It is a crisp November Sunday morning in San Francisco and a bright blue, cloudless sky stretches beyond the surrounding Edwardian rooftops. The usual Inner Sunset Farmers Market crowd is bustling on Ninth Avenue, and a man playing a shiny tin drum sits next to the bulletin board at the entrance. A child bundled in a stroller catches his eye as her parents stop to mingle at a nearby mushroom stand. Between two rows of stands shaded by pointed white tents, a swarm of healthy-minded shoppers browses the fresh strawberries and ripe tomatoes. The vendors stand behind tables dotted with bright reds and cheerful greens. Most of the stands bear a sign touting their organic practices and the local farms from which these pesticide-free crops represent. They are the remaining few of the world's farmers untouched by genetic modification or chemical contamination.

With aspirations of higher profits in an increasingly competitive industry, many American farmers have turned to unnatural methods to produce bigger, tougher crops. Such methods include cultivating seeds that are genetically altered to render a plant unaffected by certain pesticides. The companies that sell such seeds also sell specially paired herbicides and pesticides. The result is a seed system wherein any plant or insect will be prevented from affecting the success of the genetically modified, or GM, crop.

Only a handful of companies produce such products, but one stands alone in its domination of the agricultural biotech industry. Monsanto provides "the seeds for ninety percent of the world's genetically modified crops," according to last year's film The World According to Monsanto. The multinational corporation operates in more than eighty nations across the world and holds patents on seeds for corn, wheat, soybeans, canola, and cotton for large-scale farms, and ones for other vegetable seeds for small-scale farms. Monsanto is the inventor of name brand herbicide called Roundup, a product farmers use to decrease risks that crops face and eliminate the need to till land for weeds. The success of the product has led to a GM seed system known as Roundup Ready Technology.

"Roundup Ready is an advancement for society. You put less pesticide in the environment, grow for less money, the markets react, and then the cost of food stays low," says Imperial County Farm Bureau president and local sugar beet farmer Mark Osterkamp.

However, environmental concerns do exist. In September, a California judge ruled that Monsanto is no longer permitted to manufacture sugar beet seeds as Roundup Ready. Osterkamp is concerned that if Roundup Ready sugar beets are barred only in California, it will put beet farmers in danger. "We do have to continue to use a preventative herbicide, and we are afraid that the manufacturers of those herbicides will stop producing them because there won't be a market," says Osterkamp.

As president of the Farm Bureau, Osterkamp also worries about the threat of cross-pollination between wild plants and GM crops. "The difference between California and the rest of the country is that California has wild beets and there is a concern that [Monsanto's] Roundup Ready will cross with those."

The name Monsanto has graced the pages of countless articles over the course of its century-long existence--often in the silhouette of a negative light. Much of the controversy surrounding the corporation concerns lawsuits brought by Monsanto against farmers on grounds of patent infringement. Every aspect of the Roundup Ready plant is Monsanto's property by law. If the plant pollinates another field of traditional crops, that farmer is in violation of Monsanto's patent.

Perhaps one of the most famous cases of this kind took place in Canada in 2004, when Monsanto unsuccessfully sued Bruno, Saskatchewan canola farmer Percy Schmeiser. Monsanto's Roundup Ready canola seeds had contaminated Schmeiser's crop and Monsanto demanded royalties for the use of its patented product. These cases are more than isolated, occasional incidents. According to a report by the California Farmer Organization, "Monsanto has set aside an annual budget of ten million dollars and a staff of seventy-five devoted solely to investigating and prosecuting farmers."

In response to increasing lawsuits brought against farmers, individual states have begun passing legislation to protect them. In 2008, California passed its first law concerning the GM problem. According to the Center for Food and Safety, farmers who are "unknowingly contaminated by GE crops in California are now protected from all kinds of liability, and Monsanto must now use a protocol to investigate farmers and sample their crops that involves state notification and obtaining the express permission of the farmer." But local farmers are still struggling with large agricultural firms, sometimes in the form of lawsuit threats for merely using a patented name. Jamie Collins, owner and operator of Serendipity Farms in Carmel Valley, had labeled her baby broccoli 'broccolini' at her produce stand until she was approached by a representative from a large agricultural company informing her of the unauthorized use of their patented term. "I didn't know someone owned the name. I was told to 'cease and desist' using their patent name," says Collins. She jokes that when people ask for 'broccolini' she warns them not to use that term, otherwise the "produce police will come get them."

Biotechnology as a whole is not evil, and organizations like the California Farm Bureau Federation support it. "We encourage California farmers to keep up with trends to meet market demands. Biotechnology allows them to produce more crop without using up natural resources," says spokesman Dave Kranz. Brad Monroe, ornamental horticulture program coordinator at Cuyamaca College in El Cajon, is cautiously optimistic of biotechnology. "Biotechnology in the next fifteen years will change more than the computer has in the last fifty," he warns. "We have to be vigilant about the effects, and listen to scientists on both sides of it."

Still others, like San Francisco State University International Relations professor Kathleen McAfee, are less than convinced. "As for the claim that [GM crops] are higher-yielding - they are not," says McAfee as she sits casually in her campus office wearing earthy beaded earrings dangling below her short auburn red hair.

"They are really not agriculturally beneficial in any sense of producing more food, or better food, or producing food faster," she continues. "Over the last forty years, pesticide use has increased by a factor of at least ten, and yet the proportion of crops in the United States lost to pests is not fewer, but greater. They kill beneficial insects as well as the pest insects, and pests develop resistance. There's constant chemical warfare going on, and we're losing it."

"It is the band-aid solution," agrees Lily Schneider. She and her boyfriend Matt McCue started the all-organic and sustainable Shooting Star CSA farm in Fairfield last year. At Shooting Star, stewardship to the soil and the surrounding ecosystem is as important as the crops themselves. Where their soil alone feeds the plants, large-scale farms merely "see the soil as a medium."

McAfee and Schneider contend companies like Monsanto have another agenda behind their humanitarianism. One of Monsanto's claims is that it helps to feed a hungry world. The Monsanto website states, "By 2050, say United Nations' experts, our planet must double food production to feed an anticipated population of 9.3 billion people. Agricultural innovation holds a key solution - and Monsanto pledges to do our part."

"The idea that this kind of technology is going to contribute to feeding the world is absurd," says McAfee with a slight roll of the eyes. She notes there is nothing to suggest world hunger has been in any way alleviated by biotechnology. Schneider, who graduated from University of California Santa Cruz with a degree in sustainable agriculture, notes, "They are spending millions of dollars to develop specific varieties of plants, but they could put that same effort into building ecosystems."

Whether or not Monsanto will benefit the world's farmers in the long run remains to be seen. But what is certain is that the company has an incredible amount of control in the farming world.

"In so many areas the regulatory agencies of the U.S. government rely on corporate self-reporting and the honor system." As for the regulators and corporate employees, "it's a revolving door," says McAfee.

In July, Michael R. Taylor, a former Monsanto Vice President, was appointed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) senior advisor to the commissioner. Although an outspoken supporter of biotechnology in agriculture, Taylor is responsible for regulating biotechnology. He straddles the line between advocacy and regulation.

When the government wants to build a bridge, they may spend years studying the environmental impact of the project before they break ground. But when an industrial agriculture firm creates a new species of food crop that secretes pesticides into the ecosystem and contaminates neighboring farmland, it sues for damages - and that is a frightening truth. [X]