In its April 29, 2002, edition, the Iowa Farm Bureau Spokesman [below] contained an alarming story on sow breeding problems related to the feeding of genetically engineered Bt corn.
According to the article, Shelby County, Iowa, farmer Jerry Rosman was alarmed when farrowing rates in his sow herd plummeted nearly 80 percent. Rosman, who has nearly 30 years of farrowing experience, checked and double-checked all of the usual suspect causes. He tested for diseases, verified his artificial insemination methods were being properly implemented, and poured over his nutritional program. But he found nothing out of the ordinary.
Eventually, Rosman became aware of four other producers within a 15-mile radius of his farm whose herds had nearly identical pseudopregnancies. The herds had different management styles, different breeding methods and different swine genetics.
A common denominator, Rosman says, is that all of the operations fed their herds the same Bt corn hybrids.
Laboratory tests revealed their corn contained high levels of Fusarium mold. Rosman says researchers typed the Fusarium down to four strains, and two of them (Fusarium subglutinans and Fusarium monlliforme) were consistent in all of the producers' samples.
One of the producers subsequently switched back to regular non-Bt corn, and pseudopregnancy is no longer a problem within that herd.
Rosman believes the problem manifested itself on his farm because he planted 100 percent of the same brand of genetically engineered Bt seed corn and fed 100 percent of that corn to his livestock.
According to the article, Rosman isn't sure whether or not he'll be planting any corn on his land this year. An agronomist has told him that a regular rotation of corn and soybeans might not get rid of whatever gene has contaminated his corn ground.
In a follow up article on May 13, 2002, the Iowa Farm Bureau Spokesman reported that shortly after the story detailing Rosman's situation appeared, he was flooded with phone calls. "It hadn't even hit the mailboxes and the phone started ringing," Rosman says.
By late last week he had received calls from 12 other producers from various parts of the state detailing situations very much like his own. The calls primarily came from smaller producers who, like Rosman, feed their own corn and noticed a sharp decline in farrowing rates recently.
The Rosman article sparked the interest of Norm Smith, who farms east of Winterset, Iowa. Smith says he started experiencing breeding problems within a few weeks of feeding the new corn hybrids he planted for the first time last spring.
"I started feeding Bt corn in late September, and within 30 days I wasn't getting anything bred," Smith said, adding that his brother encountered similar problems.
The Spokesman articles illustrate the fact that genetically engineered crops have been rushed to market without proper testing. There have been no mandatory tests on the long term effects of these crops on livestock or human health. For example, the EPA, which regulates Bt corn, requires no tests to determine how the crop impacts the reproductive systems of the animals that eat it.
Genetically engineered materials, such as products manufactured from Bt corn, are now commonly found in conventional foods. Due to a political decision made in 1992 by the Bush/Quayle administration, genetically engineered foods are not required to be segregated or labeled. Anyone who eats foods containing conventional corn, soy, canola, and/or cottonseed products is an unwitting guinea pig in a vast, uncharted ecological experiment.
Shelby County farmer Jerry Rosman was understandably alarmed when farrowing rates in his sow herd plummeted nearly 80 percent.
Rosman, who has nearly 30 years of farrowing experience, checked and double-checked all of the usual suspect causes. He tested for diseases, verified his artificial insemination methods were being properly implemented and poured over his nutritional program.
But he found nothing out of the ordinary.
"We started looking for diseases. That's the first thing you look for," he says. "Then we looked at the feed and that came up clean.
"We were diligently checking the sows every couple days. For the last 12 months, I did all the breeding no matter how thin I was spread. We had to eliminate all of the variables."
However, from October 2000 to August 2001, the farrowing success rate in his 200-sow herd fell to around 20 percent.
"We were down to almost nothing," the Harlan farmer says.
The sows would go through their normal 113-day gestation period, giving all outward appearances of being pregnant, Rosman reports. Traditional ultrasounds, performed every 30 days, appeared normal.
