By MICHELE F. MIHALJEVICH
Indiana Correspondent

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Groups opposed to the use of biotechnologies in dairy farming mislead the public into believing milk products are unsafe, the head of Penn State University’s Department of Dairy and Animal Science said last week.

“Attempts to differentiate food based on technologies and management practices used in production, when no differences exist, are misleading and create confusion for consumers,” said
Terry D. Etherton. “It’s not a battle about facts, but about perception, deception and what is going on.”

Etherton spoke April 24 on the first day of the two-day Tri-State Dairy Nutrition Conference. He spoke on the future of biotechnology in agriculture.

A lack of knowledge about biotechnologies such as Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rbST) on the part of consumers makes it easy for groups to mislead the public, Etherton said.

“The garden variety consumer doesn’t have a clue what rbST stands for,” he said. “And most consumers have a poor understanding of the food system. More are concerned about diseases and contamination than they are about biotechnology.

“You can’t educate the public in 30 seconds, but you can scare them in 30 seconds.”

In use since 1994, rbST helps promote increased milk production and decreased animal waste.

Fallout would be felt in several areas if activist groups were to prevail and the use of rbST and other biotechnologies were no longer permitted, Etherton said.

“This is FDA-approved technology,” he said. “We have the safest food supply in the history of the world. It would be a train wreck.”

About 70 percent of processed foods on U.S. store shelves contain ingredients and oils from biotech crops, he said.

Etherton predicts other technologies would also be attacked, and that it would be more difficult to get funding for the research and development of additional technology.

“Funding wouldn’t be provided for discovery research,” he said. “It would be the making of a remarkable mess.

“Humpty Dumpty will fall off the wall and it will be awfully hard to put him back together again.”

Technologies such as antibiotics, growth promotants, artificial insemination and animal housing and restraint might also be at risk, he said.

“Milk is milk. We have decades of research that shows there’s no difference. The battle is about more than milk. It’s about production practices, and about the cows and the farming and (the farmers’) livelihood.

“I’m here to defend science because I don’t want science to be tossed under the bus.”

The 16th annual dairy nutrition conference was sponsored by The Ohio State University, Purdue University and Michigan State University. It was designed for feed industry personnel, veterinarians, county extension officials, dairy producers and anyone interested in the dairy industry.

This farm news was published in the May 2, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.