You will really enjoy listening to Julie Borlaug, Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture. She just spoke at the annual Bayer CropScience Ag Issues Forum, held prior to the Commodity Classic.

She started her remarks by telling some entertaining anecdotes about her famous Grandfather Norman Borlaug. One that I enjoyed was when she was holding her baby he asked her, “How do you know when they’re hungry.” That got a good chuckle.

Julie says we in agriculture still need to continue to make greater efforts to help educate the public, especially about biotechnology and GMOs. She gave us some great examples of how severe these misunderstanding are. One was a story about a friend having her over for an organic meal with a number of other women. Julie went point by point educating these women about all the products they were using that they believed to be organic or GMO free. One example was one of the ladies saying she gives her children hormone free milk. Julie pointed out that cows produce hormones naturally so there is no such thing as hormone free milk. It’s funny but also sad. She showed a picture of salt that was labelled Non-GMO. The label is very misleading since salt is by definition non-GMO. No such thing as gmo salt. She pointed out that the GMO hysteria is really all about making money for niche markets.

You can listen to Julie’s remarks here: Julie Borlaug Remarks

The Bayer CropScience Ag Issues Forum brings together a broad audience of agricultural journalists to learn about and discuss current issues. This year’s theme is “What the World Needs.” We’ll have a lot more stories from here probably mostly after Commodity Classic. It’s a busy week!

I’m also uploading photos from the forum here: 2014 Bayer CropScience Ag Issues Forum Photos