Knierim, Iowa ? In a field near their northern Iowa farmstead, brothers Bill and Joe Horan have planted what some say is the future for both farming and pharmaceuticals.

Their field contains corn genetically altered to contain an enzyme that helps cystic fibrosis patients digest food.

Joe Horan, left, and his brother Bill Horan, right, stand in front of their combine on their Knierim, Iowa, farm. The Horans and farmers with the Iowa Cooperative are growing corn genetically altered to contain an enzyme that helps cystic fibrosis patients digest food.

“We’re helping people with pharmaceutical therapeutics. It is a different role and it makes you look at agriculture differently,” Bill Horan says.

This is the second year the Horans and other farmers with the Iowa Cooperative have sown the altered seeds developed by Meristem Therapeutics, a French biotechnology company. Meristem purifies the corn after harvest, extracts the enzyme and puts it into pills a process French scientists say is 14 times cheaper than producing the enzyme in a laboratory.

Other companies are experimenting with growing potatoes engineered to help obese people lose weight and nicotine-free tobacco to help smokers break their habit.

Leaders of farm states believe such biological developments will help steady the bumpy farm economy, keeping farmers on their land and out of bankruptcy court.

There are concerns, though. Researchers and consumer groups wonder if the industry, government and “pharmers” can ensure that drug-containing crops do not find their way into the food supply.

The “pharma-crops” are closely monitored. To ensure that seeds do not commingle, the U.S. Agriculture Department requires the cooperative to plant the crop at least a mile from any seed production sites.

Pharmers must plant their crop at least 21 days before or 21 days after all neighbors within a half-mile to a mile radius have planted theirs, to assure there is no cross-pollination.

Meristem and the Horans have taken extra measures, planting male-sterile corn so there is no pollen that could be blown to nearby fields and detassling the plants.

“Even if a tornado comes, there’s nothing there to spread around,” Horan says.

Animals could pass through the field and eat the product, but Dominique Mison, Meristem’s bio-industrial director, says there is little danger in that.

Critics of genetically engineered crops are skeptical of such claims.

“We take a very strong position that absolutely none of these crops should ever be grown in anything that isn’t a contained field,” says Joseph Mendelson, legal director at the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

The Bush administration recently moved a step in that direction. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency should do preliminary safety assessments early in the field trials of experimental crops.

“There’s no question that growing these crops right now, without having any type of good requirements in place … is a recipe for very serious contamination,” Mendelson said.

Biotech companies are aware of the hazards.

In October 2000, a genetic testing company found an altered corn approved for animals but not for humans had ended up in the food supply, contaminating products such as taco shells. Scientists feared human allergies to StarLink corn but no link was firmly established. The cleanup cost the seed’s manufacturer, Aventis, and farm and food industries millions of dollars.

“What was a good lesson from StarLink was that a problem like that can be managed,” says Stephen Howell, director of Iowa State’s Plant Sciences Institute.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization says consumers should not expect to see acres and acres of pharma-crops anytime soon.

The Washington-based group’s spokeswoman, Lisa Dry, says it is less like farming than a living laboratory, where crops are grown by a few farmers in small plots and need constant monitoring.