Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.

“We can fertilize with s**t but will have to sterilise (sic) it. That requires energy. We have to move food from farms to the public and s**t back.”

That’s what I found when I stumbled upon one web site this week. It is representative of wide ranging ignorance about some of the natural processes we relied on to obtain food LONG before Monsanto and Cargill were ever thought of.

Those of you who occasionally thumb through the scriptures are invited to consider how the first couple were supposed to get along without Monsanto. Their job, you will recall, was to extend the boundaries of paradise and fill it with children. LOTS of children. No fertilizers. No GMOs. No mention of tools, either. (It’s called no-till agriculture and we are just now rediscovering how to use it.)

How gullible are you?

That these companies, and others like them, are not only still in business, but “riding high” proves that it is possible, at least for a while, to fool everyone. Somewhere in the 1920s we got hoodwinked into thinking that natural processes which had worked since mankind first learned to plant in a straight row, had stopped working. Greed set in and reasoning went on holiday. We stopped manuring our fields and started fertilizing them. This led directly to the dust belts of the Great Depression as the reserves of humic acids were pulled from our soils. Without humus to bind them together, the soil particles were free to leave the Midwest on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Literally … some of that dust made it all the way to the ocean.

Not coincidentally, by the 1940′s vitamin advertising had leaped “from a little over a million dollars in advertising to two hundred fifty million dollars a year in just four years.” (The Have-More Plan – A Little Land –  A Lot of Living, Robinson, Ed and Carolyn, p.20, 1973, Storey Publishing, MA. $9.95). Why? Because, as Ed and Carolyn also note on the same page, “vitamin and mineral deficient spinach looks about the same as spinach right out of a good garden.”

Friends, these problems were already known in 1945 when this book was first published.

So, are we returning to the old ways? No. In fact, Monsanto is now one of the companies leading the charge toward GMOs and dominating the seed market (to the tune of roughly 95% domination).

We are believing them again.

The wide-ranging discussion on the site was interesting, to say the least. Mostly it was focused on how to survive a government ‘gone wrong’ scenario. The commenter, perhaps intending to lend weight to his opinions, had closed his post with the statement “This is not theory. My machines work.”

Here is my response, altered somewhat for this blog, to that comment:

This is not theory, either.

As a machinist and then die-maker, I made the machines that made your machines. As a railroad conductor and skilled-tradesman, I understand the difference between reliable facts and conjecture. And you, sir, are full of conjecture. Your ‘facts’ are merely guesses and not even educated ones, at that. Only a few more degrees off target and I would have accused you of being a shill for the chemical manufacturers and purveyors of the GMO seeds that go with them. Instead, I think you may simply be someone who hasn’t troubled himself to do his homework. Well, sir, not all opinions are equal, not all are valid. Sometimes we have to rely on guesswork because not enough facts are available. But it is intellectually indefensible to form an opinion before we have at least considered the readily available facts, weighed them carefully, and then, based on the facts available to us, formed an opinion that is honest at its roots. Even then, as new facts surface or as we come to understand earlier facts differently, an honest man is prepared to shuck his former opinion and dress himself in new conclusions.

Wrong on all counts.

First of all, manure – even human manure – doesn’t need sterilization. If you are worried about the health of its source, it is enough to either compost it aerobically or spread it and allow it to sit a while. The diseases and parasites that fare so well inside a human body generally fare extremely badly outside of it. For a complete discussion of the matter, see the link at the bottom of the page. The book it references has a permanent place in my library.

Second of all, when it decomposes aerobically – whether in a pile or spread on the surface of a field – manure is exothermic and thus yields more energy than consumed. Humans are mammals just as much as horses, cows, pigs and sheep are. This fact provides the thinking behind quite a few hothouse heating systems and more than a couple home toilet systems. Since the stuff needs to rot and since rotting releases heat, why not capture the heat and use it? This isn’t rocket science; it’s economics.

Third, human manure is too rich to use directly as fertilizer, having too much nitrogen to apply directly. A side dressing, when fresh, DOES run the risk of food contamination; but more so of chemically ‘burning’ the plants. However, it is of immeasurable worth as a soil amendment. By the time it has decomposed along with the needed high carbon materials, it will assay out at around 1-1-1 (while being an excellent source of the minor and trace elements that are also needed for healthy plant growth).