However, at the end of the 113 days, the sows began gradually shrinking down to their normal pre-pregnancy size and lost all signs of being pregnant. There were no aborted fetuses from sows that did not produce a litter.
The sows would come back into heat in 14 to 30 days, and the pseudopregnancy cycle then repeated itself.
Autopsies showed no signs of pregnancy, only fluid build up. Tissue and blood samples sent to a pathology lab came back negative for all known diseases, he says. Estrogen tests performed at the University of Missouri were also normal.
More cases surface
Finally, last summer, Rosman made the difficult decision to depopulate his herd.
That's when he heard about another area producer who was also depopulating because of similar problems.
Eventually, Rosman became aware of four other producers within a 15-mile radius of his farm whose herds had nearly identical pseudopregnancies.
The more he learned, the more suspicious he became.
The herds had different management styles, different breeding methods and different swine genetics. Two of the managers shared a veterinarian, while two others shared a different veterinarian.
A common denominator, Rosman says, is that all of the operations fed their herds the same Bt corn hybrids.
Laboratory tests revealed their corn contained high levels of Fusarium mold. Rosman says researchers typed the Fusarium down to four strains, and two of them (Fusarium subglutinans and Fusarium monlliforme) were consistent in all of the producers' samples.
One of the producers subsequently switched back to known tested pure corn, and pseudopregnancy is no longer a problem within that herd.
"Their farrowing rates are back where they need to be," Rosman reports. "Everything is going fine."
Rosman worries the Fusarium problem could grow worse over time if not diagnosed. The 2000 corn crop tested at 25,000 to 65,000 CFUs (colony forming units), while the 2001 crop tested at 25,000 to 2.65 million CFUs.
"It wasn't a one-time fluke," he said. "The problem seems to have escalated."
He estimates that he has spent $6,000 to $7,000 on various tests to determine what went wrong in his operation, on top of production losses he incurred. He has corn sent samples to the Center for Veterinary Medicine in Washington, D.C., the Iowa State University (ISU) Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, ISU's Plant Pathology Laboratory, the University of Iowa Plant Pathology Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Service in Athens, Ga.
"We're working with a problem nobody has ever heard of before," he said. "It's not in the book yet."
Gary Munkvold, an ISU associate professor of plant pathology, reviewed Rosman's situation.
He said given the extensive testing Rosman has done for other possible causes of the pseudopregnancies, and the fact that switching feed has alleviated the problem for one of the producers, it is likely they are on the right track in suspecting the corn as the source.
However, he said that while CFU levels detected in their corn are admittedly high, there is no documentation of a direct connection between CFU and detrimental health effects in livestock.
The value of the CFU counts, Munkvold said, is simply to indicate the potential for mycotoxins in the grain.
He added that growers of Bt hybrids aren't at any greater risk of experiencing high CFU counts than growers of conventional corn are.
"We have done extensive research that has shown Bt corn to consistently have less Fusarium contamination and lower levels of the most common mycotoxins than conventional corn," he said. "This is because corn borer injury leads to elevated Fusarium infection, and Bt corn does not experience corn borer injury."
Searching for a cause
Mycotoxins, which are chemicals produced by some fungi, can trigger pseudopregnancies. In particular, Munkvold says, pseudopregnancy is associated with zearalenone, which is produced by certain Fusarium species. The ISU Veterinary Diagnostic lab did not find any zearalenone in Rosman's case.
"So, it is still a mystery," said Munkvold. "Rosman is convinced his problem is related to the Fusarium, and he is probably right.
"Unfortunately, it is widely acknowledged that there are unknown mycotoxins that we do not know how to detect."
Those unknown mycotoxins could be the cause of the pseudopregnancy problems experienced by Rosman and the other producers, according to Munkvold.
Complicating the diagnosis is that the corn looks normal to the untrained eye and the sows did not refuse to eat the feed, Rosman says. Also, no adverse effects were detected on nursery pigs or other livestock that consumed the feed.
