Tom Brady: Visit my farm and lean food facts

Then again, who is Tom Brady to tell me how to farm? In “The TB12 Method,” the bestselling book he released last week, Brady offers a lot of opinions about farming and food production. He’d do well to learn a few facts, which I’d be glad to teach him. Tom, I want to personally invite you to visit my family farm so we can talk about your food and farming concerns.I happen to be a fan of Brady and his team. I was born in Massachusetts and grew up watching the Patriots.  I was a Patriots fan before Brady was ever on the team. Brady gets sacked for a loss, however, when he takes up the subject of GMOs: “Then of course there’s genetic engineering,” he writes. “Does that sound like something you’d want to eat? It sounds like a chemistry experiment to me.”The quarterback may think this is a clever quip, but in fact it exposes his ignorance. Genetics have nothing to do with chemistry: They’re a feature of biology. They’re also essential to agriculture.On our farm, we grow two kinds of soybeans. One is a non-GMO variety that becomes tofu sold to Asian food processing companies. The other is a GMO crop—in other words, the kind that Brady condemns as a “chemistry experiment,” even though it’s a safe and proven technology for farmers and consumers.Here’s the irony: Our GMO soybeans are high in oleic oil, which allows our customers to extract from them an oil that is free of trans fat.Brady ought to cheer us on: “Basically, trans fats are the worst kind of fat out there,” he writes in his book. He advises his readers to avoid them.