Setting the record straight on HME ryegrass

Recently, in an opinion piece published in the Farmers Weekly(external link), president of GE Free New Zealand, Claire Bleakley made several inaccurate or misleading claims about the HME ryegrass programme, as part of a broader pushback against use of genetic technologies in New Zealand.

One central claim was that growing trials for the HME ryegrass in the United States “were so poor they failed to yield enough dry matter for the animal feeding trial they aimed to conduct”.

Despite significant climatic differences being the US and New Zealand, the yields achieved in the US were actually in line with expectation. Most importantly, the outdoor growing trials in the US proved to us that the mechanism that increases the fats in the ryegrass does work in conditions outside the lab.

Animal feeding was never the purpose of the trials in the US. Yet even growing the ryegrass indoors in New Zealand we will have enough to do a limited animal feeding trial later this year.
 
Claire goes on to call any GM field trials by AgResearch or other crown research institutes, a “commercial failure” because the plants “were riddled with unknown diseases and failed to grow”.

I won’t speak for other institutes, but such claims about HME ryegrass are simply untrue. There is no “unknown disease”.  We are talking here about products that are still being researched and developed before we can get a true sense of what the commercial return may be.

The continued involvement of a major seed company, PGG Wrightson Seeds, in the research programme is further evidence that there is confidence that the HME ryegrass has no unknown disease or yield concerns.

It is true that a significant amount of time and money goes into research programmes like these, but that is because the work is highly complex, and costs are many times greater when working within the current regulations in New Zealand. Equally, the payoff when products like these are commercialised can be game-changing, both for productivity and the environment we live in.

In an ideal world, as scientists we would keep our heads down focused on the research to prove what a product like HME ryegrass can offer us.

But when taxpayer money is being invested in the research, alongside funding from commercial partners, it is important that people know that not every claim they read or hear is based in fact.

**The above article was originally published in the Farmers Weekly**