This time of year here the local canola fields are blooming creating amazing blankets of saffron yellow across the landscape.

Interspersed between fields of wheat and peas and beans we can at least for now be certain that canola here in the Barossa Valley is non Genetically Modified.

This does not however mean I am against GMO as a means by which we shape our environment. We have been doing this already for thousands of years in less dramatic ways. Hand picking and cultivating or breeding plants and animals with traits we deem useful or pleasing has traditionally been our technology in achieving this transformation. So to me being against GMO because it is wrong is both naive and absurd simply because we have been doing it since the beginning of farming, perhaps the single biggest contributing factor to the creation of our modern, global civilization.

The real challenge as I see it is how to continue this technology in a way which benefits both us and our environment. The real risks as I see them are in big business steaming rolling unsafe iterations of GMOs into the environment in the interests of profit over sustainability or ecological disasters.

So being GMO free is not what we really want. It’s simply a stop-guard for now until we have all worked out how to do it well, for all our sakes and for the sake our environment.

Photo: Robert Rath, ‘Day 932, GMO Free For Now’ 1/1250s f/8 ISO100 200mm