Its primary value, then, is as food for soil microbes. It is these, as they release the chemicals from the raw ingredients and the minerals in the soil, who make the fertility of the soil available to the plants while binding up generous amounts of carbon. That is a layman’s way of saying “carbon sequestration” and the more organic material applied to the soil, the more carbon is sequestered (hidden away) there instead of being released into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas.

Fourth of all, this gentleman’s thinking is still locked in the monoculture / agribusiness mode. Suppose that each person simply recycled his/her OWN manure into their OWN garden? This is more than just a closed loop: it is also a means of adding external inputs (the foods eaten that were not grown on that soil). Or, if the manure, etc., from a city was recycled within 20 miles of that city* the energy needs for transporting both the waste and the produce would decline dramatically. Twenty miles is not zero, I know that, but it is a great improvement over the average of 1,500 miles that our food currently travels to reach our plate. I know for a fact that I can grow roughly $3,000 worth of vegetables on the 240 sq ft of raised beds in my backyard per Michigan growing season and this is without the addition of any sort of manure … just rough-finished compost whose ingredients originated either in my kitchen or within 100 yards of my house.

This, too, is not theory.

My machines also work. (Mostly my pressure canner.)

Here’s a link to the book I was talking about in the first exception: The Humanure Handbook. I don’t recommend books that I haven’t read and value … and that means that I read a lot more books (roughly one a week) than I recommend. However, the two mentioned in this post are both well worth owning and will set you back roughly $25 if you buy them both. I think I paid a little more for them, but they were still a bargain.

This planet, whether our production systems recognize it or not, is essentially a closed system. There is no “away”. Your manure and urine, no matter how hard or how often you flush, does not go there.

Simply raising your own vegetables and omitting meat one or two days a week is enough to reverse the global warming caused by humans and also eliminate world hunger (by reallocating resources which is, admittedly, a political hurdle yet to be conquered).  It would also reduce diabetes, cancer of the colon and heart attacks … politics not withstanding.

Seriously.

Simultaneously. It could also reduce your risk of cancer of the colon … but that’s an issue for another day. If you drop your consumption of meat to just one day a week, we can eliminate factory farming altogether.

- Bill

*According to the The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition, some Chinese cities do just this … and are surrounded by circles of green vegetation observable from space. Lots of vegetation means lots of oxygen is being released, helping to keep the city healthier and more livable. I neglected to mention that human manure can be incorporated into the soil in exactly the same fashion as manure from other mammals. Most soils can benefit from the incorporation of generous amounts of manure (as much as the first six inches can contain) from any source available. It can decompose there even more beneficially than it can in a pile because it is available to more earthworms, etc. Get the book (yes, those are affiliate links) and do the thinking for yourself.

Another day, another reason to be glad I’m a vegetarian:

http://donteatdirt.com/2011/04/05/27-tons-of-turkey-burgers-recalled/

Folks, grow your own food. Eat plants, some fruits, little meat.

Okay … just one rant this week and after that I’ll be good, I promise. Revelation 11:18 promises “ to bring to ruin those ruining the earth”. When it was penned, humans hadn’t 2% of the ability to ruin the earth that they now have … and exercise.

Yes, I am hot and worked up and this post is nearly all writing with precious few pictures. This ain’t no sound bite. Sorry about that, but if you are short on brain cells at the moment, it’s okay to click the back arrow on you browser. That’s the one near the top of the page pointing to the left. No, no … I’m not pushing you away … just warning you that what comes next can’t be called light reading. If that’s what you’re here for, try another page. But first, I owe you a quote so that you can see the source of the steam:

“We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people,” Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing “wild lands”, and in particular water supplies.

Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: “There are probably already too many people on the planet.”

Okay … I’ll buy that. Way back in the early 1970’s, my wife and I made the conscious decision to cap our child-bearing at two … the replacement number. Now, three wives later, I still have not added to that number … although she later bore two more by another man.

Statistics show that first world countries have done a fairly good job in capping their populations, especially among their better-educated citizens. Third world countries? Not so good. In first world countries work is done by what Buckminster Fuller called “energy slaves” … appliances such as vacuum cleaners and dishwashers that plug into the electric mains and do the work of one or more people. In less developed lands with fewer electric mains, you simply need more people. This is not complicated. If you ever get the chance, read Fullers’ “Utopia or Oblivion”

Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.

