Transgenics is basically taking a gene, a piece of DNA, from another organism and then splicing it into the organism that's your target and making sure that the gene is functional.
For instance, the herbicide tolerance gene may have originated in a bacterium. That bacterial gene is then spliced into a plant, and it's functioning because it's coming with a series of genes that allow it to function.
The genomic approach would be to understand the genes we have in the organisms we're already growing. I'll use lentils as an example. We may have six or seven species of lentil. We know from our own research that the wild species and maybe even the lentil itself are full of genes that we don't know anything about.
What we can do with genomics is go to an organism that's well characterized—one of the relatives of alfalfa is one of those--and if we know what genes are there, we can now start looking for those genes based on the DNA sequence in the crops that we work with.
Basically it's computerized biology. The cost is much cheaper, and it's going down every six months. That allows us to analyze what we have, rather than searching outside the organism. All you really need to do is have a little DNA test kit that could then identify the genes, and maybe you can find that it's already existing in the plants we are working with.