A cooperative like MFA Incorporated, if you look at its operations in any given year, makes for a good snapshot of farming trends in its trade territory. By their nature, buying and selling cooperatives are largely a conduit for the member/owners' farming operations-delivering input, collecting output. What is delivered and collected is dictated by the farmer.

And while that's a simplification of grand magnitude, let us accept it for the moment as we peer into the abyss of more complicated issues.

As an organization, MFA is careful to remain notably apolitical, exerting its management expertise (and capital) on business functions rather than the eternal firestorm of politics. But as a conduit for its membership, the cooperative can be misconstrued.

In a letter on the page opposite this one, a reader from Kahoka, Mo., suggests that MFA, and in fact its members, should not promote biotech crops carte blanche.

That may be a fair assessment of how to approach new technology-a lesson learned with StarLink corn.

But, if you're looking to assign cause to trends, the question for biotech isn't so much who is promoting it as who is using it. More importantly, who will be using it.

Part of the answer is that farmers are using biotech crops, and lots of them. Back when Roundup Ready technology first emerged in 1996, about a million acres were planted. Then, even with reports of "yield drag" in glyphosate-resistant soybean lines, the adoption rate, when plotted on paper, was more of a spike than a curve. This year plantings for glyphosate-resistant soybeans were estimated at 62 million acres. That's more than 75 percent of the total soybeans planted.

You know the reason for the quick adoption rate-the technology works.

Never mind that the inventors and marketers of the early generation of biotech grain crops got things a bit backwards. They delivered the notable benefits of biotechnology to producers first. It should have been consumers. But until very recent history, plant breeders were judged by plant growers, not technology adverse food activists. Breeders and geneticists didn't realize the scope of the revolution they were embarking upon.

Now that plant breeders have a few years of biotech experience, the benefits for consumers will come more rapidly. Food activists will cry foul. And food politics will become more rancorous in the public sphere. As growers, you will feel caught in the middle-half the time excited about opportunities for better price, half the time feeling betrayed by end users who continue to foist special growing requirements down the production chain.

It isn't just technology, advertising and marketing that brought us to this juncture of politics and agriculture. It is the tectonic shift of culture-a culture where health has become an overarching concern. Some of that concern is expressed in being dubious of biotech crops. But in time, when biotech-improved food has a chance to prove itself, it will be a solution for health conscious consumers. Indeed, in a culture where people are looking everywhere, desperately, for ways to live longer, there's little question that biotechnology has a promising place.

That's why the future users of biotechnology are so important to the Midwest farm. Given the choice of a product that smells and tastes just like all the others but adds a certain health benefit, it's a good bet that, in time, the product with biotech added health benefits will win.