Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Monsanto manufactures FUD about seed ownership: Farmer Bowman could win back natural seed rights

Monsanto is always hiding behind something, starving children (while selling their parents crops that fail all at once), the Great God Efficiency, or now, medical research. Will Clarence Thomas recuse himself this time on this Supreme Court seed patent, Bowman v Monsanto? Will Monsanto manufacture enough Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) to win anyway, or will the other SCOTUS judges rule wisely this time?

Andrew Pollack wrote for the New York Times 13 February 2013, Farmer's Supreme Court Challenge Puts Monsanto Patents at Risk,

Monsanto says that a victory for Mr. Bowman would allow farmers to essentially save seeds from one year's crop to plant the next year, eviscerating patent protection. In Mr. Bowman's part of Indiana, it says, a single acre of soybeans can produce enough seeds to plant 26 acres the next year.

Such a ruling would “devastate innovation in biotechnology,” the company wrote in its brief. “Investors are unlikely to make such investments if they cannot prevent purchasers of living organisms containing their invention from using them to produce unlimited copies.”...

The decision might also apply to live vaccines, cell lines and DNA used for research or medical treatment, and some types of nanotechnology.

Yeah, yeah, it could. But it would be quite easy for SCOTUS to say this ruling is about seeds.

Many organizations have filed briefs in support of Monsanto's position — universities worried about incentives for research, makers of laboratory instruments and some big farmer groups like the American Soybean Association, which say seed patents have spurred crop improvements. The Justice Department is also supporting Monsanto's argument.

And the American Soybean Association represents big growers who plant Monsanto seeds. Too bad they don't realize they'd make more profits if they didn't have to pay for those seeds every year even when Monsanto jacks up the price ( 43% in 2009), plus pay for the expensive pesticides that go on them, and the expensive huge tractor equipment to farm at the scale Monsanto demands. Another group that should know better weighs in:

Native plants in your yard for native wildlife

Nature is not something out there, apart from people. It never was, and nowadays people have built and farmed and clearcut so much that wildlife species from insects to birds are in trouble. In south Georgia people may think that our trees make a lot of wildlife habitat. Actually, most of those trees are planted pine plantations with very limited undergrowth, and in town many yards are deserts of grass plus exotic species that don't support native birds. Douglas Tallamy offers one solution: turn yards into wildlife habitat by growing native species. Since we are as always remodeling nature, we might as well do it so as to feed the rest of nature and ourselves, and by the way get flood prevention and possibly cleaner water as well, oh, and fewer pesticides to poison ourselves.

Douglas Tallamy makes a clear and compelling case in Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants

...it is not yet too late to save most of the plants and animals that sustain the ecosystems on which we ourselves depend. Second, restoring native plants to most human-dominated landscapes is relatively easy to do.

Some of you may wonder why native species are so important? Don't we have more deer than we can shoot? Maybe so, but we have far fewer birds of almost every species than we did decades and only a few years ago.

Some may wonder: aren't exotic species just as good as native ones, if deer and birds can eat them? Actually, no, because many exotic species are poisonous to native wildlife, and because invasive exotics crowd out natives and reduce species diversity. From kudzu to Japanese climbing fern, exotic invasives are bad for wildlife and may also promote erosion and flooding by strangling native vegetation.

All plants are not created equal, particularly in their ability to support wildlife. Most of our native plant-eaters are not able to eat alien plants, and we are replacing native plants with alien species at an alarming rate, especially in the suburban gardens on which our wildlife increasingly depends. My central message is that unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.

Tallamy had an epiphany when he and his wife moved to 10 acres in Pennsylvania in 2000:

Higher climate temperatures mean more and faster tree deaths

Higher average temperatures mean much more frequent droughts and trees dying faster in droughts because of the temperatures. That plus pine beetles, according to research from 2009. Forestry is Georgia's second largest industry in terms of employment and wages and salaries, more than $28 billion a year according to the Georgia Forestry Commission, plus an estimated $36 billion a year in ecosystem services such as water filtration, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and aesthetics, not to mention hunting and fishing. Climate change matters to Georgia's forests and to Georgia.

The paper appeared 13 April 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, Temperature sensitivity of drought-induced tree mortality portends increased regional die-off under global-change-type drought, by Henry D. Adams, Maite Guardiola-Claramonte, Greg A. Barron-Gafford, Juan Camilo Villegas, David D. Breshears, Chris B. Zou, Peter A. Troch, and Travis E. Huxman, 106(17) 7063-7066, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0901438106.

All drought trees in the warmer treatment died before any of the drought trees in the ambient treatment (on average 18.0 vs. 25.1 weeks, P <0.01; Fig. 1A).

They say warmer trees dying faster in drought wasn't due to a difference in amount of water. Instead, they infer the warmer trees couldn't breathe.

Combined, our results provide experimental evidence that piñon pines attempted to avoid drought-induced mortality by regulating stomata and foregoing further photosynthesis but subsequently succumbed to drought due to carbon starvation, not sudden hydraulic failure. Importantly, we isolate the effect of temperature from other climate variables and biotic agents and show that the effect of warmer temperature in conjunction with drought can be substantial.

Our results imply that future warmer temperatures will not only increase background rates of tree mortality (13, 16), but also result in more frequent widespread vegetation die-off events (3, 35) through an exacerbation of metabolic stress associated with drought. With warmer temperatures, droughts of shorter duration—which occur more frequently—would be sufficient to cause widespread die-off.

How much more frequently? They calculated an estimate for that, too: five times more frequently. Of course, that's for the specific kinds of forests they were studying, and the exact number may vary, but the general trend is clear: higher temperatures mean more frequent droughts, like the year-long drought we just experienced in south Georgia.

