‘You’ve got to embrace GM technology’

British farmer David Hill is a believer in progress. "We’re only a spot in time," he says. "Look back to where we were 1,000 years ago and where we are now. You’ve got to embrace technology," he says.

Ten years ago this conviction prompted Hill to become one of the few people in the UK to grow genetically modified (GM) crops.

Hill was asked by agrochemicals group Syngenta in the late 1990s to carry out a trial of its GM sugar-beet. The trial was carried out to learn about growing GM crops and not to sell them.

The Norfolk farmer was soon convinced of the new technology’s benefits.

"The advantages were amazing," he says. "We only had to spray crops once, as opposed to four or five times, so we were using fewer pesticides. There was no hoeing, so we weren’t upsetting ground-nesting birds and we didn’t have to work all hours of day and night."

In addition, Hill says he was the first person to realise that GM cultivation could remove the risk of crops developing manganese deficiency - a plant disorder which has to be corrected by spraying minerals back onto farmland.

Hill followed the one-year pre-trial with a three-year evaluation of the sugar-beet. He then spent a year managing a demonstration site to show people GM cultivation in practice.

But he gave up the demonstration project because of increasing anti-GM activism. "The site just attracted everyone who’s against these crops to come along and pull them up."

The destruction of biotech crops by environmental campaigners is widely credited with wiping out GM cultivation in the UK.

Hill comes from a line of British farmers. Today he runs a 600-hectare farm in Norfolk that was started by his grandfather in 1932.

Until his involvement with the GM trials, his time was divided between conventional and organic farming. The Norfolk farm still produces organic wheat and grass seed, as well as conventional sugar-beet, potatoes, grass seed and meat from a herd of Highland cattle.

But his time spent growing biotech crops has left Hill with a new passion: the need to explain GM benefits to a European audience. He hopes that there will be less opposition now.

"Consumers are changing their attitudes," he says. "They are not half so worried about GMs as in the past. They are now much more concerned about food quality.

"We’ve got to keep biotech cultivation in mind," he concludes. "We can’t keep holding back technology."

British farmer David Hill is a believer in progress. "We’re only a spot in time," he says. "Look back to where we were 1,000 years ago and where we are now. You’ve got to embrace technology," he says.