This woman has face-time access to some of the most powerful and influential people on the planet. You’ll find Ms. Rice prominently – and unfavorably – mentioned in the recent Wikileaks data dump.

Here is where Dr. Fedoroff and I part company eternally:

A National Medal of Science laureate (America’s highest science award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods.

“We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven.

“We’re going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops,” she told the BBC.

A part of the problem with GMO crops being forwarded as part of that “inventiveness” is that GMO crops tend to require more water to grow, not less. In the case of cotton, it requires fully twice as much water. Coupled with ill-considered irrigation projects, literally thousands of Indian farmers who were convinced to plant GMO cotton have committed suicide, unable to pay their debts. Sadly, Dr. Federoff, as a molecular biologist, is galloping toward an irredeemable future with pinhole glasses and jackass blinders on. From the perspective of molecular biology, she is right. But ONLY from that perspective. From the perspective of a hammer, all problems look like nails, too.

Her science, she seems to feel, and ONLY her science has “the answer” to food production.

GMO’s might be ‘the answer’, if a lack of plant fertility or disease resistance was the problem. But it’s not and the BBC has identified another, even more pressing, source of concern: water.

Yet there is another answer, a better one, and it doesn’t call for either GMO’s or their corporate dominance on the germ plasm of the planet. Whether you’ve been following along or not, Monsanto and Dow Chemical have been acquiring a planet-wide strangle hold on seed production. These two companies, alone, now produce greater than 50% of all the crop seed on the earth. This does not bode well for anyone reliant on those seeds … in other words, roughly 1/2 the planet is potentially in their thrall.

Today.

The other answer is called ‘sanity’.

What happened to our agricultural soils in the 1900’s was insane. Soil science had discovered synthetic fertilizer and, coupled with the organic material already in the soil, American soil productivity took a wholesale leap forward. It was amazing … really.

So, with bags of miracle dust (industrial waste, actually, from smelting iron into steel) in the back of the truck, farmers stopped manuring their fields, stopped rotating crops, stopped tilling stubble back to the soil, stopped letting fields lie fallow, and paid little attention as the winds blew away the topsoil. The government agricultural experts, lulled by the fertilizer manufacturers, reassured the farmers that everything was under control and science would prevail. Until, finally, the soil would no longer produce even stubble, no matter how much fertilizer was applied. If a soil is lacking in the necessary micronutrients, which soil biota will gladly supply in a healthy soil, it doesn’t matter how much of the macronutrients you pour on top of it.

As the wonder yields dropped, at first, the answer seemed to be “more fertilizer”, but gradually it dawned on the world agricultural community that “more fertilizer” was less an answer than a problem. The winds came and stripped the topsoil. In some distant day geologists are going to wonder how so much of the good dirt from the American Midwest came to be layered in the trenches of the Atlantic.

Little farmers left, driven off by debt and the need to feed their children, and their fields were gobbled up by corporations at bank auctions until the small farmer had dwindled nearly to the point of extinction. This process continues today.

The most productive soil in America has always been, and likely always will be, in its backyard gardens. Right now I have lettuce growing over where the asparagus will be in a couple of weeks. When the asparagus arises, it will find a living mulch over head … and no compaction to fight against. As summer advances and the lettuce finds its way to sandwich and plate, it will be replaced by a thick layer of compost and leaf mold. And maybe some herbs.

Commercial agriculture simply cannot do that.

In this corner, organic farming and in the other corner, GMO’s.

This is not a ‘battle royale” fit for television; this is an ordinary fight to the death. If GMO’s are granted even a toehold, they will win.

Commercial scale organic produce is economically viable, in large part, because of an implied contract with the consumer … that the producer has taken extraordinary care for the safety of the food in exchange for an increased price in the market. This is something that the corporate-owned factory farm cannot compete with.

Unless, of course, they can pollute the fields of the organic farmer (and gardener, too) with the pollen of their Genetically Modified crops. Then the (otherwise organic) crops lose their premium value in the market but retain their premium costs of production.

They are doing it. Today. If you plant a GM crop of cucumbers next to a field of non-GM cucumbers, pollen from the fields will intermingle. The GM crop will not be lifted up, but the non-GM field will be reduced in value. Right now, the law favors the GM planter and will even support a suit against the non-GM farmer for, in effect, stealing the GM pollen in order to ruin his own crop. These are laws that need to be overturned and existing judgments that need to be reversed.