This projection is conservative because it is based on the historical drought record and therefore does not include changes in drought frequency, which is predicted to increase concurrently with warming (2, 37—39). In addition, populations of tree pests, such as bark beetles, which are often the proximal cause of mortality in this species and others, are also expected to increase with future warming (7, 9, 38).

Bark beetles, such as the ones that bored into this 19 inch slash pine and spread from there to twenty others I had to cut down to prevent further spread of the pine beetles. What happens when pine beetles spread is what you see in the first picture in this post: acres and acres of dead red pine trees. Monoculture slash pine plantations may show this effect most clearly, but look around here, and you'll see red dead loblolly and longleaf pines, too.

The article is saying that if the beetles don't get the trees weakened by droughts that will be much more frequent, the trees will die more quickly of suffocation, because the temperature is higher. Higher temperatures is something that should concern every Georgian in our state where forestry is the second largest industry and our forests protect our wildlife and the air that we breathe and the water that we drink.

-jsq

The whistleblowers show sued Fox (and lost)

Fox News hired Jane Akre and a couple of other reporters as an investigative unit and did a snazzy promo about that. The first case they investigated was Monsanto's bovine growth hormone, RBGH. This is the whistleblower story behind the Fox Can Lie lawsuit.

ITN in the U.K. reporting about Health Canada's report on bovine growth hormone:

Monsanto's engineered growth hormone did not comply with safety requirements. It could be absorbed by the body, and therefore did have implications for human health. Mysteriously, that conclusion was deleted from the final, published version of their report.

That was for a product that U.S. EPA had approved with little or no testing. Fox's investigative unit had the story, but Monsanto threatened to sue Fox. Watch the video for the details.

Eventually, Akre sued Fox. She won, but Fox won on appeal. An appeal that established that Fox can lie.

-jsq

PS: Owed to Paul Hollands.

John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee (audio)

Back at the end of March at a river conference in Roswell, Georgia, I was interviewed for a podcast. Here's the audio, and here's the blurb they included:

John Quarterman on the Withlachoochee
Monday, July 9th, 2012

John S. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.

NPS talks with Quarterman and his observations on starting and strengthening a Withlachoochee Riverkeeper organization at Georgia River Network's 2012 Weekend for Rivers.

The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:

WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.

-jsq

PS: They also recorded another podcast which starts out on what may sound like a completely different topic, but which is actually quite related.

Relics: forty years later you can still read their labels

I remember when my father and I put these things there, around forty years ago. They're still intact, and if you look closely you can still read the labels. We prefer taking things to the dump these days.

Metal can:

Metal can
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 22 July 2012.

Plastic bottle:

Advanced sheets-Field operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1917

What was your county like a hundred years ago, roads, houses, streams, ponds, and soils? Digital Library of Georgia in association with the University of Georgia Map Library has made available old soil maps from around 1910-1920 online in a viewer that can pan and zoom. Detail of Cat Creek Road, Lowndes County, Georgia in 1917:

Detail of Cat Creek Road
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Screenshot by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 July 2012.

The soils haven't changed much (Tf is Tifton A soil, for example), but the roads and houses have, and many streams have been dammed for ponds.

They seem to have all Georgia counties. Here's Tift County in 1910 and Cook County in 1931.

-jsq

Owed to Don Davis of the Lowndes County Museum at the 11 July 2012 WWALS Watershed Coalition meeting.

 

Largest U.S. declared drought disaster ever

It's not just us. More than half the country is in drought, and almost one third is in a federal disaster area for drought: the biggest ever declared.

Dashiell Bennett wrote for Atlantic Wire today, U.S. Declares the Largest Natural Disaster Area Ever Due to Drought

The blistering summer and ongoing drought conditions have the prompted the U.S. Agriculture Department to declare a federal disaster area in more than 1,000 counties covering 26 states. That's almost one-third of all the counties in the United States, making it the largest distaster declaration ever made by the USDA.

The declaration covers almost every state in the southern half of the continental U.S., from South Carolina in the East to California in the West. It's also includes Colorado and Wyoming (which have been hit by devatasting wildfires) and Illinois, Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska in the Midwest. However, it does not include Iowa, which is the largest grain and corn producer in the U.S. This map show the counties affected:

Look, there we are, right in the center of the red area in the southeast!

-jsq

Early corn Planting —Alla Peek Quarterman

My grandmother wrote this around 1960, when she was around 77 years old. -jsq

I remember when corn in the fields was dropped by hand — 2 grains every two steps. Mule plow opened the furrow & children dropped the grains.

The first corn planter was considered bad — it was sure to keep the seed from sprouting!

My brother Patrick found this text in a notebook his aunt Elsie had kept.

-jsq

Groundwater at historically low levels

The only well in the Withlacoochee, Little, or Alapaha River watersheds that seems to be instrumented for near-realtime depth measurements is in Valdosta. That well is now at historic lows, compared to 55 years of back data.

On the graph to the right, the black triangle in the middle of the green is the median over those 55 years since 1957. The green is 25th to 75th percentile. The yellow is 10th to 24th percentile. The red is below 10th percentile. I'm guessing below the red means never been seen that low before in that month.

The current depth shown, 137.52 feet below the surface on 26 April 2012, is not the lowest ever seen, which was 152.31 feet on 19 September 1990. But apparently it is lower than seen before for April.

Maybe we should think about water conservation more frequently than just when Valdosta's water pumps have problems. Not just for watering lawns; also for agriculture and silviculture. Maybe we should try to plant crops that don't require as much irrigation, or plant them in ways that don't lead to so much evaporation. Maybe we should be more careful about clearcutting trees, which causes rapid runoff that doesn't get back into the groundwater as much. Maybe we should think about how much growth do we want.

-jsq