Half the pile will sit in warehouses, underpriced by foreign competitors and stalled by federal quotas.

It's a bleak scene for farmers, but a Texas A&M molecular biologist offers hope.

Erik Mirkov has genetically engineered sugar cane with a human gene to produce a human therapeutic protein. Such a protein could replace the need to farm cadavers for face-plumping collagen and provide a more affordable alternative to fermenting hamster cells for cancer treatments.

It also could turn some varieties of Texas sugar into a more profitable crop. Some proteins used by pharmaceutical companies now are selling for more than $1 million a gram.

But the research worries environmentalists, who fear the proteins from such "pharma plants" may somehow get loose and contaminate conventionally grown food crops.

A number of scientists are raising crops spliced with human genes, which coax the plants to produce proteins that then are extracted and turned into drugs known as biologics, which Mirkov said would be easier to produce and less expensive than conventional pharmaceuticals.

About two years ago the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center, one of several entities that have tested biopharmaceutical crops in Hawai'i, concluded field testing of 50 sugar-cane plants on O'ahu that had been crossed with human genes in hopes of producing an enzyme to spur production of bone marrow.

One cancer drug being tested now at Stanford University is derived from the tobacco plant, while other suitable crops include corn and rice.

But Mirkov said sugar cane's simple genetic makeup compared with other crops would make the splicing with human genes easier and less expensive.

The introduction of human genes into sugar cane plants could provide a more affordable alternative for collecting human proteins.

Rituxan, manufactured by Genentech Inc., latches on to cancer cells so that the body will destroy them. The same principles are behind hundreds of drugs being used against other ailments including breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohn's disease.

By the time his wife's cancer was being treated with Rituxan, Mirkov was already well under way with his research and was confident plants could be used to make the treatments more plentiful and less expensive. And while the proteins need an expensive purification process, Mirkov said sugar cane's simple makeup compared with other crops would ease the process.

Most protein-based drugs are made from animal cells, which are reproduced by fermentation in 10,000-liter vats that are costly to build. The vats available are working near capacity, Mirkov said. The only capital cost involved with creating sugar-derived drugs is the cost of planting the field.

"People have turned to plants as a biofactory," he said, although it could be years before the proteins are ready for use.

But the environmental concerns persist.

Prodigene Inc., of College Station, Texas, successfully made protein from corn they grew in Nebraska. But when the field was cleared to prepare to grow soybeans, some of the engineered corn poked through, causing a bioengineering scare.

Some 3 million bushels of soybeans already harvested had to be incinerated. Ingesting a genetically altered crop can be fatal, Mirkov said.

Neil Carman, with the Sierra Club's national genetic engineering committee, warned that entire European and other markets — as well as some U.S. manufacturers — might reject Texas sugar.

"Somebody buying it may say, 'We don't want any collagen in the sugar cane we're buying. ... We don't want any sugar cane if it's growing in an area where there's some kind of genetically engineered crop,' " he said.