“We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century.” (Dr. Federoff)

A molecular biologist might think that splicing a fish gene into food is exactly the same process as splicing a fish gene into a pill, but that is a grievous error because the pill in the bottle does not contaminate the pills in the bottles around them.

If memory serves me correctly, it was a molecular biologist who introduced the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus into the human population through polio vaccine. It mutated. Now it’s called Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV.

Such are the consequences of trusting scientists who hold press conferences. Dr. Fedoroff included.

The pollen of the GMO is carried, by wind and insect, great distances — silently inseminating the fields of others and destroying their value. This completely subverts the organic goal, causing the (formerly) organic crop … the one on which expensive care has been lavished … to be useful only in the markets that will tolerate such pollution and not in the market which was willing to pay for such care.

And it’s not just a matter of economics.

It’s also a matter of our right to choose what we put in our mouths. A person taking a pill has the right to know how that pill was obtained and then to make an informed choice about ingesting it. But, by law, there is no labeling, no chain of custody, by which even the most pro-active of consumer might trace his dinner back to its source without driving to the address on the label. The sticker on the apple on my desk says, simply, “Fuji” “USA” and a logo also has the word “Washington”.

The state is 71,342 sq. miles and is known for its apple orchards. If I’m going to find out how my apple was grown, I guess that I’d better fill up with gas and pack a lunch before I go.

“We wouldn’t think of going to our doctor and saying ‘Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century’, and yet that’s what we’re demanding in food production.”

That’s because the food production methods of the 19th century worked but the food production methods of the 20th century do not.

Increasing amounts of fertilizers are being met with decreasing yields because the soil itself has been abused. Restore the soil and the fertilizers will work again. I promise.

Evidence is mounting that claimed yields for GMO’s are fictitious, that genes are not reliably transmitted between generations (up to a 25% failure rate) and that the research into the safety that was supposedly done with GMO’s was ‘cooked’ . More than that, GM crops are now seen as requiring more, not less, pesticides and herbicides. Already thousands of acres have been abandoned to Roundup ready pigweed and pesticide resistant weevils are infesting cotton fields safe from their former predators.

Nina Fedoroff needs to get out into her backyard, get a shovel in her hand, and reconsider the health of this fragile place we call home. It seems that she is considering GMO’s in isolation, where, in the sterile environment of the laboratory and petri dish, they may make perfect sense. But she wants to release them from that isolation and impose them on the rest of us and that’s where we draw the line.

Ms. Fedoroff might also ask herself if there might be someone smarter than her.

And if there might be a kernel of truth to Revelation 11:18.

All quotes courtesy of the BBC article “Earth population ‘exceeds limits’” March 31, 2009 @ 18:17 GMT

Food, inc. takes a fact-supported look at agribusiness. It’s not a pretty picture.

This book is a companion publication to the movie by the same name and includes much material and additional detail that simply could not be reasonably crammed, wedged, shoehorned or otherwise forced into the movie.

If, like me, you missed the movie, you want to get this book. Really … you want this book. If you saw the movie, you still want this book … because you’ve already forgotten most of the movie.

The impact of the food we eat on our health, the impact on those who produce it and the impact on our precious natural resources must be met by a personal determination to ‘do better’ with our food choices and practices.

Readers of this blog are already organic gardeners … and that’s the gold standard for a healthy diet and a healthy planet … but there are steps that even we can take to ‘do better’ – not the least of which is spreading this information as widely as it is in our power to do.

Most of us are still eating meat, for instance. We can have a tremendous impact on the health of the planet simply by eating ‘vegan’ (no meat or animal products at all) once a week. With our gardens starting to produce again, this should be fairly simple to accomplish. As I have gained experience with this diet, I have found it desirable to eat a diet that is predominantly ‘fruit/grain/vegetable’ with -tiny- amounts of cheese and butter. I reserve my meat eating for those rare occasions when I am a guest in a friend’s home or simply MUST eat at a fast-food establishment and simply cannot stomach yet another dry and unimaginative salad in a plastic tray.

That’s not perfection and it won’t meet PETA’s standards for food blessedness, but it works for me and it is a far cry from where I used to be.

I’m doing my part … care to join me?