It was the first varsity tournament of my sophomore year. The topic: on balance, the benefits of genetically modified foods outweigh the harms. Because of the wording of the resolution we used a cost benefit analysis. Let it be known however, there are very few harms when it comes to genetic modification.

The benefits of genetic modification include how they help make crops healthier, how it helps farmers yield larger harvests, how GM crops can be used to make better vaccines, how genetic modification limits pesticide usage, and how genetically modified organisms are more resilient to the natural forces. Frankly, there’s even more benefits (and stats to support them), but the list would be ridiculously long. The costs include several false reports of prenatal bleeding caused by GM crops, some small farms being harmed economically by big corporations, the endangerment of one species of monarch butterfly, and the potential creation of superweeds in select environments.

These costs are hardly evident in comparison to the benefits. As such, my affirmative was extensive, articulate, and thorough. This was the first time I was truly proud of a case. The negative, on the other hand, was a disaster.

I wrote two separate negative cases. One had three relatively weak contentions. The other had the same contentions, but I wrote in a red herring contention. The strategy is simple: write a short, easily beaten contention in the middle of a case. This hopefully makes it so the opponent focuses on the one contention, as opposed to the rest of the case. With the genetic modification case the red herring was that GM crops endanger one species of monarch butterfly.

At the tournament, the coin flipped in our favor all three rounds and we wound up both affirmative and speaking second. Needless to say, with the strength of my case and luck on our side, Crackshot and I won all three rounds.

It is also of note that the second round of the tournament was the first I faced one of my rivals, Alec. He was always kind to me, but never courteous in our debates. Each time we faced off, he brought along a different partner. I remember this first face off because our judge was my father’s old debate coach. It really bugged Alec that I was a year younger than him and the judge already knew me. We would later face him three more times, but I’ll get to that later.

This meet was important because for the first time ever, Crackshot and I broke to finals. It was a big deal to us, so the second the round posted we hustled to our room early and waited for everyone to arrive.

Our opponents arrived soon after, and much to our chagrin they were seasoned veterans. It was a boy and a girl, both seniors. The boy, being ill, refused to shake anyone’s hand. He was slender, meticulous, and was their first speaker. The girl was calculated and cruel, but had dyed hair to almost humanize her. We would soon learn that she could talk circles around the Crackshot. In fact, she’s part of the reason Crackshot started to speed up his speeches.

In a stroke of bad luck, we lost the coin toss. They took the affirmative. We took second speaker. We hadn’t run the negative yet. It was poorly written. It was sloppy. We were un-practiced. And our opponents were superior. On top of that I had included that red herring contention. It was only a sentence: in a study done by the Institute for Modern Technology, GM crops eliminate habitat for the monarch butterfly, a species whose population is already down 50%. It was ridiculous. We were screwed.

As the round began I lost myself. I was flustered through my speeches, their first speaker walked over me in my crossfire. Crackshot did his best, but he was no match for her experience and poise. If I recall this was the first of only a few times I ever took off my jacket and rolled up my sleeves mid-round.

I lost all hope, so during that final speech I pretended to take notes. I was drawing a little cartoon. It was of a prickly plant wearing a cape. A super weed. But during that final speech I saw something. Crackshot was still steadfast. He left everything on the floor and refused to give up. This was our first finals round, and he wasn’t letting anything stop him. I appreciated his rigor. When I crumbled, he carried on. As a team we could be unstoppable.

We lost that round. Pretty handily. We took sixth place at the meet overall, and they gave us a small trophy. That was the best we had ever done, and hearing them say our names on the stage is a feeling I never will forget.

I still have that drawing of the superweed. Every time I look at it I remember that thrill. The thrill of winning. The thrill of competition. Most of all, the thrill of someone having my back. Crackshot had my back in that meet, and for the rest of highschool.

Frequent Mowing May Transform Poisonous Weeds Into ‘Superweeds’, from University of Arkansas + University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, published by Scientific Reports

There was a moment, about 20 years ago, when farmers thought that they'd finally defeated weeds forever. Biotech companies had given them a new weapon: genetically engineered crops that could tolerate doses of the herbicide glyphosate, also known by its trade name, Roundup. Farmers could spray this chemical right over their crops, eliminate the weeds, and the crops were fine. Stanley Culpepper remembers that moment. He'd left his family's farm to study weed science at North Carolina State University. "I was trained by some really, really amazing people," he says, "and I was even trained that there would never be a weed that was resistant to Roundup." These scientists believed that plants couldn't become immune to Roundup because it required too big of a change in a plant's biology. In 2005, though, Culpepper reported that he'd found some weeds that Roundup could not kill. They were growing in a field in Georgia. And this was not just any weed. It was a kind of monster weed called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed. Over the following years, these glyphosate-resistant pigweeds spread like a plague across America's farmland. They're practically everywhere in the South now and increasingly common in the Midwest.

EPA Watchdog to Investigate Monsanto GMOs and Superweeds | AgroNews

"Genetically modified corn and soybeans were supposed to reduce chemical use on farms, but instead theyve done the exact opposite by creating herbicide -resistant ‘superweeds’ and increasing the use of Monsantos toxic weed killer Roundup. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog wants to know how this chemical war on weeds is affecting human health and the environment.

Th…

Already, Reuters reports, 14 different weed species in the U.S. have developed resistance to glyphosate — the world’s most widely used herbicide – affecting some 60 million acres of farmland and causing an estimated $1 billion per year in damages. The drastically reduced efficacy of the herbicide lead to the USDA’s approval, last fall, of a new line of genetically modified crops engineered to withstand a different type of herbicide. Critics of this approach refer to what’s called the “herbicide treadmill”: chemicals lead to herbicide-resistant superweeds, requiring new chemicals and new forms of resistance, until we’ve run out of options.