Natural gas can power farm equipment...and it seems we have a lot...even though most of it is being shipped off-shore into the world market rather than keeping it around here...which is a testament to my natural gas heating bill not going down even though they're pumping more out of the US than any other place in the world. Sigh. There are gains being made in runs-on-electric farm equipment (grid electricity), but most of that is in small cultivators and small tractors which aren't large harvesters or large scale plowing machines. China is a heavy innovator in this market, but larger manufactures like J.Deere are developing prototypes (diesel-hybrids mostly).

For many of us organic growers the term "organic fertilizer" is an oxymoron since we think more in terms of building soil health with compost and other forms of organic matter instead of using something that may not truly feed the soil that feeds the plants. Other than compost, cover crops, shredded leaves, and other vegetative waste what your soil may need can only be determined by a good reliable soil test. Few animal manures, today, will be free of GMO byproducts since most all animal feeds use grains grown using GMO seeds, unless one can find an organic animal raising operation with enough manure to sell. The Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium is a naturally occurring bacterium and you most likely already have some in the soil where you are, just not enough to be a very reliable insect pest control. The problem with the BT bacterium is what happens when we ingest them, since no research has been done we have no idea.

Right now, most GMO seed is for big ag commodity crops- RoundUp Ready soy, corn, canola, and now alfalfa. There is also BT corn & BT cotton, which has BT wedged in there to kill the corn & boll worms when they take a bite. They are evolving to resist that now.... You have to buy GMO seed from the source- Monsanto or whoever, and you have to sign a pledge that you won't perform any experiments with it, and that you won't save the seed. There can be pollen drift which containmates regular seed being grown nearby, (like with corn) but in general, the average gardener cannot get their mitts on GMO seed. Hybridizing plants for disease resistance & other qualities has been going on since the dawn of time. The key element there, is that it is cross pollination within the same species, and is perfectly natural. Some Hybrids aren't all that great though- it depends on how much & in what way they have been tweaked. There is some debate to their nutritional value. But there are also Hybrids which have been developed to bump up nutrition, so...read the fine print with them, do trials, etc. But Hybrids are not GMOs. GMOs are created when one species' genes are inserted into another species' DNA. With BT corn, a bacterium's gene (bacillus thuringiensis a known caterpillar kiler) is inserted into corn or cotton DNA. I don't know what RoundUp Ready seed has inserted, but the basic function of RoundUp is to weaken the plant's natural defenses to enable soil borne pathogens to take over & kill the plant. RoundUp resistant weeds are evolving & becoming a problem now. Old school pesticide companies are quite happy about that~ Google Don Huber & glysophate. Not only are we eating loads of RoundUp every day in soy, corn & canola products, but we are destroying our soil and reducing nutrient uptake by the crops that are sprayed with it....and our livestock is starting to show signs of infertility from GMO feedstock. As to the Safe Seed pledges- it is incredibly expensive to test for GMO contamination. Organic seed, by definition, has to be GMO free- but I don't know if it's 100% anymore, as the USDA has watered down Organic standards to be almost comical. Anyhoo, any seed house that makes the pledge is at least aware of the problem & is doing what they can. Understanding the pollination of whatever you want to grow will help your decisions: if you want to grow corn, which is primarily wind pollinated, don't fool around, buy Organic seed. (Unless you know for sure it's been grown far away from any GMO corn fields.) Stuff that is mostly self pollinated and non commodity (like tomatoes, peppers, melons, etc.) there's not alot to worry about in terms of GMO contamination. Yet! I hope this helps- it does get confusing & alarming. But at this point you're more likely to eat GMO food than accidentally buy GMO seed. But they have all kinds of GMO plants & animals in the pipeline for eventual release. ...

@little_minnie You are very wrong about GMO seeds being available to the public. It is NOT just sweet corn that is GMO now. Cucumbers, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage and many other common seeds bought from places like Johnny's and other seed sources sell GMO seeds, but do not disclose that the seed they are selling IS GMO. What most people think of as GMO is transgenic modification of a species. By this we mean the artificial transfer of genes from different kingdoms of living things. Most commonly this has been transferring genes from bacteria and fungus to plants. Cell fusion is also considered genetic modification and is WIDELY used in modern breeding to cut down on the time it takes to have a sterile plant line for breeding. In order to hybridize a plant "naturally" and get reproducible results you need a sterile parent to breed to. That parent will have been inbred to the point it can no longer produce viable pollen to self pollinate. This parent will have traits we want to include in a new hybrid (disease resistance, fruit quality, etc.). It will then be cross pollinated with another plant in the same species that HAS viable pollen and other desirable traits. The resulting seed from this cross we hope will have the genes we want with the desired traits we want. Inbreeding, also known as selfing (because we pollinate it with itself until it no longer can produce it's own pollen), is the traditional method. Some plants, such as corn and onions, naturally have some infertile plants. They NEVER produce pollen. This trait helps the plant to prevent too much inbreeding in it's own line. We can exploit this trait called cytoplasmic male sterility (the males are all sterile) when we want to hybridize corn, onions, etc. We plant seed corn that we know is all male sterile. It becomes the perfect parent to cross with. Broccoli, Cabbage and many other veggies have no natural male sterility. What plant breeders are now doing us using chemicals and electricity to "fuse" the nucleus of cells from Corn, Sunflower, etc. that have the genes that code for male sterility with other veggies like Cabbage. The result is a plant that has male sterility and is now easy to cross with other cabbages. The breeder get a very uniform seed crop to sell to farmers. The downside is that NO seed will be set when the farmer plants this crop or the seed that does form will not be viable or true to it's parents. In Europe, France mostly, genetic testing has been done on many veggies and they have found that almost 80% of cabbage has Sunflower, Corn and other DNA in it's genetic structure. This has come from breeders fusing cells from other species to induce male sterility. The use of this technology is almost NEVER revealed by seed companies. If it is, you will usually see CMS after the variety name. Organic seed has been found to contain foreign DNA, even though cell fusion is banned in organic production. The problem is that many organic growers don't know what they are buying from breeders. CMS technology has been around for over 30 years. Some of the parent plants used in organic breeding may have been bred using CMS techniques. @nc-crn You are wrong on how widely used this technology is. It has not been limited to the lab for decades. Sakata, which has some of the best broccoli lines available, is ALL CMS now except for four varieties, Syngenta is the same. CMS technology, and the associated gene transfer, is spreading to almost ALL commercial breeders and varieties. WHY? Not just for the male sterility in hybridizing, they had that almost down pat with Self Incompatibility inbreeding. It is to lockup the genetics and attempt to limit them to a specific company. The male sterile gene, as you noted, is passed on to the progeny. There is no easy way (yet) to extract genes from a CMS hybrid. Resistance to a specific pathogen, the most commonly bred traits, are the most valuable. If Sakata finds a gene that gives broccoli better heat resistance, they don't want other companies cross pollinating their hybrids to extract the genes. CMS technology essentially locks up the genes and makes it very hard for another company to simply extract the desired genes. How do I know this? I called Sakata AND many of the other breeders and ASKED them why they are going the CMS route. They ALL told me it was to lock up their genetics and prevent "theft" of their property. Mind you NONE of these companies MADE the genes. They just found a way to coax them into the seed. In Summary, can you avoid CMS technology? YES, as long as YOU grow the food and YOU do your homework on WHICH varieties use CMS technology. The only large company that I know of that does not use CMS on large scale is Bejo. They are a European Seed breeder that sells many of their varieties in the US. Enza Zaden is another, but they have less of their lines available in the USA.