Rosman believes the problem manifested itself on his farm because he planted 100 percent of the same brand of seed corn and feeds 100 percent of that corn to his livestock.
His sample, in effect, was undiluted.
"We got nailed really hard because we're a small operation feeding 100 percent of our own corn," he says. "If somebody sends 15,000 to 20,000 tons of this stuff to an elevator and somebody gets a blast of it, it could hit their units for a week or 10 days and then it's over."
Other producers he has visited with experienced fluctuating pregnancy rates, which they later traced back to feeding corn out of a bin containing the Fusarium mold during one cycle and out of a "clean" bin the next.
Rosman thinks similar cases might exist elsewhere in the state but aren't being diagnosed. By the time pseudopregnancy surfaces in some larger operations, he speculates, the feed that might have been the source of the problem likely would have already passed through the system and could not be tested.
"If I had been the only one I'd say it's a fluke, but here we've got four others who experienced the same signs, symptoms and outcome," he says. "And I don't just think there's five of us out here."
Rosman wants other farmers to be aware of his problem in case their circumstances match his.
"I would have given anything 18 months ago to flip open a magazine and see this thing addressed," he says. "If I can just help one or two people, it's worth it.
"I know the physical and mental beating I took. This'll just about drive you nuts."
Rosman isn't sure whether or not he'll be planting any corn on his land this year.
An agronomist has told him that a regular rotation of corn and soybeans might not get rid of whatever gene has contaminated his corn ground.
Shelby County farmer Jerry Rosman was understandably alarmed when farrowing rates in his sow herd plummeted nearly 80 percent.
Rosman, who has nearly 30 years of farrowing experience, checked and double-checked all of the usual suspect causes. He tested for diseases, verified his artificial insemination methods were being properly implemented and poured over his nutritional program.
But he found nothing out of the ordinary.
"We started looking for diseases. That's the first thing you look for," he says. "Then we looked at the feed and that came up clean.
"We were diligently checking the sows every couple days. For the last 12 months, I did all the breeding no matter how thin I was spread. We had to eliminate all of the variables."
However, from October 2000 to August 2001, the farrowing success rate in his 200-sow herd fell to around 20 percent.
"We were down to almost nothing," the Harlan farmer says.
The sows would go through their normal 113-day gestation period, giving all outward appearances of being pregnant, Rosman reports. Traditional ultrasounds, performed every 30 days, appeared normal.
However, at the end of the 113 days, the sows began gradually shrinking down to their normal pre-pregnancy size and lost all signs of being pregnant. There were no aborted fetuses from sows that did not produce a litter.
The sows would come back into heat in 14 to 30 days, and the pseudopregnancy cycle then repeated itself.
Autopsies showed no signs of pregnancy, only fluid build up. Tissue and blood samples sent to a pathology lab came back negative for all known diseases, he says. Estrogen tests performed at the University of Missouri were also normal.
More cases surface
Finally, last summer, Rosman made the difficult decision to depopulate his herd.
That's when he heard about another area producer who was also depopulating because of similar problems.
Eventually, Rosman became aware of four other producers within a 15-mile radius of his farm whose herds had nearly identical pseudopregnancies.
The more he learned, the more suspicious he became.
The herds had different management styles, different breeding methods and different swine genetics. Two of the managers shared a veterinarian, while two others shared a different veterinarian.
A common denominator, Rosman says, is that all of the operations fed their herds the same Bt corn hybrids.
Laboratory tests revealed their corn contained high levels of Fusarium mold. Rosman says researchers typed the Fusarium down to four strains, and two of them (Fusarium subglutinans and Fusarium monlliforme) were consistent in all of the producers' samples.
One of the producers subsequently switched back to known tested pure corn, and pseudopregnancy is no longer a problem within that herd.
"Their farrowing rates are back where they need to be," Rosman reports. "Everything is going fine."
