Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Welcome to Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, brought to you by the History Department, the Clio Society, the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University and by the Bexley Public Library. My name is Nick Breyfogle, and I'm an associate professor of history and director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching. And I'll be your host and moderator today. Thank you for joining us. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world's largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018. Monsanto's Roundup Ready seeds, introduced 25 years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. Today, our speaker, Bart Elmore, will examine Monsanto's astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products, including PCBs and Agent Orange, to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology. Let's take a moment to get to know our speaker. Bart Elmore studies the past to understand how we can live more sustainably on this planet. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Bart is an associate professor of environmental history and a core member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. He's the author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca Cola Capitalism, a global ecological history of the world's biggest soft drink brand from his hometown. From 2016 to 2018, he was a Carnegie Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. He finished his second book, Seed Money, (which we'll talk about today) in October of 2021, and is currently completing a book tentatively entitled, Country Capitalism: The American South, and Global Ecological Change. With that introduction, let me mention the plan. Professor Elmore will open with a presentation on the history of Monsanto and our food. And then we'll take your questions, and we'll open things up for discussion. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen on Zoom, and we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can. We had several questions come in during registration. And we'll start with those first and then we'll move on to others from the audience today. So, without further ado, let me pass you over to Professor Bart Elmore, who will take us on an exploration of Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future. Over to you, Professor Elmore.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna pull up the slides here. And thanks, Nick, and Jade for those fantastic introduction[s]. And what a pleasure to see everyone. Thank you for coming out to hear this talk. The best part about writing a book is getting to connect with people all across the country and the globe and doing these book tour talks. So thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. This was a labor of love. [It] took about eight years to finish this book. I traveled all over the place to Vietnam, Brazil, all across the country. I met with some of the top weed scientists, agricultural scientists in the world and and I'm just so happy to be here to present this to you all this afternoon. So this is the book, Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, just came out in October. And really what the book does is it tries to tell a story about the history and rise of this firm, that Nick so eloquently described, a firm that started out as a chemical company in St. Louis in 1901. And that became the largest seller of genetically engineered seeds in the world by the end of the 20th century. And having such a huge influence on our food system. For me, it was a firm I really wanted to get to know. And that was in part because I had written the history of Coca-Cola and looked into the environmental history of this firm, Coca-Cola, and looked at each ingredient that goes into that soft drink beverage. And it was when I was writing the story of caffeine for Coca-Cola that I came across this history of Monsanto that I really wanted to know more about. I traveled to St. Louis at the time, I was writing a dissertation about the history of Coca-Cola and was trying to figure out how they got their caffeine and found out it was Monsanto that was producing caffeine for Coca-Cola. And I went to St. Louis and was given permission by the company to access their corporate records, which is one of the things I wanted to point out today, is that the story you see here comes in part from access to the corporate records that are housed in St. Louis. And I think it's a story that really wowed me as I went through this journey. I really didn't anticipate all the twists and turns. And so I'm gonna take you on some of those twists and turns today, as we talk about this. I'm gonna talk for about 30 minutes here, my plan is [to] just give you a brief outline of how this company came to be. Its early roots, talk a little bit about its pre-agricultural history, and then focus on the story of Roundup Ready technology, this genetically engineered seed suite that they created in the 1990s that I think revolutionized the way that we grow food, the way that we farm, and not only here in the United States, but in other parts of the world. So that's the journey we'll have and then have a lot of time for Q&A. And I'm looking forward to that as well.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

