An interesting Wild Card was played in the past week of 5 May 99 when Archer Daniels Midland upped the stakes at the commodity crop casino. ADM is offering a last-minute bonus to growers who plant a non-GMO soybean hybrid designed to take on the ravages of DuPont's Synchrony herbicide. What a marriage from hell. An 18 cent per bushel premium they say? Oh, that will buy you a new set of tires for your JD9400-particularly since you would need a 425 horsepower machine and farm 4000 acres to make those pennies pay out. On that scale you could bring in an extra $36,000 gross*.

Could we back up a minute? I thought all the players at this particular table were losers. Is this a Royal Flush, or just dealers picking from a deck with more than 52 cards? A most unusual ( daresay, improbable) leviathan suddenly sweeping in, horns blaring, to rescue farmers for 18 cents a bushel when soybeans are depressed at a rate 10 times that? Whereforth comes such generosity? What farmers need are better soybean prices, not a phony bail-out just because Monsanto and all the gravy-trainers who jumped aboard the SS Frankenstein have run aground on the public/private Euro embargo on genetically modified agriculture.

Dueling Terra-Gators: I see massive threewheeler herbicide units jousting amid the stubble, Monsanto versus DuPont seeking primacy over the rights to continue the despicable border-to-border pollution of the biospehere. Synchrony versus Round-Up . Who's poison will win?

"Synchrony? Sounds like a new name for a NATO war-operation", my Texas neighbor, Reno Travis, wrote with a histrionic air of bumpkin cyncism.

"Synchrony.....now that's a coincidence. I can imagine that the narcissists in those boardrooms thought that was a stroke of genius."

When was this miracle merger hatched? It doesn't seem like it was planned, unless trainwrecks like this can be predicted. Did the wet spring give them a window to push this one forward? Soybean planting is not that much delayed, but if the ground had been drier this season ADM-DuPont would have announced their dreadful deal with more than 11% of the acreage planted. Sounds more like an afterthought than typical corporate strategy. Or desperation, we shall fervently hope.

Creating a timeline is helpful. Because of export market requirements, Archer Daniels Midland has been forced to segregate the commodities they handle, and faced with the uncertainties of GMO contamination, decided to not handle any GMO corn whatsoever. Synchronizing the soybean trade was the next step. The GMO corn prohibition came in late April, and was a result of overseas consumer disaffection for GMO foods that spilled over from January' into February and grew into scandal by March. Crisis created opportunity. It was no sweat getting the Synchrony seed. These things are grown from pole to pole, so even in a pinch they could get the planting seed up from Argentina in ten days, which was enough time to influence how the ground would be planted in Minnesota, Michigan, New York and Ontario.

Why does the ADM-DuPont link-up look a bit twisted? Let us count the ways. Like cannibalistic jackals piling on the hopefully soon-to-be-rotting flesh of the Beast that is GMO, these two superpowers feast on their own kind. Taking short term profit at the expense of rivals Monsanto, Zeneca and AgrEvo, we observe ADM-DuPont fronting two-dimensional good will that only their slavish puppets at the Farm Bureau and AgriTalk can hype as a good alternative to a sour, even calamitous market. Cannily, DuPont gets to butter both sides of its bread ( they play in the GMO trade through their acquisition of Pioneer), and perhaps can knock Monsanto down a few more notches so DuPont can buy the carcass at deflated prices.

Third-guessing myself, I semi-paranoically wonder if this is dupe-time, and I will be caught in my own net, crabbing about pesticide use on a non GMO crop which the Splice and Dice Gang have used as bait for people like me to self-contradict over. Then they can say: " You can't have it both ways."

To which I might be able to say: " I want neither of your worlds. I will close you all down before I die, you Armani-wearing, corporate welfare weasels. We see you working, and you are not working very well! Your lies are hiding in plain sight."

Meanwhile, its Hush Time on the plains: calm those fretful farmers lest the stink from these bins full of unsold GMO soybeans and corn lead them to action. You have to love it, by the way, when the "authorities" recommend that farmers feed their GMO crops to their livestock. What livestock? You mean Armour's, Murphy's and IBP's livestock? Is my name Tyson?

What in the hell is this stuff? Synchrony is a mixture of thifensulfuron and chlorimuron and like glyphosate is also an amino acid synthesis inhibitor. Other toxic chemicals in this group include the sulfonylureas, imidazolinones and sulfonamides. They use a lot of "Imi", so nicknamed by the toxic synthetic pesticide community, on corn. Sometimes you can hit three Imi commercials in a row on your AM radio when you hit "seek" in succession around Ames.

Saturation is so crucial. Saturation of print and radio, saturation at the Land Grants, saturation in DC, and saturation from stream bed to stream bed. Pour on that stuff and watch the world turn yellow. Poured on largely for cosmetics: there is such a high school prom-night mindset in ag right now, no wonder they think its more important to go broke looking like a Monsanto commercial than to have a few weeds.

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