We work with seed and soil for a living, and the GMO debate has been raging for years. Everyone has a hot take.
So here’s where we land. Most of the GMO argument gets stuck on one narrow question: is the modified gene itself harmful to eat? On that narrow question, the major reviews are fairly consistent. (National Academies of Sciences 2016; WHO) But that framing carries a much bigger assumption, that the gene is the whole story. It isn’t. Most of the GM crops planted at scale were engineered to be sprayed, and what they get sprayed with and where it ends up is a real concern and a long way from settled.
People often get confused, thinking the GMO food itself is unhealthy but the real concern is a layer deeper than that. Who owns the seed, and the chemical system that seed was built to serve. Beyond that, crops designed to withstand higher levels of herbicides are facilitating further environmental harms.
The question to focus on
Who controls the food supply, and why do they want to consolidate that control? The answers are contracts and patents, and seed you’re not allowed to save. A handful of companies deciding what grows and what it costs you to grow it.
Seed that we all rely on to live has become concentrated in very few hands. The four largest companies now control over 60 percent of global proprietary seed sales. (Howard, Global Seed Industry Changes Since 2013; Howard 2009, Sustainability) A century ago, seed saving was just what farmers did. You grew a crop, you kept the best of it, you planted it again next year, and over generations that seed adapted to your soil, your climate, your land. That practice is how every food crop we eat today came to exist in the first place.
Genetically modified seed flipped that. Much of it is patented, and the patent isn’t a technicality. (Bowman v. Monsanto Co., 569 U.S. 278, 2013; Center for Food Safety, Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers, 2013) Farmers who buy patented seed typically sign an agreement not to save it. Plant it, harvest it, sell the harvest, and buy new seed next season. Skip that cycle and you’re breaking a contract. A practice as old as farming itself became something you could get sued for.
There is a real health and environmental conversation attached to this too, and we get to it below, because it matters. But start with the ownership, since it draws the least attention: patented seed changed farming from something you did with your own resources into something you rent every season from somebody else.
The system that comes with it
GMOs didn’t arrive alone: most of the genetically modified crops planted at scale were engineered to survive being sprayed with herbicide, which made large scale monoculture easier to manage. Plant one crop across thousands of acres, spray it to kill everything else, harvest, repeat. (USDA ERS, Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the United States; Benbrook 2016, Environmental Sciences Europe)
That system runs on chemicals we don’t use and don’t recommend. Symbiosis has a no-glyphosate stance for a reason: a monoculture held together by herbicide is fragile, and it gets more fragile every year. It strips the soil of the biological diversity that makes land resilient, and it leans harder on the chemical every year because weeds adapt, which pushes growers toward even older and harsher herbicides to keep up. (USDA ERS, The Economics of Glyphosate Resistance Management in Corn and Soybean Production; International Herbicide-Resistant Weed Database)
And the chemical does not just stay on the fields. Glyphosate residue turns up in food and water, and it has become one of the most widely detected agricultural chemicals in the environment. (USGS, National Water Quality Network; FDA, Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program FY2023) Whether that everyday exposure is harmful is disputed. The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans, while the EPA and European regulators concluded it is unlikely to pose a cancer risk at typical exposures. (IARC Monograph 112, 2015; EPA, Interim Registration Review Decision, 2020; EFSA Journal 2015;13(11):4302 ) In 2022 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the human health portion of that EPA decision and sent it back to the agency for reconsideration, so the regulatory side is not settled either. (EPA, Glyphosate) We don’t need that argument settled to know where we stand. A food system engineered to depend on spraying more of a chemical whose safety is still being litigated, and whose residue is now nearly everywhere, is not one we want to build a farm or a garden on. That is a large part of why we work without it.
And the crops themselves got narrower. (FAO, The Second Report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, 2010) Where a region once grew dozens of corn or tomato varieties, each adapted to a particular soil or a particular pest, industrial agriculture narrowed the field to a handful of varieties bred for uniformity and shelf life rather than flavor or place. Genetic diversity is what lets a crop survive a new blight or a strange season. A monoculture doesn’t have that insurance policy.
What we stand for
We plant heirloom and open-pollinated seed whenever we can, and we’ll tell anyone who asks why. An open-pollinated variety breeds true. Save the seed, plant it next year, and you get the same plant again, adapted a little more to your specific patch of ground each season. That’s not nostalgia. That’s generations of selective breeding, done by individuals over thousands of years by paying attention to what grew well and what didn’t.