So let's dive into the story here of Monsanto. And I think there's no better place to start than with John Queeny, who you see seated here, with his two children, Edgar and Olguita, his daughter on his lap. His wife is standing over him. And I think maybe that's the first point of history here that's worth mentioning. His wife has named Olga Monsanto, she's of Spanish ancestry. And he of course, names his company that he's going to create in 1901, Monsanto, after his wife. And at first, I wasn't quite sure why he did this. I mean, it's obvious. On the one hand, he's doing this because he wants to honor his wife. And that seems like an appropriate thing to do. But he is John Queeny, why not call the company, the Queeny Chemical Company in St. Louis. And it turns out, there's a document I found in the corporate records that's pretty unique. And what that document showed was that Queeny did not want to name his company the Queeny Chemical Company, in part because he was moonlighting when he started this company, and he was working for another drug company, a company selling chemicals, called the Myers Brothers Drug Company. And he was trying to get this company started in the evenings as a kind of moonlighting project. And that document makes very clear that one of the things he tried... wanted to avoid is this, you know, any kind of confusion, is John Queeny a part of Myers Brothers, is it different? By naming it Monsanto, it might help with that, that confusion, naming it after his wife. And so that's why it's called the Monsanto Chemical Works, and ultimately, the Monsanto Company. And it started in 1901. I love this picture because I am now a parent too. And I have kids around the same age. They are all under five at this point. And Queeny, you can see is maybe not looking so happy. He's had some kind of rough encounters in recent years in his life. He tried to start a chemical company in the late-19th century, but it had burned down. And he'd lost essentially his life savings. So imagine having these two kids under the age of five, we've tried to start a business. He's now 40 years of age, remember, life expectancy in the early 1900s, at this point is maybe 46 or 47 years of age. So he's well up in age and, you know, he's struggling, he's trying to get this thing started. And I think that's the best way to think about Monsanto at the beginning. It's a firm that's very much a scrappy startup. It's trying to out-compete these massive German chemical companies that are the kind of lions of the day. Europe is where most of these chemicals that are ultimately coming from things like coal tar, and then later oil, petrochemical feedstocks... It's companies like Bayer in Germany, or Sandoz in Switzerland that are running and controlling the chemical market. They are the giants, they are in control. And that is one of the ideas behind Monsanto in 1901. The idea is to try and liberate the American market from the stranglehold of these European chemical concerns. Queeny wants to be an American-made chemical firm that can make chemicals in the United States that are, at this time, being imported from overseas. And of course, I think the great irony of this story is that in 2018, Bayer, this massive German pharmaceutical and life sciences company, is going to buy Monsanto. There's a kind of tragedy to the story that the whole point of Monsanto was to try and break free of the stranglehold control of these big businesses like Bayer. And yet in the end of the book, you'll see that Bayer ends up buying Monsanto. I wonder how Queeny would feel, you know, over 100 years later, knowing that history? But he doesn't live to see that. He would live into the 1920s and really get this business off the ground. Again, trying to out-compete these chemical firms overseas. It's really important to point out that World War I was the critical moment that allowed Queeny to expand in the 1910s, when we have our chemical supplies being cut off from those German suppliers overseas that we're now at war with. Companies like Monsanto are allowed to expand and explode in terms of their sales. War, in other words, is a big part of the story. And World War I is probably one of the most important stops. But so too, is another company... part of the story, which is a company called Coca-Cola. Because in those early years, before World War I, what Monsanto was producing was essentially saccharine, an artificial sweetener. In the early, early years, that was the only thing they were producing, an artificial sweetener, that it sold to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola bought its entire stock of saccharine, Monsanto's entire production, to sweeten their beverages. And the reason they did it was because it was cheaper to sweeten beverages with this artificial sweetener than it was to buy sugar and to sweeten with sugar cane, sugar that comes from sugar cane. So Coca-Cola was central to the story. In fact, Monsanto's second major product was caffeine, which the company sold to Coca-Cola. It actually made caffeine, Monsanto did, from the waste tea leaves of the tea industry. So damaged or dirty tea leaves that were left on the floor of tea exchanges, that were kind of the garbage of the tea industry, Monsanto would sweep up that waste product that was cheap, and process out the caffeine and sell that to Coca-Cola. It was such a critical relationship that you can even see here on their company website they say that without Coca-Cola, there would be no Monsanto. It was so critical to the to the beginnings of the firm.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

And you can see in this early period there's no pesticides or insecticides. The firm is not really focused on that. It's focused on what it calls specialty chemicals for the soft drink industry. And in fact, they had to wait for the payments that came from Coca-Cola to pay their workers. That's how significant that contract was. And so we start with saccharine, but of course, over the course of their history, Monsanto would then diversify into a diverse array of compounds. Many of these compounds were made from coal tar, the byproduct of turning coal into coke. It's kind of the impurities that are left over, this black syrupy tar that you could find these carbon-based compounds in and turn it into all sorts of chemicals. By the 1920s, the firm is starting to turn to oil, specifically oil refining companies, that have this waste product that's left over after refining oil into gasoline and other fuels, that they can turn into all these other compounds that you see here compounds like polychlorinated bisphenols, an insulating material that was used in almost everything, beginning in the 1920s and onwards. They also got into DDT in the 1940s and into agricultural chemicals in the post-war period... herbicides like Agent Orange, which was used in the Vietnam War as a defoliant to try and expose... enemy combatants hiding in jungle environments. In fact, Monsanto was the largest producer of Agent Orange by volume during the Vietnam War. We think of Dow Chemical Company as one of the producers of this compound, but Monsanto is actually one of the biggest producers. So in this book, we follow this journey of this firm that started as this scrappy startup by a guy who's down on his luck with two kids. He's just trying to moonlight to get this business up and running. But then it explodes into producing all these compounds that become critical to the economy. And I want to note that Queeny, again did not have a background in chemistry. John Queeny, the guy who starts this company, didn't even have a high school diploma. In fact, in the 1920s when he's being quizzed by a congressman about the chemicals that he's putting out into the marketplace, he actually pauses the congressman and says, "excuse me, sir" he says, "you're getting into chemistry, on which matter, I am rather weak." And here, of course, is this baron of this massive chemical company that's going to affect so many different lives, admitting in the 1920s that he doesn't really even understand some of the basic chemistry of some of the compounds that he's producing. In fact, he has to import chemists from Switzerland and other parts of Europe to actually make the compounds that he's going to sell internationally by the 1920s, and 1930s, and 1940s.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

