I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great field trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow test plots. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for acreage left you battered by the storms of uninformed pundits and ripped out by the hands of Greenpeace brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that biotic and abiotic stresses are redemptive. Go back to Colorado, go back to Oregon, go back to Southeast Asia, go back to Africa, go back to Europe, go back to the broken greenhouses of Germany, and the burned buildings in Michigan and California, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the laboratory with despair, I say to you today, my Frank ‘N’ Friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Human dream.

I have a dream that one day the eaters will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all crops are bred equal.”

Continue reading…