Heirloom varieties carry that history literally in their genetics. A tomato variety passed down through five generations of a family, or a bean a Hill Country homestead has grown since before Texas was Texas, isn’t just a plant. Saved seed is a record of adaptation and a form of inheritance you can eat.
Saving seed is a small, quiet act but something about it feels very empowering and magical. Participating and helping to guide the dance of life. Every packet of open-pollinated seed you save instead of buy is one less dollar routed through a supply chain that you don’t participate in. Growing even a little of your own food, on a balcony or on a quarter acre, does the same thing. Your first garden won’t replace the grocery store this year. But it’s an act of peaceful defiance, learning and hope. Taking a step toward a different relationship with your food, one growing season at a time.
We think food, clean water, and a real connection to the land you live on are a fundamental right. Not something you sign away in a seed contract, and not something you should have to ask permission for. As we move further away from participation in our food system, we become more dependent and helpless.
The bigger threat
More than any GMO debate, what worries us is that small farms and homesteads across Texas and the country are disappearing. (USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture; USDA ERS, Number of U.S. Farms Falls Below 2 Million) Some of it is economic pressure from consolidated agriculture that a family operation can’t compete against on price. Some of it is development, where land that grew food for a hundred years gets subdivided and paved because that’s worth more on paper than the food ever was.
When a small farm or homestead goes under, it goes beyond just one family’s loss. There’s heritage land changing hands for the last time. While local food security is getting a little thinner. The ecosystem services that working land quietly provides, the rain it soaks in and the wildlife it carries, traded for a parking lot or a subdivision that provides none of them. Biodiversity narrows again, the same way the seed supply did.
We’ve watched this up close on properties across Central Texas. Land that was grazed bare and drained of life for decades can come back once someone decides to steward it instead of just owning it. But that only happens if there’s still someone there to make that choice, on land that’s still theirs to make it on.
What you can do
You don’t need ten acres to push back on any of this.
- Growing some of your own food, even a small amount, changes your relationship to your groceries more than people expect. A few raised beds or a food-producing front yard do it.
- Saving seed from open-pollinated varieties you grow is a good place to start. Something forgiving, like beans or tomatoes, gives you seed for next year and a story for the year after that.
- Buying from local growers and seed companies that sell open-pollinated and heirloom varieties routes fewer dollars through the same few seed companies.
- Talking to the growers at your farmers market about where their seed comes from is a better conversation than you’d expect, and most of them love being asked.
None of this requires becoming self-sufficient overnight. It starts with treating food as something you take part in.
How Symbiosis helps
This is the work we do. We design edible landscapes and food forests that put real, perennial food production back into yards that used to be just lawn. We help homesteads get built around food security from the ground up: water and soil first, then a planting plan built around what you’re going to eat. And when a property comes to us tired and stripped of life, we design the restoration that brings the biodiversity, and the food, back.
If any of this sounds like the direction you want your land to go, whether it’s a front yard or a piece of Hill Country acreage that’s ready for a different chapter, we’d like to talk. Book a consultation and let’s figure out what growing your own power looks like on your ground.
FAQ
Are GMOs bad for you? The things we worry most about with GMOs are who controls the seed, the contracts that come with patented seed, the herbicide load that comes with them, and the monoculture farming systems built around it. If you want to dig into the safety research yourself, start with a primary source rather than a blog post either defending or attacking GMOs.
What’s the difference between an heirloom seed and a GMO? An heirloom is an open-pollinated variety that’s been grown and passed down, often for generations, without patents or restrictions on saving it. A GMO has had its genetic material altered in a lab, often to survive herbicide application or resist a pest, and is typically patented. Heirlooms breed true from saved seed. Most GMOs are hybrids or patented lines that either won’t breed true or legally can’t be replanted from saved seed.
What does “seed sovereignty” mean? It means the right of farmers and growers to save, breed, exchange, and plant their own seed rather than being dependent on a small number of companies for it every season. It’s the seed-level version of food sovereignty: control over your own food supply instead of dependence on someone else’s.
Can I save seed from my own garden? Yes, if you’re growing open-pollinated or heirloom varieties. Hybrids won’t breed true, and patented varieties may come with legal restrictions on saving them, so check what you’re planting first. Beans, tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce are some of the easiest crops to start seed saving with.
Does Symbiosis only plant non-GMO or heirloom varieties? We favor heirloom and open-pollinated seed for the reasons in this article: seed you can save and independence from patented supply chains. We want you to be able to grow and save your own food.