Feds Freeze Out Frost Fix for Southern States.

Texas is known for things like violent hurricanes and torrid heat waves, but some parts of the state experienced snow, ice, and sub-zero temperatures this week. Some cities broke century-old records. The cold snap, which according to the U.S. National Weather Service, was caused by an "Arctic outbreak" that originated just above the U.S.-Canada border, and lasted for several days.

Frost damage to crops is not unusual; it causes American farmers to lose billions of dollars annually.

Texans are not shivering alone. The storm moved north and east, and temperatures across the middle of the country also plummeted to new lows that haven’t been felt in a century or more, with temperatures dropping to minus 14 in Oklahoma City and minus 20 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the sub-freezing weather came too early to inflict significant damage on many crops, with a few exceptions, such as citrus and some stone fruits. It will take a toll, however, on many of the common landscaping plants and trees that adorn yards and parks.

Frost damage to crops is not unusual; it causes American farmers to lose billions of dollars annually. Peaches, plums, citrus, and other crops are regularly threatened by frost in the Southeast, but California is also susceptible: a freeze there in January 2007 cost farmers more than $1 billion in losses of citrus, avocados, and strawberries, and a 1990 freeze caused about $3.4 billion in damage to agriculture and resulted in the layoff of 100,000 citrus industry workers, including pickers, packers, harvesters, and salespeople. In 2002, lettuce prices around the country spiked after an unseasonable frost struck Arizona’s lettuce-growing regions.

As with many things, technology could mitigate much of the damage. But government regulation has placed obstacles in the way of innovative solutions. Those obstacles illustrate what innovators are up against, and how flawed, unscientific public policy prevents science and technology from realizing their potential.

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REGULATORS FREEZE OUT AN INNOVATIVE SOLUTION

Currently, farmers’ tools for preventing frost damage are pathetically low-tech. Methods include burning smudge pots to produce warm smoke; running wind machines to move the frigid air; and spraying water on the plants to form an insulating coat of ice. An innovative high-tech solution—a clever application of biotechnology discussed below—has been frozen out by federal regulators (pun intended).

So far, so good. Then the government stepped in.

In the early 1980s, scientists in the agbiotech (agricultural biotechnology) industry and at the University of California, Berkeley, devised an ingenious approach to limiting frost damage, using recombinant DNA, or “gene-splicing” techniques.

There is a harmless bacterium, Pseudomonas syringae, which lives on many plants, and contains an “ice nucleation” protein that promotes frost damage. (Ice nucleation proteins, which are found on the surface of certain bacteria, promote frost damage in plants by inducing the formation of ice crystals at a higher temperature than they would otherwise form.) These scientists created a mutant of the bacterium that lacks the ice-nucleation protein, reasoning that spraying this variant bacterium (dubbed “ice-minus”) on plants might prevent frost damage by displacing the common, ice-promoting kind. Using very precise recombinant DNA, or “gene-splicing,” techniques, the researchers removed the gene for the ice-nucleation protein and planned field tests with the ice-minus bacteria to see whether it would actually prevent frost damage under real-world conditions.

So far, so good. Then the government stepped in.

The Environmental Protection Agency classified the innocuous ice-minus bacterium, which was to be tested in northern California on small, fenced-off plots of potatoes and strawberries, as a pesticide. The rationale was that because the naturally occurring, ubiquitous “ice-plus” bacterium promoted frost damage, and was, therefore, a “pest,” other bacteria intended to mitigate its effects would be considered a pesticide. This is the kind of absurd, sophistic reasoning that could lead the EPA to regulate outdoor trash can lids as a pesticide because they deter or mitigate the actions of a “pest”—namely, raccoons.

At the time, scientists inside and outside the EPA agreed that the test posed negligible risk. (I myself wrote the analysis submitted by the Food and Drug Administration.) The reasoning was that no new genetic material had been added—only a single gene whose function was well known had been deleted—and the organism was obviously harmless. Nonetheless, the field trial was subjected to an extraordinarily long and burdensome review, by both the National Institutes of Health and EPA, only because the organism had been genetically modified with recombinant DNA techniques.

We have the EPA to thank for farmers’ jeopardized livelihoods, lost jobs, and inflated produce prices following winter and spring frosts.

It is noteworthy that small-scale field trials using bacteria with identical traits, but constructed with older, cruder techniques require no governmental review of any kind. (There are natural, ice-minus deletion mutants of P. syringae, but because the gene for the ice-nucleation protein is not completely deleted, the mutation isn’t permanent.) When field tested on less than 10 acres, non-engineered bacteria and chemical pesticides are completely exempt from regulation. Moreover, there is no government regulation at all of the vast quantities of the “ice-plus” P. syringae organisms (which contain the ice-nucleation protein) that are commonly blown into the air during snow-making at ski resorts.

Although the ice-minus bacteria proved safe and effective at preventing frost damage in field trials, further research and commercialization were discouraged by the combination of onerous government regulation, the inflated expense of doing the experiments, and the prospect of huge downstream costs and the stigma of pesticide registration. As a result, the product was never commercialized, and plants cultivated for food and fiber throughout the nation remain vulnerable to frost damage.

We have the EPA to thank for farmers’ jeopardized livelihoods, lost jobs, and inflated produce prices following winter and spring frosts. This point illustrates the ripple effect—in this case, the public health impact—of such government actions. The demand for fresh fruits and vegetables is elastic, so higher prices reduce consumption, which causes consumers to get less of the antioxidant, vitamin, and high-fiber benefits afforded by these products. Especially in these times of pandemic-driven disruptions in parts of the food supply chain, the last thing we need is an irresponsible, unscientific government policy lowering crop yields and lessening farmers’ resilience.

The EPA’s creating disincentives to the development of a product that can prevent or mitigate frost damage is yet another example of regulators creating a situation in which everyone loses. Will they rethink their policies and be guided by science and common sense? Probably not before hell freezes over.