that time. But right what I'd like to do is talk about this whole idea of sustainability. We have a lot of data and things about the economic and social and things that go on, but we have very little data about the sustainability of cropping systems. But this Lancaster trials gives us agronomic data to be able to address that. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to talk about corn yield. I'm not going to talk about the economics. I'm not going to talk about the environmental things here. I just want to show you what's going on agronomically in terms of production and yield. Now, this trial had a number of different rotations initially. I'm going to basically show you these rotations here. 

Continuous corn, corn/soybeans/corn, then oats and alfalfa, and then I want to talk a little bit about the corn/soybean trial treatment which was started in 1987. All of these have got different rates of nitrogen as a split plot, but we'll just talk about the rotations here. Now, one of the questions to ask is, what are you looking for when you're talking about sustainability? What is it that we're really trying to do with measuring sustainability in crops? Well, if we look at corn, we know that over time corn yields have been going up. That was one of the first slides I showed you. It's been going up about two bushels per acre per year. If you compare that to another system, if those lines are parallel, basically there's really no change in terms of the sustainability of that particular other system. It's just a step change. It's just a more productive system than the other one. 

But, if you have one that diverges over time, then you basically have a system that's improving and would be, theoretically, more sustainable. And then you can have the other situation where over time these things converge on one another, on the control, and they're basically deteriorating. So this is kind of what we're looking for as we evaluate these systems using 50 years of data, basically. Now, here's what that data looks like. Okay, it's real messy. Alright? And one of the things that, when you look at it by year, makes it very difficult, but when we think about rotations, what's our experimental unit?

Our experimental unit is that piece of land, that piece of ground. And for you to evaluate a rotation on that, you've got to put one year corn, next year soybeans, then corn, then oats, then alfalfa. It takes five years for it to basically complete the cycle to look at what actually happened to that piece of ground. 

So the way we do this analysis is we basically are looking at a cycle within this. So for me to get a data point, it takes fives years. It takes five years to complete the cycle when you've got five crops in a rotation.

Well, okay, so remember these numbers here. 1.9 to 2.4 bushels per acre. Two bushels per acre every year. And remember, we're talking about Grant County, which is right down in here within the U.S. Let's look at the continuous corn example first. When you have continuous corn and you don't put nitrogen on that for 50 years, yields don't really go up, alright? What's surprising to me is that we still get 50 bushels per acre on average over those 50 years. So there's a lot of nitrogen mineralized from that soil just inherently.

So this is eight cycles, 40 years of data. We just finished the ninth cycle last year, and I haven't got that point on here. But when we add 50 pounds to this system, again we've got a flat line here. Now, we know that corn yields are going up, right? They're going up two bushels per acre per year. When you don't add nitrogen to this system, basically it's a flat line, alright? Fifty pounds is a step change. A hundred pounds is another step change. We don't start to see improvement until in continuous corn we're adding 200 pounds to those plots. And that increase is 1.4 bushels per acre per year. 

Now, when we look at this for rotation I'm going to look at the first year of corn in this rotation. Right at the start was 0 N, we get 1.8 bushels per acre per year. It's using the nitrogen effect, nitrogen leftover from the alfalfa that's growing that last year. Even though we don't add any nitrogen to that system, it's using the alfalfa nitrogen that's there, and we see this 1.8 bushels per acre per year. Okay, when we add 50 pounds, a little bit of a step change. Not much. 2.2 bushels. A hundred pounds, 200 pounds, basically they're sitting right on top of one another here. And when we look at all the different rotations, continuous corn we saw no real effect until we got to 200 pounds. The complete rotation, 1.8 to 2.4 bushels per acre per year. 

Very similar to what USDA is telling us. And here's what some of the other rotations are showing. Up to 3.2 bushels per acre per year with hybrids and things over time with these different rotations. Now, the real question here though is, what about the corn/soybean rotation? Alright, what is going on with that? And remember what we're looking for. Okay, you've seen this one here. This is continuous corn at 0 N. Here's continuous corn at 200 pounds of N. These things are diverging, so the 200 pounds of N is required, basically, for that to be sustainable, if you will, over time compared to the 0 continuous corn. 

When you have it in rotation, basically they kind of sit on each other a little bit. There is a little bit of divergence going on when you add nitrogen to the system. Okay, in this study here in 1987, soybeans were added. And one of the things that happened right away was that when we added soybeans to the system under 0 N, yields went down for corn. In other words, that's a system that is converging on the control or diverging from our traditional ways of producing corn, adding nitrogen, but it's separating over time. And it's really going downhill. Soybeans add nothing to the corn/soybean rotation. They don't add any soil organic matter, things like that. But when you add nitrogen to the system...

it's basically the same as... 

So you really have to add nitrogen to this system in order for it to be sustainable down the road. And more than likely over the next 20 to 25 years, this corn/soybean rotation is going to be here probably because we'll be able to produce enough nitrogen to help sustain that over time. But this is some yield data, if you will, about long-term yield data, about the implications of some of these rotations. And, again, this is very difficult to get a hold of. Alright, so just to kind of summarize here. I think I'm running out of time. A couple of things about the transgenic things that we've seen. One of the things that we've seen is that pesticide use has decreased over time. Soil erosion has decreased as well too because we're able to do more no till production and use the Round-Up ready traits for controlling weeds, which was a major limitation in no till production of corn. We have seen a number of different perspectives emerge. 

You've got the farmer and the industry perspective, but the real major one has been the consumer perspective. If you want a good, I think, fair read of what of these different perspectives with well documented references and things, this report here came out last year, and it's a very good, I think, fair report of the different sides of the issue, again documented fairly well. But we certainly have had our struggles with that. One of the things to keep in mind here is that there's been no documented effects of GMOs within the food system.

There have been studies published showing some lesions on pig stomachs, for example, but those have been retracted, published elsewhere kind of a thing. But there's been over billions of animals units fed, and there's really been no documented effect of GMOs. And if you want a website of all the research that goes into that, that website is right there. It's pages of references. And then, finally, this last point that the corn/soybean system will continue to dominate the Midwest, I think into the future. Whether that's good or bad, I think it'd be better to get other crops in it. 

Wisconsin is a good example of this, where you can have other crops in it. It kind of slows down some of the effects and pressures from Mother Nature. And, again, I think it's a good thing to have, but it's probably going to be the main system for a number of years yet. One of the things I just want to kind of come back to, it's kind of an exciting time to be an agronomist, especially when the price of corn is real high. There's a lot of activity that goes on, a lot of questions from farmers. It's come back down a little bit, but one of the things that we're seeing right now is that there's just tremendous pressure put on Mother Nature by these transgenics, but it's also changing the way we think about and produce crops out there in the landscape. And I think there's going to be a lot of activity as we incorporate more of these transgenic crops into our cropping systems. If you want to follow what we do, we do the social media stuff. We also have a website where, when we publish things and make things available to farmers, they can get an email notifying people of that. So if you want to follow some of our work, you can do that on this website. 

So, with that, I'll stop. I know we're short on, a little close to time, but maybe I can take one or two questions. 
(applause)