Vermont, as it happens, is one of the few states that tracks herbicide usage. “And so we figured, well shoot, we’ve got the data, let’s take a look at it,” says Will Allen, an organic farmer and activist. “When we did we were shocked, really.” llen says herbicide use has nearly doubled from 2002 to 2012. And he says it’s no coincidence that the increase came during a time period when almost all the state’s corn growers switched from conventional seeds to GMOs. “And we feel like that paradigm one, is hurting farmers, is hurting farmworkers, is trashing the environment, and probably is contaminating products,” Allen says. Over at the Sprague Farm in Brookfield, the view on GMO corn is decidedly different. Sprague, whose family began farming this land 152 years ago, has converted his corn crop entirely to GMOs. Not only is he using less herbicides as a result, Sprague says the hardiness of the GMO corn has allowed him to adopt what’s known as a no-till growing system. “We have tremendous worm activity in our soils,” Sprague says. “Our organic matter is way higher than anybody that tills.” Sprague says he takes pride in his “progressive” farming practices. And he says healthier soil means less erosion, less runoff, and less toxic substances leeching from fields to nearby rivers.
Cary Gigeure, chief of the Agrichemical Management Section at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, says he appreciates Allen’s dogged pursuit to reform agriculture practices.“Will Allen is a brilliant guy. He’s passionate and I enjoy having conversations with him,” Giguere says. “But if you look at the longer term trends and talk with farmers about why they’re choosing what they’re choosing, the data doesn’t support the theory, at least here in Vermont.” Giguere says Allen has cherry-picked data to game the results of his analysis. If you track numbers from 1999 to 2013, for example, atrazine use is down by 40 percent, despite the near-total conversion to GMO crops during that time period. And if you compare metolachlor use in 2008 to metolachlor use in 2013, it’s down by nearly half, despite the fact that GMO corn acreage jumped by about 50 percent over the same time period. State data indicates that farmers actually used less herbicide in 2013 than they did 15 years prior. Allen doesn’t trust the science done by state or federal regulatory bodies.