And in the 1920s, he hands off the company to his son, Edgar Queeny, who radically expands the business. They produce all these different compounds, not just specialty chemicals for the soft drink industry, but these things like polychlorinated bisphenols, DDT, and Agent Orange. I can't go into all these stories. The book does, and it's a really wild journey to tell the story of how they got into DDT, which they branded Santo Ban, that was Monsanto's brand of DDT, and how they got into Agent Orange. But along the way, I found some pretty wild documents, and either in corporate archives, or as a result of litigation against the firm. One of the documents I wanted to show you came out of the chemical industry archives that I used to write this book. This is a document that shows a confidential internal document that Monsanto executives were writing when they were debating what to do about polychlorinated bisphenols in the 1960s. By then it was clear that polychlorinated bisphenols were an extremely toxic compound. These PCBs were in everything. I mean, we're talking about in receipt paper. It was in the paint that lined pools. It was in the paint that lined silos that held our food. It was in the cardboard that held cereal that we ate in the mornings. It was in artificial Christmas trees. It was in, most importantly, transformers and electrical equipment. It was again, this kind of fire-retardant material that ended up in everything. And Monsanto was the only producer of PCBs in the United States, which made it extremely liable in the 1960s when it becomes clear that this was an exceptionally toxic compound. And so in 1969, the company is trying to figure out what to do about this incredibly profitable product line. And you can see here at the top, they're saying internally in this confidential meeting, "the subject is snowballing. Where do we go from here?" And they discussed alternatives in this meeting, one of which, of course, was the one that you might think of, well, maybe we should stop producing PCBs, given how toxic the material is, we should quote "go out of the business." But that wasn't the only alternative they considered in this meeting. You'll see point two here on the document says that one of the things we might want to do with this toxic compound is just, quote, "sell the hell out of them as long as we can, and do nothing else." And note that the person had to go back and put a little note here to add the "hell out of them" in that. And also you see here, customers, like General Electric and other customers, weren't even told about the internal studies that showed some of these problems with these compounds. What do we tell our customers? And when do we tell them? Right? These were the types of documents I was able to uncover or reveal in this book, that I think get to this story that I think a lot of people know about Monsanto, the story of a company, that at times, made some pretty unethical decisions in terms of selling products that they knew were toxic, even though internally, their studies were showing that there were real problems with them. And you're gonna see those stories in this book. But I also want to stress something that I really wanted to try my best in the story, not just to tell a story of evil people doing evil things, right? I think this was also a story, that you see in this book at times, people who really have good intentions, scientists who come in the firm who are creating new compounds that they believe can save the world. And there's also stories in this book of technologies that had great promise, but that backfire in ways... and I actually think that human story of sometimes how good people inside these firms might be involved in technologies or processes that have these unintended consequences, was really important for me to tell. And I tried to tell those human stories to tell... a story that involves both the good and the bad throughout this. But you can see there were documents like this as well, that I didn't shy away from, pointing out where unethical decisions were made, or even on ethical discussions in so many ways about what to do about such a toxic compound as PCBs.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

So as I said, you know, Monsanto gets into agricultural chemicals in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and gets into it in a big way. It becomes a major producer of herbicides and insecticides. 2,4,5-T, one of the compounds in Agent Orange, they were one of the largest producers of this chemical in the United States. But of course, by the end of the 1960s, we learned that a lot of these early herbicides are quite toxic. And one of the things the company wants to do is find an environmentally friendly herbicide that it can sell on a large market after the Vietnam War and into the 1970s. And one of those compounds that they turn to, in this period, is a compound called Roundup. Well, it's branded Roundup, but it's actually called glyphosate, the active ingredient, glyphosate. The herbicidal properties of this compound are found and discovered in 1970. This becomes commercialized as a herbicide to be used by farmers and by gardeners and by pretty much everyone in the economy. By the mid-1970s, Roundup becomes the first billion-dollar herbicide in history, it becomes a blockbuster product for Monsanto, in part because it's such a broad spectrum weed killer, it's so effective at killing weeds. And through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, this becomes a really critical product. Most of us know Roundup is the most widely used herbicide today. And of course, the controversy surrounding it after the World Health Organization, in 2015, issued an announcement saying that it had found in a meta-analysis that Roundup was a probable human carcinogen. And there's been a debate about that. And the EPA has done its own studies and said it does not see that link. But when that happened in 2015, Roundup became this massive controversial product in some ways and led to a series of litigation, which we can talk about in the Q&A. But the interesting thing I want to point out in terms of the history of all this, that I didn't expect to find, is that one of the reasons that glyphosate, specifically a phosphate based, a phosphorus (that's why gly-pho-sate) phosphorous based compound becomes the kind of target for the firm, is in part, because of another product the company had been selling. Monsanto had created All detergent that it used and sold on a wide scale in the 1950s and into the 1960s. But All detergent, by the 1960s, was coming under fire. And one of the builders in All is a phosphate-based compound. And phosphate-based detergents were being targeted by regulators because it was argued that phosphate-based detergents were increasing eutrophication, algae blooms, in the Great Lakes and other areas, contributing to water pollution in many parts of the country. And so there was a move in many states to ban the sale of phosphate-based detergents. And this is precisely the moment that Monsanto begins playing with finding new compounds that it can use its phosphate, that it's mining by the way out in southeast Idaho at great expense and at great capital cost to the firm, and they're trying to figure out what do we do with all this phosphate that we're not going to be able to put into the detergents. And it turns out that Roundup becomes, as one executive put it, a strategic exit from that phosphate-base detergent business. No longer are you going to put that phosphate into your detergents, you can now channel it towards Roundup. And this product becomes, again, an extremely important product for the firm going in to the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

