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The days of Monsanto greeting protesters at its World Headquarters (MWH) with balloons and pitchers of water are over. When 500 to 700 showed up for the October 12, 2013, March Against Monsanto (MAM), scores of police from half a dozen municipalities were there, several with dogs.

Also gone were police attempts to micromanage demonstrators. During a previous demonstration, police told picketers to stand on the pavement and not on Monsanto’s grass. At the next event, cops said that the pavement was too close to traffic and ordered people to stand on the grass. October 12 was noticeable by the absence of police commands concerning where to stand. At first, they seemed to have given up on controlling the increasingly large crowd.

Since the 1990s, marchers at MWH mostly have been environmentalists and Vietnam War veterans who had been radicalized in the 1960s. At MAM events in May and October 2013, there were hundreds of activists who had not even been born in the 1960s.

A mixture of joyful exuberance and angry rejection of the company’s efforts to control and contaminate food permeated the crowd, which spilled onto both sides of the 50 mph traffic racing by Monsanto’s Olive Boulevard entrance. As cars slowed to appreciate the multitude of signs, young activists poured into the street, handing out literature. Cars slowed to a stop, bringing more demonstrators into the street. Police and dogs advanced toward the crowd. Demonstrators backed off and cleared the road. Cops moved back. No arrests.

This cycle repeated itself four or five times during the two-hour happening. At one point, several of us wrote a list of reparation requests for the Monsanto CEO. We had not expected to get past the police line blocking the entrance, but the police line unexpectedly evaporated as a road block occurred at the same time we began moving. The person in the guard shack shut the window tight as we approached. A squad of eight to ten private Monsanto security guards rapidly walked up to us. We presented the list to the head goon and retreated. No arrests.