- It's not the bucolic, sun-dappled landscape you might
envision when picturing American farmland. But a chilly, damp cave with
no natural light just may be the most productive agricultural environment
around.
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- Purdue researchers and entrepreneur Doug Ausenbaugh didn't
launch an underground farm because they thought it would yield more crops.
They wanted to provide biotech companies a safe environment for growing
crops containing pharmaceutical drugs for humans. But they were pleasantly
surprised to find that not only did the former quarry apparently keep pollen
from the corn, tobacco, soybeans, tomatoes and potatoes from escaping,
but it also led to higher yields than greenhouses or outdoor fields.
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- Some researchers believe that growing drugs in crops
could be a cheaper and easier way to get biotech drugs than growing them
in vats of genetically modified bacteria, as it's done today. But companies
pursuing this approach have suffered setbacks due to government regulators,
protests from environmental groups, and at least one incident in which
a pharmaceutical crop nearly slipped into the food supply.
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- Last year, Ausenbaugh founded Controlled Pharming Ventures
to grow crops in a former quarry and underground warehouse, in the hope
that it would reduce the risks inherent in "pharming." With the
help of Purdue scientists and a grant from the Indiana 21st Century Research
and Technology Fund, he seems at least to have proven that crops can grow
robustly in a seemingly inhospitable 60-acre former limestone quarry in
Marengo, Indiana.
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- "We didn't know if there would be some trace contaminant
or gas in the atmosphere that could have been a show stopper to normal
crop growth and development," said Cary Mitchell, a Purdue horticulture
professor, in an e-mail. "There wasn't. Things went smoothly."
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- The average yield for the genetically modified corn (Bt
corn, which contains a gene that produces a protein that kills larvae of
the European corn borer) grown in the facility was 337 bushels per acre.
The researchers also grew corn in a greenhouse, getting 267 bushels per
acre. The average yield for field corn in the United States is just 142
bushels per acre. The researchers say they can achieve higher yields in
the cave thanks to the controlled environment.
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- Although it's more expensive to grow crops in an artificial
environment, higher yields could help offset the cost.
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- Mitchell says that if they can make the lighting system
even more efficient, the cave system could revolutionize U.S. farming,
whether it involves growing genetically modified or conventional crops.
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- For example, he's working on a way to use plant debris
as an energy source to feed the lighting system, which also helps ward
off the chill of the cave. The system could even support organic farming,
because fruits and vegetables could be grown without pesticides, since
there are no insects in the cave.
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- His potential customers include companies like Ventria
Bioscience, whose pharming efforts have been held up by the USDA and concerns
from farmers and environmental groups in states including California and
Missouri.
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- Environmentalists don't trust that the transgenic plants
-- crops with foreign DNA added to their genome -- won't contaminate food
crops. They point out that shipping mishaps, not pollen drift, have caused
most contamination problems so far. So they don't think growing pharmaceuticals
in a cave will solve that problem.
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- If medications make their way to people for whom the
drugs were never intended, the results could be disastrous. That almost
happened in Nebraska in 2002 when ProdiGene accidentally mixed corn it
said contained an animal vaccine with half a million bushels of soybeans
meant for human consumption. All of the corn and soybeans had to be destroyed.
In Iowa, ProdiGene corn cross-pollinated with 155 acres of conventional
corn, which then had to be burned.
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- "It's an issue of irresponsibility on the part of
the biotech industry," said Bill Freese, a research analyst at Friends
of the Earth.
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- In March, the journal Nature reported that hundreds of
tons of an unapproved genetically modified corn called Bt10 had entered
the food and feed supply in the United States and overseas since 2001.
Bt10 is not a pharmaceutical crop -- Swiss biotech Syngenta engineered
the corn to produce pesticide. But Freese and others say this and other
examples show that genetically modified crops are difficult to contain.
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- "Most people would reasonably require that there's
no chance that a pharmaceutical agent could contaminate the food supply,"
said Craig Culp, media director for the Center for Food Safety. "And
the only way to do that is not engineering our food crops to produce pharmaceutical
or chemical agents."
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