But there's a problem. And I didn't expect to see this until I got deep into the corporate records. But the big problem for the company was this issue with the fact that most of Monsanto's products, including Roundup, ultimately were derived from finite fossil fuels, specifically, oil. And you can see this from their 1980 annual report. The company said "today, more than 80% of our products depend on hydrocarbons derived from oil and gas." And many people watching today may have lived through that period and know why that would be a problem in 1980. Of course, the massive energy crisis has hit the country and ultimately the globe, the OPEC oil embargo of 73 and 74. Of course, the Middle East, conflicts in 1979 spike oil prices. Monsanto was scared, what do we do? Almost everything we make comes from the byproducts of the oil industry and oil prices are skyrocketing. And not only that, but big oil majors like Exxon, Chevron, other companies are now vertically integrating into producing their own chemicals in-house instead of giving us their waste products to produce chemicals at cheap. This was a real problem for Monsanto and this is why this company that made chemicals for so long pivots and begins trying to invest in biotechnology. It was the energy crisis, in so many ways, that pushed Monsanto into this kind of more profitable product line that they were really interested in. And biotechnology looked really promising at the time, there was a great deal of investment in pharmaceuticals. And there was tremendous new technologies and genetic engineering coming online, this seemed like a growth area for the firm. And so they pivoted, starting to unload a lot of the chemicals they were producing, and getting into producing genetically engineered crops. This is going to be a big part of their portfolio in the future. They're not going to give up on every chemical, especially chemicals like Roundup, that are making them about a billion dollars by the end of the 1980s annually, a huge profitable line for the firm, making something like 30% of their profits by 1990, a huge, huge, huge, important chemical that they're going to hang on to. But, they're going to start pivoting into trying to become a biotech company, and specifically trying to become a seed company that can produce genetically engineered crops, specifically two types of crops, Roundup Ready crops that can tolerate heavy spraying of Roundup. So these are crops that are genetically engineered, like corn, cotton, and soybeans, that are genetically engineered to be able to be sprayed with Roundup throughout the growing season, and the crops will survive, it'll kill all the weeds, but the crops will be able to tolerate that spraying of Roundup. That's one series of crops they try and create. And the second series of crops they try and create are BT crops, crops that can produce their own insecticide, known as BT, that can keep pests at bay. If we can genetically engineer these crops to have this trait that can produce this insecticide, it's almost like crops are producing their own insecticide and fending off pests as a result. That transition began in the 1980s. And it began in earnest to develop these crops. And the point I want to make is that it was impart inspired by that energy crisis. By this concern that 80% of what they were producing, were coming from chemicals coming from the oil industry. And so you can see this, Monsanto was successful with creating Roundup Ready crops. In 1996, we see the first commercialization of these genetically engineered crops, first in soybeans, and then cotton and corn. And you can see the adoption rates here just how fast these crops were adopted by farmers. And it makes sense because these crops were incredibly, incredibly...they were almost magical to farmers. Think about it, you can now just spray your crops during the growing season, during the growing season once your crops have emerged, and your crops will survive. But it will keep your fields magically clean, it'll kill all the weeds. You couldn't do that before you genetically engineered crops to tolerate Roundup. And so you see this magical adoption of this technology with something like 90% of farmers going in on this for the major commodity crops by the 2010s. And we also see farmers adopting BT crop technology as well.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Now at this time, the head of the company was a guy named Bob Shapiro, and I actually got to talk to Bob Shapiro when I was working on this book. And he believed, in so many ways, that this was going to be a positive revolution that would help out the environment and the planet. It would help us feed the world, but also reduce farmers dependency on chemicals. In fact, in this Harvard Business Review article in 1997, he said that really what we are, is like Microsoft, we're selling genetic software in the form of these seeds, that's going to allow farmers to reduce their herbicide usage, we're going to be replacing stuff with information, we're going to make plants smarter, so that farmers don't have to use as much herbicide on their crops. And his point was all they need to use is glyphosate, they're not gonna have to use all these other chemicals to try and keep back weeds. This was the argument at the time, this is going to be good for farmers, and this is going to be good for the planet. And he also said that this is going to radically increase our food production. And we're gonna see this exponential growth and yield with this new genetic engineering technology. So I want to end by talking about those two promises. Did they play out? Well, here's what the data shows. After genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops were introduced in 1996, the use of glyphosate exploded. It was already a popular herbicide by 1992. You can see here on the graph of the country estimated use on agricultural land but look by 2017 how much glyphosate is being used on farm country. You can even see Ohio here for those who are local. This was one of the consequences of that Roundup Ready revolution, glyphosate was being used almost exclusively by farmers to beat back weeds during the growing season in the 1990s and early 2000s. Because they had crops that could tolerate Roundup, [you] could spread as much as you need it. And glyphosate use exploded. And here's a fascinating chart I put together with a data scientist that shows what happens. Notice, look at glyphosate use, this is pounds per acre, and we're just looking at soybeans, for some of the target states that were big soybean producers. Notice 1992, you have some substantial amounts of glyphosate being used, but notice how much glyphosate is being used as we go into the early 2000s. It's replacing, and this is a dotted line here, all these other herbicides, herbicides like 2,4-D that goes back to the 1940s, herbicides like Dicamba, that goes back to the 1960s. And the argument was, these chemicals are old, and they're more toxic. And Bob Shapiro was saying, look, we're creating an environmental good here, look at the drop in our herbicide usage. And glyphosate, which at the time was argued as being a more environmentally friendly herbicide is replacing these more toxic herbicides, this looks really good. But notice what happens. By the early 2000s, nature fights back. So much glyphosate is being used exclusively on farms, that weeds begin to adapt resistance to glyphosate. And as a result, farmers are having to beat back those weeds that have developed resistance to glyphosate, they have to turn back to those older and more toxic herbicides, to try and kill weeds that have developed resistance to glyphosate. So Bob Shapiro's promise was in part true, right? In the beginning, we do see this radical reduction in toxic herbicides being used. But over time, weed resistance develops because of the selection pressures, put on that environment by glyphosate. And we see this rise in all other herbicides coming back in recent years. If you want to look at it as a bar chart, you can see here's glyphosate, and here's all other herbicides. And you can see that we're not using less herbicides, today, we're using a lot more and not just of glyphosate, which explodes. But of all these older chemicals that go back to the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, it's an old chemistry that's being used to grow our food today. And that's one of the messages of this book. But the future of food, which promises being this new and radically, you know, chemically reduced, kind of futuristic type of agriculture, actually looks like a very old agriculture. But we're using older and older chemicals, and a lot more of them today.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

