The seed contamination meant that some farmers who thought they were growing another variety would find that their crop tested positive for StarLink, which has been approved for animal use but not human consumption because of concerns it could cause allergic reactions.
Then, a few days later, a skeptical farmer in Onami, who wanted to be sure his rice was safe for a visiting grandson, had his crop tested, only to find it contained levels of cesium that exceeded the government's safety limit.
The crop tested was soybean, cultivar Hoyt, which produced an aboveground biomass of 2510 grams.
NASA's Biomass Production Chamber BPCC) at Kennedy Space Center was decommissioned in 1998, but several crop tests were conducted that have not been reported in the open literature.
To note, hemp has been legal for over 15 years in Canada and there has not been a single problem with use for psychoactive purposes according to government crop testing.
Taylor suggests that uncertainties about second-generation crop testing exacerbate the agrobiotech industry's reluctance to develop these markets further.
"To grow either seed crops or test crops, you need soil that's essentially sterile," says professor Hector Valenzuela of the University of Hawaii department of tropical plant and soil science.
And although the farmers say the canal water is clean enough to irrigate their crops, tests by a team from the national university show that it is not.
Since the crops tested proved only as noninvasive as expected, researchers say, the study did not shed light on the more pressing question: whether biotech plants engineered with genes likely to make them succeed in the wild could indeed become fast-spreading weeds.
Among the cover crops tested, black oat stood out by its greater production of biomass, resulting in higher P and K availability in the soil surface.
