Twenty years ago I visited Frank and his father, Fred, while reporting a story on the American seed industry. At the time, the industry was undergoing rapid consolidation as regionally based seed companies were being bought out by large multinational pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. Hundreds of locally bred seed varieties were being phased out in favor of hybrids that could be grown in broad swaths of land across America.

I talked with the McLains then about what effect this consolidation would have on genetic diversity. They had lived through the infamous corn blight of 1970, a year in which 15 percent of the US corn crop was devastated by a blight that attacked a single hybridized corn variety that had been planted in one out of four acres from Florida to the Midwest. Meat prices shot up that year, as most of the lost corn was being grown as cattle feed. The reason for the blight was subsequently identified by the National Academy of Sciences as genetic uniformity: Corn seed across the country was, the academy reported, "as alike as identical twins." Fred told me how he watched as his plants became black and shriveled under the corrosive effects of the blight. When scientists quickly raced another slew of corn varieties onto the market for the following season, they relied on genetic material contained in traditional corn varieties, whose roots could be traced back to those land races around Oaxaca.

I hadn't seen the McLains since the summer of 1982, except once the following year, during a cross-country trip when Fred and his wife, Donnie, graciously laid out a lunch for me when I pulled into their farm, located just off Highway 30. At the time, Monsanto had just announced the creation of the first transgenic plant, launching the technology that would later evolve into full-scale genetic engineering. Few understood what that would mean.

Today, Fred has retired, and Frank, 50, is running the farm. I have a vivid memory of when I last saw Frank, sitting with him in a cramped tractor cab listening to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street at full volume as we churned fertilizer into the soil. Now, on a sweltering July day, we're rumbling along the dirt road past those same fields, past acre upon acre of corn plants of identical height, a perfect crop. Frank points out the window of his pickup to a field of seed corn almost five feet high. In addition to his fields of Bt feed corn, he is growing experimental seed for Monsanto, the nation's largest producer of genetically engineered crops. "They're wanting to see how it will do maybe one last time before putting it out in large acreage," he says. Growing the experimental seed pays a premium and insulates him from the rollicking prices of commodity feed corn, enabling him to make a comfortable living from farming--an increasing rarity for American family farmers.

Frank, like many American family farmers, is struggling to keep the farm afloat in an era when hundreds of farms a month are thrown into bankruptcy by the twin forces of low commodity prices and the rising cost of inputs, like seed and agricultural chemicals. He needs to obtain an ever-rising production from his 1,400 acres just to stay alive as a farmer. Through careful tailoring, the new crops shrink, by at least a bit, the immense workload involved in running a family farm, and add, at least a bit, to the reliability of being able to make a livelihood off the land.

But like most farmers, he is now deeply dependent on the multinational agribusiness enterprises that dominate the US food production system. To grow transgenic seeds, Frank has to agree to Monsanto's conditions. Every year Frank signs a contract with Monsanto for its patented Bt corn and Roundup Ready soy, agreeing not to replant it the following season--which means Monsanto gets to resell it to him the following year. Frank sees himself as entrenched on the conveyor belt of American industrial agriculture. "My job," he says, "is the production end of this assembly line. We're just a small little cog in the wheel.... What we're concerned with is production agriculture. To most of us that means our five or ten miles that we were born and raised and will probably die in."

But whether he likes to think about it or not, Frank's fate is entwined with that of Olga Maldonado and other farmers like her. Indeed, it's even possible, among infinite possibilities, that Frank is growing the same type of corn that surfaced in Capulalpan. Ultimately, it is questions of control and predictability that lie at the heart of the controversy over genetically modified crops. In the farmer's fields, it is a question of control over corn's free-floating means of insemination--those tassels you see feathering the air in corn country are like a plant's version of a peacock's tail, there to produce and release "male" pollen to be carried to the "female" silks. And inside the corn plant itself is the issue of whether genetic manipulations might have unforeseen effects. These are questions that bedevil even the scientists who are engineering the changes.

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