I've got three more slides. And I know I'm a little bit over time, but I want to see if I can get these slides in because they matter. One of the chemicals that we've seen come back in heavy use is a chemical called Dicamba, which was first commercialized in the 1960s. And Dicamba, again, is being sprayed on crops, in part because Monsanto has created a new series of seeds that make crops not only tolerant to Roundup but makes crops tolerant to Dicamba as well. So now you can spray your crops with not just Roundup throughout the growing season, you can spray it with Roundup, and this chemical called Dicamba. And these seeds are called extend seeds. And the reason you're doing that is because glyphosate is going to kill a lot of weeds. But now there's a bunch of weeds that are tolerant to glyphosate. So Dicamba will kill all those weeds. It was supposed to be this fix to the Roundup- resistant weed problem. But note the sticker. When these seeds were first introduced in 2015, the EPA told farmers that they could not spray Dicamba on these Dicamba-tolerant seeds. And you might be saying, what, that doesn't make any sense. Why would farmers not be allowed to spray Dicamba on seeds that have been genetically engineered to tolerate Dicamba. And the reason was because the EPA was concerned about Dicamba. At the time, the formulations that were on the market were volatile. If you sprayed Dicamba in a hot temperature during the growing season Dicamba would vaporize. It would drift off target. So if you spray it in hot, hot temperatures Dicamba has a tendency to jump up in the air, as farmers will say, they call it jumping, and it'll drift off target, and hit farmers nearby who may not have Dicamba-tolerant crops. It's a major problem. And even though Monsanto said in 2017 and 2018, we have a new Dicamba formulation that doesn't vaporize. We have seen Dicamba drift affecting farmers all across the country, it's become a massive problem with peach farmers, vineyards, for example, being hit by Dicamba. There is no such thing as a Dicamba-tolerant peach farm. There is no such thing as a Dicamba-tolerant vineyard. And it's become a huge problem. I sat in on this case, Bader Farms, which was a peach farmer filing suit against Monsanto in 2020, actually went to the trial. And I'll tell you, my jaw dropped when I saw the documents that were released in that trial. These are the last two images I'm going to show you and then we can have a conversation. In that trial...a document was released; you can see it was listed as company confidential. It became exhibit 22, in this case, in which Monsanto was coaching its sales team on how to sell Dicamba-tolerant seeds to farmers. And you can see here that there might be an issue. Maybe a farmer doesn't have a resistance issue, doesn't have Roundup-resistant or glyphosate-resistant weeds. How do we sell this seed to him, this new Dicamba tolerant seed. And you can see here this kind of damning document, it says, you can sell it to the farmer by telling them it'll be protection from their neighbor, i.e., Dicamba is going to be drifting all across the country, it's going to be vaporizing and volatilizing. And either you can buy our seeds and have protection from that drift or not. This was company confidential. This was not released to the public. But it was released in trial. I was sitting in the trial when this document was released, my jaw dropped when I saw it, because it was kind of admission of the knowing the problem before it was even released into the market in 2015. This document was from 2013. Last slide. The email chains that were released in that trial were equally damning. And it showed that people inside the company knew that Dicamba would drift, knew that there was going to be a massive problem when it came to Dicamba-tolerance around the country. And here you can see an email. This was a person who worked inside the company on soybeans and cotton as you can see here, and you can see how he even thought that pink sticker would never prevent farmers from spraying Dicamba on their crops, they had just bought Dicamba-tolerant seeds. Of course, they were going to spray Dicamba even if there wasn't an approved formulation by the EPA.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

And look at this email right here, you'll see him saying "it's great that all I get to work with a group of renegades that launch a technology without a label and think one sticker, that pink sticker, is going to keep us out of jail. If that was the case, another person on the team would be covered in stickers." This is what I mean by the problems of the past are coming into the future. Dicamba an old, old chemical in so many ways, is wreaking havoc out in farm country today. And it's a part of a larger history that I've tried to outline in this book, Seed Money. And I'm just so thankful that you gave me the time to share a little bit of that story with you today. I'll stop here. I know it's a lot to digest. I'm happy to go into any of it in the Q&Q. But thank you for your time, and I look forward to our discussion.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Bart, thank you so very much for that really remarkable and really interesting talk today. We have a lot of questions coming in. And I will do my best to make it through as many as I possibly can. Let me start with one that you've touched on a fair amount here, which really has to do with how is it that people in the company could balance the kind of good intentions of what they were hoping to do with the reality of these documents that you're showing us, where they knew that their good intentions weren't living up to their hopes? How did they balance that? And how do you how do you balance that in the book?

