My GMO Jammies

I spend most Sundays outside. But today it’s chilly and drizzly. I don’t like gardening in a raincoat, so today I’m inside in my comfy jammies, getting some house projects accomplished.

These jammies are 100% cotton. I’m not sure where they were made, because the lower portion of the little label is too tattered to read.

Let’s assume I paid a lot for them some six years ago because they were made in the U.S.A. If so, this 100% cotton is 100% GMO (genetically modified organism) cotton. Same for my t-shirt and my undies. According to the USDA, roughly 95 percent or more of American acres planted in cotton are planted with GMO varieties. That’s one of the highest GMO adoption rates of any U.S. crop (alongside our soybeans and our field corn), and it happened in barely three decades.

What are the problems this genetic engineering is aiming to solve?

First, PESTS. Cotton is evidently a magnet for caterpillars like bollworms, budworms, and the pink bollworm, which burrow into the cotton bolls and destroy the precious fiber. Before GMO varieties arrived, growers fought them with frequent insecticide spraying, which was expensive, labor-intensive, and hard on beneficial insects and farm workers alike. In 1996, “Bt cotton” hit the market, engineered to produce a protein from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that is toxic to those caterpillars. Farmers saw fewer losses and were able to cut insecticide applications substantially. The pink bollworm, once a devastating pest in the Southwest, was declared eradicated from U.S. cotton-growing areas in 2018, a success attributed largely to Bt cotton combined with other control measures.

Second, WEEDS. Having operated a small, organic vegetable, fruit, and flower farm, I know a lot about weeds, even if I know nothing about bollworms. As I understand it, cotton seedlings are poor competitors with weeds (as are so many crops), and those weeds can slash yields if they’re not controlled. In 1997, herbicide-tolerant ("Roundup Ready") GMO cotton let farmers spray glyphosate (Roundup) all over their cotton crop, killing weeds without harming, magically, the cotton. That simplified weed management. But that means a lot of Roundup is used to make these undies and jammies. Today, most cotton seed is “stacked,” meaning that it carries both insect-resistance and herbicide-tolerance traits in a single bag. Problems remain, however. Weeds like Palmer amaranth (not unlike the pigweeds I fought on my farm, but by pulling rather than spraying) have evolved resistance to Roundup, pushing farmers toward additional herbicides.

Economics sealed the deal. Seed with these traits costs more, but many growers found that the savings on insecticides, fuel, and labor, plus more reliable yields, outweighed the premium. Cotton also isn’t a food crop, so growers faced little consumer pushback compared with, say, GMO soybeans (to make our mayonnaise, etc., etc.) and GMO field corn (to make our ketchup, etc., etc.). And once most farmers adopt a technology, it becomes hard to opt out: seed companies focus breeding on the traits farmers want, so the best-performing varieties increasingly come with them built in.

Our cotton is GMO (e.g., "Roundup Ready") unless it is stated to be non-GMO (including "organic," which cannot be GMO). So if your knickers label does not say "non-GMO" or "organic," then your knickers are made with GMO crop. In other words, GMO cotton does not have to be labelled as such.

Rather than buying new jammies for a drizzly day like today, I’m going to keep wearing these for another six years. It took a lot of Roundup to make these undies and jammies, so I’m going to wear them until they spontaneously biodegrade in the washing machine.

The bottom line is that our Roundup-Ready undies, and soybeans, and field corn, means spraying a lot of Roundup—on millions and millions and millions of acres across our land—putting sustainability at risk.

I want some organic underwear for Christmas.