Rosman worries the Fusarium problem could grow worse over time if not diagnosed. The 2000 corn crop tested at 25,000 to 65,000 CFUs (colony forming units), while the 2001 crop tested at 25,000 to 2.65 million CFUs.
"It wasn't a one-time fluke," he said. "The problem seems to have escalated."
He estimates that he has spent $6,000 to $7,000 on various tests to determine what went wrong in his operation, on top of production losses he incurred. He has corn sent samples to the Center for Veterinary Medicine in Washington, D.C., the Iowa State University (ISU) Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, ISU's Plant Pathology Laboratory, the University of Iowa Plant Pathology Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Service in Athens, Ga.
"We're working with a problem nobody has ever heard of before," he said. "It's not in the book yet."
Gary Munkvold, an ISU associate professor of plant pathology, reviewed Rosman's situation.
He said given the extensive testing Rosman has done for other possible causes of the pseudopregnancies, and the fact that switching feed has alleviated the problem for one of the producers, it is likely they are on the right track in suspecting the corn as the source.
However, he said that while CFU levels detected in their corn are admittedly high, there is no documentation of a direct connection between CFU and detrimental health effects in livestock.
The value of the CFU counts, Munkvold said, is simply to indicate the potential for mycotoxins in the grain.
He added that growers of Bt hybrids aren't at any greater risk of experiencing high CFU counts than growers of conventional corn are.
"We have done extensive research that has shown Bt corn to consistently have less Fusarium contamination and lower levels of the most common mycotoxins than conventional corn," he said. "This is because corn borer injury leads to elevated Fusarium infection, and Bt corn does not experience corn borer injury."
Searching for a cause
Mycotoxins, which are chemicals produced by some fungi, can trigger pseudopregnancies. In particular, Munkvold says, pseudopregnancy is associated with zearalenone, which is produced by certain Fusarium species. The ISU Veterinary Diagnostic lab did not find any zearalenone in Rosman's case.
"So, it is still a mystery," said Munkvold. "Rosman is convinced his problem is related to the Fusarium, and he is probably right.
"Unfortunately, it is widely acknowledged that there are unknown mycotoxins that we do not know how to detect."
Those unknown mycotoxins could be the cause of the pseudopregnancy problems experienced by Rosman and the other producers, according to Munkvold.
Complicating the diagnosis is that the corn looks normal to the untrained eye and the sows did not refuse to eat the feed, Rosman says. Also, no adverse effects were detected on nursery pigs or other livestock that consumed the feed.
Rosman believes the problem manifested itself on his farm because he planted 100 percent of the same brand of seed corn and feeds 100 percent of that corn to his livestock.
His sample, in effect, was undiluted.
"We got nailed really hard because we're a small operation feeding 100 percent of our own corn," he says. "If somebody sends 15,000 to 20,000 tons of this stuff to an elevator and somebody gets a blast of it, it could hit their units for a week or 10 days and then it's over."
Other producers he has visited with experienced fluctuating pregnancy rates, which they later traced back to feeding corn out of a bin containing the Fusarium mold during one cycle and out of a "clean" bin the next.
Rosman thinks similar cases might exist elsewhere in the state but aren't being diagnosed. By the time pseudopregnancy surfaces in some larger operations, he speculates, the feed that might have been the source of the problem likely would have already passed through the system and could not be tested.
"If I had been the only one I'd say it's a fluke, but here we've got four others who experienced the same signs, symptoms and outcome," he says. "And I don't just think there's five of us out here."
Rosman wants other farmers to be aware of his problem in case their circumstances match his.
"I would have given anything 18 months ago to flip open a magazine and see this thing addressed," he says. "If I can just help one or two people, it's worth it.
"I know the physical and mental beating I took. This'll just about drive you nuts."
Rosman isn't sure whether or not he'll be planting any corn on his land this year.
An agronomist has told him that a regular rotation of corn and soybeans might not get rid of whatever gene has contaminated his corn ground.
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