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Yeah, it was really interesting because I wanted to get to know people as much as I could inside the company. As I mentioned, I talked with Bob Shapiro, who had been the head of the company, I've talked to people that worked in lower levels of the firm, and I really feel fortunate to have had that opportunity to get those perspectives and to add them to the story because I think they matter. You know, what I saw and during that process, I'll just tell you one story that comes to mind, Nick, was a person you'll meet in the book, who reached out to me who worked inside the company. I think it's apt to call him a whistleblower. And just listening to him, we went back and forth over a course of several months about whether he was going to go public with the information that he had. And it was related to Dicamba. It was related to the story I just told you about... this Dicamba drift problem. And just listening to this person, you could tell he was a person who had joined this company, in part because he believed in the mission of the firm, that he was gonna be doing work that was going to be helping to feed billions of people, that it was going to be about developing new technologies that can help feed a hungry planet. And yet, he got caught in this moment where he's seeing this problem that we kind of talked about at the end here. And you can just feel the tension. I mean, we talked for months, I had lawyers at Norton, we had lawyers in Atlanta, we had lawyers in St. Louis, I asked him to get his own lawyer so that we could talk through all the ramifications of what would happen if he went public, and violated, for example, his NDA, talking about what he wanted to talk about. And it was just a really personal experience, this person talked to me about what it would mean, you know, if he were brought to trial, I mean, he had two kids that were going to school... would he be able to pay for their college? Would his pension be affected? And just, you could feel this culture within the corporation, in a way, a culture of surveillance, that he was clearly feeling. And you see in the book that I ultimately can't go public in the book with what he wanted to say. So the story is actually about how he doesn't talk. And I think that's a story that we see time and time again in the story, of people inside the company who see something that they're not exactly okay with. And yet, what do they do? They've got families, they've got kids, how do you negotiate that? So I write in the book to show that there's this kind of culture, corporate culture of keep this story inside, you know, and a culture of not releasing information that clearly should be in the public domain. The last thing I'll say on that is a document that says Dicamba driftees, which is what Monsanto internally called farmers who were hit by drift. They say this is an internal term only, right? Never use this outside the company. Same thing with PCBs, we now know this stuff is toxic. There's a document that says, don’t offer up information. So this culture of being an information gatekeeper, and I think the tensions I was able to see real people in trying to grapple with that you see that tension in the book. And I hope it's a human story that people will connect with.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Well it seems like a tension we have in many of our kind of business community and government community in general, is this sort of tension of how much, how often to admit mistakes, how much knowledge to make public? These are difficult things and issues kind of broadly in our society. We have a bunch of questions about... well, two questions that I think are connected. One is "were there scientists inside Monsanto who understood the resistance to glyphosate, for example, would occur?" I mean, did they understand? I mean, that's a relatively well-known kind of concept, they must have understood that this kind of thing would have happened. And then kind of building off of that we have a number of questions about: "so what are the impacts of all of this? You know, is there an impact of the use of herbicides like Dicamba or glyphosate on soil quality, on our ability long term to be able to produce food? And what's the human impact on human health of these kinds of herbicides?"

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Yeah, so on the first question, it's actually pretty startling. In the 1990s, Monsanto, and you can see this in the book, and one of the things I've really worked hard in the book was to document everything I possibly could so that people that are interested in this would be able to go to the original sources. So you'll see a study in the 1990s, that Monsanto commissioned, which by the way, was part of the strategy during these years, to be out in front to have company-funded studies be the kind of studies that either the EPA was reviewing or that were in the kind of public domain to kind of control the conversation. And in the 1990s, Monsanto produced a study that said that based on our experience with Roundup, which has been around since the 1970s, we don't think resistance is going to develop. And yet, weed scientists here at Ohio State, which I should say a big shout out to Ohio State, we had these amazing weed scientists that I got to travel along with, Extension Service folks, and go out and spend time with farmers and to talk with them about the day-to-day experience, told me about what it was like in that period to be seeing these studies coming out with Monsanto saying, "No, Roundup won't develop resistance in weeds," and then in their own greenhouses, clearly seeing it. There's a story, for example, a source, who's in his greenhouse, and Monsanto officials come in to badger him, he's finding this weed and he's saying, hey, look, I'm show low-level tolerance to Roundup in this, I think it was, I don't know if it was Palmer Amaranth or what it was. He said, I'm seeing low-level resistance. And Monsanto said, you don't know what you're talking about. There's no resistance here. And this person said that he sent his graduate students out of his greenhouse, and said, I quote, read this Monsanto rep, the riot act, he said, "You don't come in here to Ohio State, and tell people who've been doing this for 30 to 40 years, that we don't know what we're doing. You know, we're seeing this tolerance, and it's happening." And it makes sense because look at the amount of Roundup we're using. I mean, farmers were literally using this almost exclusively. So a fifth-grader could have predicted it. And they were seeing it. At some point, Nick, it didn't matter. I mean, farmers, its just the cat is out of the bag, it's just not working as effectively. And so Monsanto had to pivot. And that's when they started saying, okay, we have the solution, these extend seeds and then there's going to be a new series of seeds. So that's kind of how it played out. They fought it. And they fought it aggressively, even here at Ohio State, to try and prevent that... being able to delay the game a little bit.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

