Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Gretchen with okra

Gretchen the farmer and Gretchen the Rotarian with okra and peppers and Brown Dog and Yellow Dog:

Gretchen the farmer and Rotarian with okra and peppers and Brown Dog and Yellow Dog.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 31 October 2012.

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Dogs in pine straw

Smile, dogs:

Picture by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 19 October 2012.

The tree behind the dogs on their right is a longleaf four years old; the rest are loblolly five years old.

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Crop rotation for profit

Want better yields and the same or more profit? Stop buying pesticides, rotate more crops over longer periods, and mix in animals. Yet another study confirms this. Oh, and a hundred times less disease-causing pesticides in streams, and presumably also less pesticides in the food going to market.

Mark Bittman wrote for NYTimes today, A Simple Fix for Farming,

The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm. On 22 acres of it, beginning in 2003, researchers set up three plots: one replicated the typical Midwestern cycle of planting corn one year and then soybeans the next, along with its routine mix of chemicals. On another, they planted a three-year cycle that included oats; the third plot added a four-year cycle and alfalfa. The longer rotations also integrated the raising of livestock, whose manure was used as fertilizer.

The paper's Figure 3 (above) illustrates that labor increased with crop rotation length, but so did yield, and profit remained the same or better. How can this be?

Pesticide studies hitting a nerve

There's quite the controversy about that recent study that shows that "inert" ingredients in Roundup are actually toxic. Apparently Dr. Séralini hit a nerve.

Some critics are making up stuff:

"The EFSA requested access to the raw data" —Jon Entine

That turns out not to be true:

No. EFSA has not requested raw data for the study as this information is not required at this stage of the review process." —EFSA.

Who previously actually did refuse to release raw data?

Monsanto only released the raw data after a legal challenge from Greenpeace, the Swedish Board of Agriculture and French anti-GM campaigners.

Here's the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)'s rather vague statement about the recent study and EFSA's FAQ clarifying that statement.

Here's a much more substantive response from scientists supporting the Séralini cell toxicity study. The last item of that response:

CRITICISM: GM has been in the food chain for years in the US. Why isn't there evidence of people and animals suffering more tumours or dying earlier? Why aren't Americans "dropping like flies?"

RESPONSE: Most GM crops are fed to farm animals, which have relatively short lives either for meat or dairy production and so there is probably not enough time for tumours to develop.

Americans have been eating GM food (soya, maize) for only a relatively short time in significant quantities in processed foods. So it may be too short a period for long-term effects such as tumour formation to be noticeable. However, we should also note that there is no labelling of GM foods in the USA and no monitoring of the population for ill-effects, so if GM food were causing ill health this would be going undetected.

Ill effects of Roundup went mostly unstudied until scientists in places like Austria (the first study above) and France (the second study) and Canada and

Roundup causes DNA damage even when vastly diluted

Roundup (you know, the stuff that's sprayed on cotton, soybeans, peanuts, and corn and drifts across the road) causes DNA damage even when diluted down to 450 times less than what's used in agriculture, according to a scientific study from February 2012.

Cytotoxic and DNA-damaging properties of glyphosate and Roundup in human-derived buccal epithelial cells, by Verena J. Koller, Maria Fürhacker, Armen Nersesyan, Miroslav Mišík, Maria Eisenbauer and Siegfried Knasmueller, Archives of Toxicology Volume 86, Number 5 (2012), 805-813, DOI: 10.1007/s00204-012-0804-8.

Glyphosate (G) is the largest selling herbicide worldwide; the most common formulations (Roundup, R) contain polyoxyethyleneamine as main surfactant. Recent findings indicate that G exposure may cause DNA damage and cancer in humans....

Since we found genotoxic effects after short exposure to concentrations that correspond to a 450-fold dilution of spraying used in agriculture, our findings indicate that inhalation may cause DNA damage in exposed individuals.

It's probably not even the "active" ingredient, glyphosate, that's causing this DNA damage, more likely one of its "inert" ingredients.

Sayer Ji wrote for Greenmedinfo 15 October 2012, Research: Roundup Herbicide Toxicity Vastly Underestimated,

Raccoon growling at the dogs that treed it.

About 80 feet up, with the dogs trying to climb up to get it; you can't really hear it growling in the video, but you can see its tail thrashing.

If Brown Dog and Yellow Dog could climb...
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 15 October 2012.

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Shelling corn

Gretchen Quarterman shelling corn.

Terry Davis is preparing by shelling one end so it starts in the device easier. Video:

Red cobs and blowing chaff:

Yellow Dog and her snake

My snake!

Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 October 2012.

The dogs barked up a storm while I was picking okra, and by the time I got there the snake was in sad shape. Too bad, as I keep explaining to Brown Dog and Yellow Dog, snakes eat mice.

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Corn in trailer with rising moon

Finished picking a trailer full of corn; now cover it.

Cloud colors, picker, trailer, and moon:

Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 September 2012.

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Dogs playing @ Okra Paradise Farms 2012-09-28

Dogs being dogs:

Pictures and video by Gretchen Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 28 September 2012.

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