Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future

by Bartow J. Elmore Narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins

Overview

An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system.

Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world's largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018-but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us.
 
When researchers found trace amounts of the firm's blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto's past, many told here and woven together for the first time.
 
A company employee sitting on potentially explosive information who weighs risking everything to tell his story. A town whose residents are urged to avoid their basements because Monsanto's radioactive waste laces their homes' foundations. Factory workers who peel off layers of their skin before accepting cash bonuses to continue dirty jobs. An executive wrestling with the ethics of selling a profitable product he knew was toxic.
 
Incorporating global fieldwork, interviews with company employees, and untapped corporate and government records, Elmore traces Monsanto's astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products-including PCBs and Agent Orange-to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology.
 
Skyrocketing sales of Monsanto's new Roundup Ready system stunned even those in the seed trade, who marveled at the influx of cash and lavish incentives into their sleepy sector. But as new data emerges about the Roundup system, and as Bayer faces a tide of lawsuits over Monsanto products past and present, Elmore's urgent history shows how our food future is still very much tethered to the company's chemical past.

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2022 - AudioFile

Narrator Sean Patrick Hopkins shows great talent as he offers a warm, accessible, light, and engaging narration of this audiobook. However, his style may be at odds with the villainous story at hand. Historian Barlowe J. Elmore offers a well-researched examination of the St. Louis-originated chemical firm Monsanto, which grew into a powerful conglomerate that was later purchased by Bayer. The primary thrust is that the profit motive tainted the original Monsanto’s values as it became the world’s largest manufacturer of genetically engineered seeds—seeds that may have been knowingly toxic. Hats off to Hopkins for accepting the narration challenge and for succeeding in handling the many scientific terms and foreign expressions in this work. This mixed listening experience will inform those who enjoy exposés of “scavenger capitalism.” W.A.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

08/09/2021

In this sobering account, historian Elmore (Citizen Coke) chronicles chemical giant Monsanto’s rise from being a humble enterprise attempting to “free the American economy from the stranglehold of European chemical concerns” in 1901 to powerful conglomerate. If Monsanto’s “well-meaning men and women fail to look up from lab microscopes and widen the aperture to take stock of the history in which they are embedded, they may fail to see the harvest these seeds might bear,” Elmore warns, before documenting numerous lawsuits against the company and EPA investigations into its environmental depredations. He traces the company’s history, from pushing for the use of saccharine in sodas (consumers would be none the wiser, it reasoned) into “scavenger capitalism,” including its touting of its Roundup pesticide as a way to avert famine and ecological catastrophe. Elmore’s intention was not to create “an indictment of genetic engineering in toto,” he writes, but rather an effort to show how the profit motive tainted even the best intentions at the company from the start. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this is an essential history for understanding the impact of a major player in modern agribusiness. (Oct.)

Richard Shiffman

"Authoritative.…a damning portrait."

Booklist (starred review)

"Elmore’s substantial research and outstanding attention to detail makes this investigation of the Monsanto chemical and agribusiness corporation riveting from start to finish.…Combining elements of the film Erin Brockovich, Robert Bilott’s Exposure, and Patrick Radden O’Keefe’s exposé of the Sackler family, Empire of Pain, Seed Money is a galvanizing achievement that will leave readers deeply impressed, impassioned, and infuriated."

Ellen Griffith Spears

"A fast-paced and vivid account of the global threats to food production and public health from the agrochemical industry’s widely marketed herbicides—a must read for all who wish to better understand the workings of ‘scavenger capitalism.’"

Anne-Marie Slaughter

"A timely, powerful, and totally engrossing book. Through stories of farmers, chemists, entrepreneurs, workers, patients, lawyers, and judges, Elmore recounts a devastating history of how chemicals have seeped into almost every cranny of the national and global food supply. We will not fix our health until we fix our food; fixing our food, as this book makes clear, is a tale of politics and power."

Catherine Colman Flowers

"Seed Money illustrates the danger of placing profit over people and how not protecting our environment from dangerous chemicals threatens the health and welfare of all of us."

Edmund Russell

"I expect this will become the book on Monsanto."

Mark Bittman

"If you want to know just how Monsanto became so reviled by the sustainable food movement, this gripping tale of greed and corporate power tells all."

Edward L. Ayers

"A book of immediate relevance and enduring significance. Elmore’s powerful narrative uncovers evidence long hidden in corporate vaults, reveals the global consequences of decisions made in distant laboratories and boardrooms, and finds connections among science, agriculture, technology, politics, and business never seen before. This is history that matters."

Nature - Ryan Scarrow

"[M]agisterial…Throughout Seed Money, we learn about the owners and leaders of Monsanto who were oblivious and dismissive of the cost to their own workers…[and] the business strategies and tactics that would transform farming and farm communities from the heartland of America to the cerrado of Brazil [and] to Vietnam.…This is an amazing work of environmental history."

JANUARY 2022 - AudioFile

Narrator Sean Patrick Hopkins shows great talent as he offers a warm, accessible, light, and engaging narration of this audiobook. However, his style may be at odds with the villainous story at hand. Historian Barlowe J. Elmore offers a well-researched examination of the St. Louis-originated chemical firm Monsanto, which grew into a powerful conglomerate that was later purchased by Bayer. The primary thrust is that the profit motive tainted the original Monsanto’s values as it became the world’s largest manufacturer of genetically engineered seeds—seeds that may have been knowingly toxic. Hats off to Hopkins for accepting the narration challenge and for succeeding in handling the many scientific terms and foreign expressions in this work. This mixed listening experience will inform those who enjoy exposés of “scavenger capitalism.” W.A.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-08-25
Digging deep into the murky world of the agrochemical giant.

By 2005, Monsanto had become the world’s largest seller of seeds. Elmore, a professor of environmental and business history and author of Citizen Coke (2016), has done his homework to deliver an insightful chronicle of Monsanto since its 1901 founding. Struggling with vicious competition, it faced bankruptcy for years before turning the corner with its major products, saccharine and caffeine, and a big customer: Coca-Cola. In a forecast of what was to come, Monsanto fought off government efforts to brand both as toxic adulterants. Diversifying into chemicals in the 1920s, Monsanto hit the jackpot after 1935 with its monopoly on polychlorinated biphenyls, essential in electrical insulation, paints, and plastics. PCBs turned out to be fiercely toxic, led to a torrent of litigation, and were ultimately banned. Turning from industry to agriculture after World War II, Monsanto produced powerful herbicides that were spread over huge areas of Vietnam as defoliants, devastating that nation’s forests and sickening innumerable Vietnamese and Americans exposed to it. Monsanto’s bestseller today, Roundup Ready, are seeds genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides. Resistant seeds now produce more than 90% of the cotton, corn, and soybeans in the U.S. and are spreading across the world. They seemed miraculous when introduced during the 1990s, but they cost more and don’t increase yields. Herbicide-resistant weeds are spreading, and Monsanto continues to fiercely defend its patents. Elmore admits that the Earth could not support 8 billion humans without high-tech agriculture and chemicals. The future will require more, but we’ve underestimated their dangers and surrendered too much control to institutions whose priority is making a profit and who spread disease and destruction to achieve it. Elmore’s gimlet eye reveals that, although an energetic and creative enterprise, Monsanto did not break the mold. For more alarming information about Roundup, pair this book with Stephanie Seneff’s Toxic Legacy (2021).

An astute, evenhanded history of a business often portrayed, with good reason, as a villain.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172934100
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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