The second question was about effects. You know, any number of effects, we could talk about the human health effects of exposure to glyphosate, which again, given the IARC study in 2015, I think raises a lot of questions about not just for low dosage that potentially we are consuming, of glyphosate, in our food, which we know of course, glyphosate is in the food system, given the amount that's being used. But the acute exposure that many farmers, many laborers, farm laborers, are experiencing in the field. I often read studies that will say, well, we don't need to worry as consumers, because it's very low levels of glyphosate in our food, of course, what does that mean over a long period of time when you're chronically exposed to a compound like that? But more importantly, do we care at all about the people who produce our food, you know, who are exposed to this chemical on such a high level? And back to your point about Dicamba. It's not just that, it's also now you have Dicamba, 2,4-D, Roundup, you have them all being sprayed in high concentrations together. What are the systemic effects of all that happening now is another big question. But the bigger issue I'd say is, the game is up on this kind of chemical-based intensive agriculture that goes back to the 1940s, you could argue it's a product of war, that I think is showing that it's broken, how long can you play this game out? Okay, so we're starting to see Dicamba tolerant weeds, right, because you're spraying Dicamba at such large volume, well, maybe we'll create seeds that can tolerate five different herbicides, which is being pushed by Bayer today with the EPA. That game has a short lifecycle, you know, and I think what we're seeing, in other words in this history is that the system is broken. And that we're gonna have to think much harder, as you said, about soil health, about using cover crops about going back to old time-honored traditions, [and] techniques that aren't going to rely so heavily on these chemical inputs, especially given that they're all, as I mentioned, based on petrochemicals, at a time when we're trying to deal with climate change and get off fossil fuels. It seems like an imperative for our time that we read the history and see the warning signs, and pivot now. And I think we are, farmers are doing it. I'm actually optimistic given what farmers are doing in fields today.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

And this was a question that we had from several people in the audience about... I mean, I think they, like you, are worried about the future of their children. And they're wondering, "so how do we structure our agriculture now? How do we ensure we make enough food but in a sustainable way that we can pass on to the next generation and to generations after that?" I mean, as you're saying, is part of the story simply returning to some of the practices from the past that we know work because they have worked for generations? Or are there other things that you would suggest now, having seen seeing all of this in action... what are farmers doing? What would you like to see them do to create that kind of sustainable agricultural future?

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Yeah, I mean, I think probably will end up being a combination. I'm no Luddite. I should mention to folks, you know, when I wrote this book, I was a person who my first job was working with PCR machines, one of my early jobs with the CDC, you know, I was working with, one could argue with kind of genetic manipulation. And I was very interested in the science of that. This was not meant ever to be a book that just sees genetic engineering, as I put in the book, evil in toto, you know? I think they're probably going to be some combination of new technologies and interesting ideas. What I think was wrong with what we see in the last 25 years was the way it was deployed. This technology was clearly deployed in ways that didn't diminish our chemical dependency but deepened it. And I think that has a lot to do with the business history of what was being sold. What was was on the line, the profits, for example, that were driving it, and why it was so critical that the company push Roundup, and maybe not other alternatives. And so, I think that's part of the story is not being so beholden to one company like Monsanto or Bayer, because when you do, the product pipeline, it's such a tunnel vision for the for the potential of what we can do out in agriculture. But I think we ended up in these cul-du-sacs. So I think it may be there's some pretty cool technologies that are coming online, I think, a lot of computer-based robotics that are emerging. If you spend time with farmers today, by the way, it feels like you're out in Silicon Valley, there's just so much tech out there. Some of it seems, you know, I have a lot of questions about it, maybe it's a little bit fantastical. But on the other hand, maybe there might be some cool applications. But you're right. On the other hand, we also just got to go back to the past and say, there were ways to nurture our soil, to pay attention to how we grow food, that I think we moved away from when it became so easy to do this kind of Roundup Ready system. And I hope to go back to that, in many ways. The other thing that I think is really, really critical. The biggest thing, though, I think, is we became so obsessed with yield, yield, yield yield, it was all about yield. And instead of asking, "well, what yield?" What crops? I mean, right now we talk about yield yield yield was soybeans and corn, we got to produce more gotta produce more. I mean, think about it in a country that's actually trying to figure out what to do with its surplus, it's actually turning it into ethanol, for cars, trying to figure out what to do with all this, right? I mean, one big thing is think about what we grow, not just trying to grow what we grow now, more. But changing the types of things were growing, mixing our agriculture. If we really want to grow food, maybe we shouldn't grow as much of this material that actually doesn't go into food that humans eat. And most of this is going into fodder for animals. So there's much more efficient ways to feed the world. And I think we got to confront that yield message, which is something that industry promoted for so many years, because it made a lot of money. But it might not be the best way to feed a hungry world.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Tell us a little bit what you think about the rule or responsibility of government regulatory agencies in this story. Yeah, what's their role? And what should their role have been?

