PORTLAND, Ore. – Call it a turf war if you will. A group calling itself the Anarchist Golfing Association broke into Pure-Seed Testing Inc. June 5 and stomped experimental grass plots, destroying ten years worth of work at the grass seed research facility.
The Anarchist Golfing Association took responsibility for the vandalism in an e-mail to Bill Rose, president of Canby, Ore.-based Pure-Seed, and local media boasting about the attack. The vandals said they targeted Pure-Seed because the company was experimenting with a genetically modified grass used on putting greens – creeping bentgrass – that is resistant to the herbicide Glufosinate. However, the grass destroyed at Pure-Seed was grown using normal techniques of plant breeding, not genetic engineering, according to Rose.
"That's natural breeding. They actually destroyed what they purport to be supporting," said Rose, who estimated the damage at $300,000 to $500,000 at the 110-acre (44 hectare) farm near Portland where the company conducts cross-breeding and other experiments on new varieties of grass for turf and forage.
"They pulled and threw and stomped and mixed labels and threw away labels and did everything they could to destroy things," Rose said. They even painted the fuse box black so workers would be unable to read the labels.
In their e-mail, the anarchists lashed out against genetically engineered research, saying "these crops are grown for profit and the pleasure of the rich and have no social value." Rose said he responded to the e-mail from the activists and informed them his company is not involved in genetically engineering grasses, but is doing research "to properly assess the dangers and precautionary measures that must take place" before any genetically modified grasses are produced in the Portland area.
Pure-Seed research director Crystal Fricker also denied that the company was developing genetically modified grasses, saying that it was trying to determine how far grass pollen would travel and if it was safe to release new strains into the environment.
"They hit people trying to get answers to important questions before these grasses are released into the environment," Fricker said, calling the experiments "environmentally friendly."
The above information was compiled from articles written by Associated Press Writer Aviva Brandt and Reuters News Writer Teresa Carson.