More than a decade after pulling the plug on genetically engineered wheat, Monsanto is working again on biotech wheat, says the St Louis Post-Dispatch after visiting a research center run by the agribusiness giant. Wheat growers, who used to worry that customers wouldn’t buy GE wheat, now regard genetic engineering as a way to boost yields and revive a crop that is losing ground on U.S. farms.
Monsanto is seeking a new GE strain rather than revive the variety it abandoned in 2004, reports the Post-Dispatch. “Now it wants to sell farmers a newer generation of seeds immune to a variety of herbicides. The idea is to get farmers closer to the early days of Roundup, when weed control was made simpler by a spray that could kill everything in a field except the protected crop.”