Genetically altered crop gets test in Amish country

[Rick Roush <rick.roush@adelaide.edu.au>]

Another farmer's view:

Genetically altered crop gets test in Amish country

 - George Strawley, The Associated Press via New Jersey Online
http://www.checkbiotech.org/root/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsletter&topic_id=1&subt
opic_id=1&doc_id=1015

 GAP, Pa. (AP) -- As he rested four Belgian horses in the shade before
riding his cart out to spread more manure on his fields, Amish farmer
Daniel Dienner Jr. saw no conflict between his traditional values and the
genetically engineered tobacco he expects to plant.

"I myself like biotechnology," Dienner, 41, said from beneath the brim of
his straw hat. "I feel it's what the farmers will be using in the future.
There's a lot of technology out there that I feel we're just right on the
edge of. ... I think it's exciting."

Modified to contain a gene that inhibits nicotine, the tobacco to be
planted by Dienner and other Amish farmers in and around Lancaster next
month will be bought by a company that wants to produce a virtually
nicotine-free cigarette by early next year. The approximately 550 farmers
also hope it will help them preserve their rustic ways. Amish trace their
roots to Jakob Amman, who broke with the Mennonite church in Europe in the
17th century. Followers still dress in the plain manner prescribed by him,
with untrimmed beards for men and bonnets for women, and strict adherents
shun any technology deemed by church leaders as divisive to the community......

(clipped for brevity)

 For the Amish, tobacco -- which is still farmed much the same as it
was a century ago -- is both a cash crop and a particularly good fit with
their familial ways. Most of the Pennsylvania farmers are from the
German-descended Amish or Mennonite communities, with some others -- known
in local parlance as "English" -- also participating. Dienner, his wife
and seven children, aged 7 to 17, invest hour after hour in their crop.
They will hand-plant 52,000 seedlings provided by the company, harvest the
plants 12 weeks later, and strip the stalks after the leaves dry in the
tobacco shed.

Dienner said his youngest children are particularly useful in stripping,
which requires them to remove about 17 leaves from each stalk, thus
freeing older family members for other tasks. "I grew up with tobacco," he
said. "I feel that's one of the things that helped me learn responsibility
and work. It teaches a whole family to work." As for the money, Hess said
farmers can earn from $2,500 to $3,500 an acre for the Vector tobacco,
compared to between $300 and $400 for corn.

Technologies like genetic modification of crops are not inconsistent with
the tradition-bound life of the Amish, said Don Kraybill, a professor at
Messiah College who studies the sect. Rather, members reject innovations
like automobiles or mechanized tractors that undercut the community and
its work ethic or tie the community too closely to the outside world,
Kraybill said. Inventions that make the community more productive --
pesticides, for instance -- are cautiously accepted, he said. "They really
try to control the technology rather than have the technology control
them," Kraybill said.