Agriculture is an industry

How many Americans know this? I didn't.

In the United States, where almost all crops are now genetically modified, the debate is largely closed.

For that matter, what does this sentence actually mean? Are nearly all harvested individual plants GMO? Or merely some individual plants in each commercial species?

The Times is correct that the debate is largely closed here, but they neglect to recall that the debate was largely closed even when it was nominally open. Agribusiness and its lobbying checkbook were by far the dominant voice.

I do know this about corn: Not long after Monsanto sold one of its GM corn varieties (Roundup-resistant, IIRC) to the world, even ancestral corn stocks high in the Sierra Madre had been cross-pollinated with it, whether by butterfly migration or wind or a combination.