All ag eyes are on an important seed engineering case involving sugar beets.
Today a federal judge in San Francisco ruled against organic farmers who wanted an immediate ban on the planting of genetically modified sugar beets, which were engineered by Monsanto to resist the herbicide Roundup.
The good news for organic farmers, who say the genetically modified crops are contaminating their fields, is that the judge signaled he could change his mind depending on the results of an environmental review.
But U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ruled he couldn’t implement an outright ban because that would force the shuttering of 14 U.S. sugar beet plants because “there’s a shortage of conventional seed,” Bloomberg reports.
Last year, Judge White sided with environmental groups, ruling that during the Bush administration, federal regulators improperly approved the genetically engineered crop for market, according to the Associated Press.
Sugar beets account for half of the nation’s sugar supply.
Bloomberg reports that more than 90 percent of the American sugar beet crop comes from genetically modified seeds.
Sugar beet harvest photo from Blue Square Thing’s Flickr photostream.
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