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

I'm inspired by that question to bring back up the slide deck so I can show you a kind of jaw dropping thing, here, let me show... if I can show you here. I think the role is that we need to have much more aggressive action from agencies like the EPA, agencies that are responsible for making sure that we don't head down these cul-du-sacs that are I think harmful, not only in terms of producing food, but harmful to other farmers. Notice this, this is the EPA website talking about Dicamba. And this is December of 2021. The EPA published a report talking about Dicamba-related incidents that caused damage to non-target crops. They say, "despite the control measures implemented by the EPA in 2020, Dicamba registration and that decision to approve the use of Dicamba, these incident reports showed little change in numbers, severity, or geographic extent of Dicamba related incidents when compared to the reports that the agency received before the 2020 control measures were required." Now, that's a mouthful. My point here is that currently, this is December, so it's basically right now, the EPA is admitting that nothing they're doing is fixing the problem. Farmers are getting hit by Dicamba that have no defense against that system. And we can either let that be the norm, or we, as citizens, can demand more of our regulatory agencies to say that's not how a food system should be. That's not liberation. That's not choice. Farmers should not have to buy seeds to protect themselves. And in the case of peach farmers, there is no protection for them to buy. So I think that's the big thing, yes, I think the EPA is dragging its feet on some of these things and... could do more to protect farmers who are getting harmed by this. And more importantly, we need to have firmer firewalls between the companies that are being regulated, and the agencies doing the regulating. In this story, you see time and time again, the companies are producing the studies that are often used to greenlight the use of a chemical. That's just not the way it should be. And I even filed a FOIA here with Ohio State (Freedom of Information Act request) and you'll see it in the book, to look at how much money Monsanto was giving to Ag programs here at Ohio State. And not surprising, it was a lot of money going specifically to study things like Dicamba and its efficacy. Now, the integrity of the scientists I met here at Ohio State is unquestionable. I mean, they were amazing folks to work with. But we shouldn't live in a society where the people whose products are being regulated are paying for the studies that are going to be used to regulate the product, that's just not a safe place to be in, it doesn't build... even if people have good integrity, it doesn't build confidence in the system. So giving our regulatory agencies more power and resources to do the job they're supposed to do, I think is a key message of the book.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

We've had a bunch of questions about the international ramifications of all of this. And perhaps you could talk a little bit about, you know, what are the effects of, you know, the monopoly, basically, of GMO seeds and chemicals going to developing countries? What responsibility do organizations like the WTO hold for supporting and promoting trade in these kinds of toxic products? World Bank, IMF, Green Revolution, all of these sorts of things?

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Yeah. I think it's an incredibly important story, I think, unfortunately, we haven't seen the reverse with the WTO and others, right? I mean, I think this system has been seen as a net good in so many ways. For communities like Brazil, for example, Argentina, places where this GMO technology has spread... widely. And yet, we see the same story of kind of corporate consolidation happening in these places. And in the book, you kind of see it, it's a really weird situation, because oftentimes, what's happening is, we see the problems in the United States. And then they're going to be, you know, it's almost like we see them exported to Brazil, after we've already learned here in the United States what's problematic about it. Dicamba is a good example. I went down to Brazil to study this using the Ohio State gateway, which is like an Ohio State embassy in Brazil. It was amazing to connect me to all these great farmers and scientists there. And if I was walking around, talking to people, so many people, and they were just scared to death about the arrival of Dicamba. Because they were watching what was happening in the United States with this volatile chemical, causing all this havoc and damage to farmers who didn't want to have anything to do with Dicamba. Think about it for an organic soybean farmer, you know, your organic, you don't use chemicals, if this stuff drifts on your property, what protection do you have? And the word I kept hearing from people was we're scared, we're scared. And it was weird. It was like living in history, we were seeing the history from the United States, how it played out, and then seeing this technology being proposed in a place, and I was literally writing about this kind of fear of what's going to happen if this comes to these places. Think about it, you're talking about the Cerrado. This is a place that's tropical. So you've got in Brazil, the middle of Brazil, so hot, hot, hot temperatures, if it's going to be bad in Arkansas, what do you think it's going to be like there? So I think one of the things we see in this book, and other words internationally, is just the failure of the lessons we've learned here. Learning those lessons and stopping them from being exported overseas to other places. I think we could do a lot better job of that in so many ways. Bayer, of course, owns Monsanto now. And so there is inherently an international component to the story in a way that there wasn't before, you know, with the headquarters being in St. Louis. And I should just mention that Bayer has reached out since the book has come out. And they've said that they've learned a lot from the book, and that they're hopeful to change as a result of what they've read in the book. And we're in conversation. I don't know what that's going to look like. But, I'm open to a conversation. And I think the real question is, what do we do internationally? Given what we've seen here in the United States, it's one of the things I'm going to press the company on as we have those conversations.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Wonderful, thank you, Bart. I know you would love to talk all day about this. And I know probably many of the audience would love to as well, but we've come to the end of our hour. And so I just wanted to, first of all, thank you, Bart, so very much for taking the time to enlighten us with our kind of new understandings today. I hope you will join me in giving Bart a big round of applause for his work today. Thank you.

 

Dr. Bart Elmore 

Thank you.

 

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

And let me just say a very big thank you to all of you for joining us today. We're really grateful that you came. We're grateful for Professor Elmore for sharing his expertise and his passion for history. We did our best to get through the questions. My apologies to those who we didn't quite get to. But you know how to reach out to Professor Elmore. He's easy to find and I shared his personal website in answer to one of the questions. So thank you. I'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, particularly Jade Lac and Maddie Kurma for their help today, the History Department, the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, the Clio Society, the Bexley Public Library and the magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective for their sponsorship. And once again, thank you, our audience, for your excellent questions and for your ongoing connection to Ohio State. Stay safe and healthy, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye bye