The chemical weedkiller Roundup is, according to the Monsanto Man, mighty stuff. It is the safest and most commonly used weed-killer on the planet.
And according to the Monsanto Man, Patrick O'Reilly, it is a "downwardly mobile product", killing evil weeds by seeking out their roots and shutting off their lives.
By the time Patrick, who is business manager of Monsanto in Ireland, was finished singing the praises of Roundup, agriculture correspondents were almost moved to substituting it for their Guinness in the local pub on Thursday last.
Patrick had invited the reporters to meet him to view the trial crop of genetically modified sugar beet on a hillside in Co Wexford.
The genial Meath man rejected any idea that this exercise was a charm offensive launched by the multinational to win back ground swiped by environmentalists.
This background briefing and information session, said the PR operative with Patrick, John Gallagher, was to inform and educate the ag corrs. He said the demand for more information had come from the farming community itself and a series of informal meetings had been arranged for farmers at other sites in Cork and Carlow.
And so it was that the men from the Indo, RTE, the Examiner and the gentleman from The Irish Times, found themselves on a sunny hillside in Wexford viewing Ireland's most controversial crop.
This small patch of genetically modified beet is on the farm of Martin Foley, a farmer who tills 250 acres with his sons near Arthurstown, Co Wexford. Fenced off from the rest of the field, the sugar beet trial plot has become the most inspected crop in the State and the most protected. It is also the most expensive, costing £40,000.
The GM sugar beet looked exactly like the rest of the beet in the field except, it has to be said, it looked healthier than the untreated line of beet which had received no chemicals at all.
At the top of the first line of beet, Patrick had arranged an exhibition of boxes containing all the chemicals which are currently used by farmers growing the crop. This combination of chemicals, he said, was far more harmful to the soil than Roundup, which leaves no residue and is the safest and most effective weed-killer in the world.
The only problem was, he said, that if it were sprayed on a sugar beet crop it would kill it, and that was why Monsanto inserted a gene into the 100,000 genes in the sugar beet to make a Roundup-resistant sugar beet plant.
He stressed that Monsanto had nothing to do with the seed for the super-beet, it was merely trying to prove to the authorities here that it was safe to use the weed-killer on the crop. The Monsanto Man's figures on the reduction in chemicals which would be achieved if GM beet was allowed were impressive and seemed to impress Martin Foley as well.
He reckoned that savings of up to £50 per acre could be achieved if the GM beet was allowed, but he is also a very practical man and is well aware of the difficulties.
"I will not grow a crop which no one will buy, and there seems to be a lot of opposition to it out there. You cannot produce food that no one will eat," he said.
He said he had no fear that other crops would be contaminated by the GM crop because of the intensity of the monitoring which goes on at the farm.
"The Environmental Protection Agency counted all the seeds which were put into this plot, and not even a leaf from the beet is allowed leave this plot," he said.
He laughed at any suggestions from the reporters that the crop could be harmful to insects or wildlife or could lead to the spread of super-weeds.
"When you see the amount of cleaning that goes on here when any work is being done there is no likelihood of that at all," he said.
Patrick O'Reilly has no doubt that he has a huge battle to fight in order to win the hearts and minds of consumers to GM food. He said no other issue had united the Green movement worldwide and there were few issues where there was more misinformation to be obtained.
However, there were a few victories for those involved in GM crops. For instance, he said, more than 50 per cent of crops produced in the US are genetically modified. And, he concluded, multicoloured cotton crops are now being grown in the US which means that dyes no longer have to be used during manufacture.
"I understand that multicoloured boxer shorts made from genetically modified cotton are all the rage now in the States," he said.