Soon it will be planting time in Iowa, and Jim and Sharon Greif, farmers in the village of Prairiesburg, will be starting up the CornCam. Mounted on a pole near their house, the CornCam was a great success last year. Every 15 minutes it dispatched images of their field to the Internet. To the couple's surprise, they got more than 2 million hits, people logging on all summer just to watch their corn grow.
Occasionally the Greifs got e-mails asking if they raised genetically modified crops, a sensitive subject. The CornCam's sponsors, a seed company and a farm journal, advised the Greifs not to touch it. About 25 percent of the corn grown in the United States has been armed with a bacterial gene that produces an insecticide, making the plants poisonous to caterpillars. Most such corn is mixed with conventional corn, and most consumers are unaware of the difference. ...
