Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Want some 2,4-D with that drifting Roundup and Paraquat?

Got enough Roundup and Paraquat drifting onto you? Want some 2,4-D with that? If not, you can send your comments to USDA now. Hey, what if we all plowed under the mutant pigweed instead of breeding more with poison soup!

Tom Philpott wrote for Mother Jones 18 July 2012, USDA Prepares To Greenlight Gnarliest GMO Soy Yet,

In early July, on the sleepy Friday after Independence Day, the USDA quietly signaled its intention to greenlight a new genetically engineered soybean seed from Dow AgroSciences. The product is designed to produce soy plants that withstand 2,4-D, a highly toxic herbicide (and, famously, the less toxic component in the notorious Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange).

Readers may remember that during an even-sleepier period—the week between Christmas and the New Year—the USDA made a similar move on Dow's 2,4-D-ready corn.

If the USDA deregulates the two products—as it has telegraphed its intention to do—Dow will enjoy a massive profit opportunity. Every year, about half of all US farmland is planted in corn and soy. Currently, Dow's rival Monsanto has a tight grip on weed management in corn-and-soy country. Upwards of 90 percent of soy and 70 percent of corn is engineered to withstand another herbicide called glyphosate through highly profitable Monsanto's Roundup Ready seed lines. And after so many years of lashing so much land with the same herbicide, glyphosate-resistant superweeds are now vexing farmers and "alarming" weed-control experts throughout the midwest.

And that's where Dow's 2,4-D-ready corn and soy seeds come in. Dow's novel products will be engineered to withstand glyphosate and 2,4-D, so farmers can douse their fields with both herbicides; the 2,4-D will kill the weeds that glyphosate no longer can. That's the marketing pitch, anyway.

There's more in the article.

It can also get into your well water, and then, according to EPA:

Organic farming as productive as pesticiding (proven yet again)

Rodale Institute has been running a side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture since 1981. They report:

After an initial decline in yields during the first few years of transition, the organic system soon rebounded to match or surpass the conventional system. Over time, FST became a comparison between the long term potential of the two systems.

Year after year, Rodale found:

Organic yields match conventional yields.

As Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones 17 November 2011, Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag,

And now comes evidence from the very heart of Big Ag: rural Iowa, where Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture runs the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR), which began in 1998, which has just released its latest results.

At the LTAR fields in Adair County, the (LTAR) runs four fields: one managed with the Midwest-standard two-year corn-soy rotation featuring the full range of agrochemicals; and the other ones organically managed with three different crop-rotation systems. The chart below records the yield averages of all the systems, comparing them to the average yields achieved by actual conventional growers in Adair County:

Norman Borlaug, instigator of the "green revolution" of no-till and pesticides, when asked in 2000 whether organic agriculture could feed the world, said:

More profit and higher yields through organic farming in India

Increase your income and your yields with traditional farming methods? That's what's happening in India.

Nishika Patel blogged 11 May 2011 in The Guardian, Organic farming – India's future perfect?

India's struggling farmers are starting to profit from a budding interest in organic living. Not only are the incomes of organic farmers soaring – by 30% to 200%, according to organic experts – but their yields are rising as the pesticide-poisoned land is repaired through natural farming methods.

How did this happen?

Organic farming only took off in the country about seven years ago. Farmers are turning back to traditional farming methods for a number of reasons.

First, there's a 10% to 20% premium

The case against agrochemicals

Some people didn't like the source of a recent post about the toxic effects of agrochemicals and GM plants on the environment, plants, animals, and people. There are plenty of other sources, including:

How big agro causes the problem

• Vandana Shiva on the pesticiders' strategy, why it's bad, and what to do about it.
• Some specific U.S. cases of big agro gaming the regulatory system at the expense of the environment.
• International cases of Monsanto gaming regulatory systems.
• How Monsanto leverages patents to dominate the world food supply.
• The Fox-can-lie case, in which Monsanto made Fox rewrite 80 times about RBGH in Florida cows and the courts said that was OK; Fox can lie.
• Monsanto blocking research.

Evidence of the ill effects

• U.S. president's cancer panel sounding the alarm about "Americans are facing "grievous harm" from chemicals in the air, food and water that have largely gone unregulated and ignored."
• Scientific American on "The rapid adoption by U.S. farmers of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton has promoted increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and more chemical residues in foods."
• Peer-reviewed research on animal miscarriages.
• Sterility and infant mortality in hamsters.
• Liver and kidney damage in rats.
• Research on toxic chemicals from the GM plants themselves polluting streams.
• Pesticides found in the urine of schoolchildren linked to ADHD. More about that, including a link to the actual peer-reviewed journal article.
• A German documentary with research from Argentina and France, plus links I've added to that research.
• A French documentary The World According to Monsanto.

There are ways forward

• Remember, even Monsanto is not invulnerable, and in fact had a bad year in 2010.
• Monsanto's Roundup no longer works on the mutant weeds it's bred, so Monsanto has to pay farmers to spray rival pesticides and even that doesn't really work.
• The most profitable crops are non-GM crops.
• Organic Farming Yields often Better Than with Agrochemicals.
• Local agricultural research on how to farm without Roundup.
• How to do organic peanuts in particular.
• They can farm without pesticides in west Africa, they don't damage the land, and they make more money.
• Even Haiti refuses Monsanto's seeds, calling them "a new earthquake".

What you can do

• Things you can do yourself to replace poisoned food with local and organic food.
• Especially vote at the checkout counter. If you don't know it's local and non-GMO, don't buy it. There may be no labelling laws, but local supermarkets know what's local.
• Protests worked in India.

Monsanto shouldn't get away with it anymore --Vandana Shiva

Quantum physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva foresees The Future of Food, in three parts.

• Part 1:

  There are only two applications that have been commercialized in these twenty years of genetic engineering. One is to make seeds more resilient to herbicides, which means you get to spread more Roundup, you get to spread more Glysophate, and you get to spread more poison. Not a very desirable trait in farming systems. Especially since what Monsanto will call weeds are ultimately sources of food.

  It gets even better from there.

  These are illusions that are being marketed in order for people to hand over the power to decide what we eat to a handful of corporations.

  Vandana Shiva is the keynote speaker at the Georgia Organics conference in Savannah, 11-12 March 2011. There's still time to sign up!

  Here's Part 1:

Animal miscarriages from new fungus or virus in Roundup-read crops?

Jill Richardson publishes a letter from Col. (Ret.) Don M. Huber, Emeritus Professor, Purdue University, who is APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS). It begins:

Dear Secretary Vilsack:
A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn-suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup. This organism appears NEW to science!

What's an "electron microsope pathogen"?

Pigweed on Georgia Farm Monitor

Dr. Stanley Culpepper of UGA Tifton says 52 counties have the mutant pigweed. He says they're looking at cover crops and deep turning. (You may know that as plowing.) He hastily adds that they're looking at other herbicides. But he wraps up by saying we have to look at other methods than herbicides: tillage and cover crops. He frames it as diversity and integration. What it really means is spraying poisons eventually breeds weeds that refuse to be poisoned. People, of course, are not so lucky.

This is the same Dr. Culpepper whose extensive slides on this subject I reviewed last summer.

-jsq

Germans document glysophate poisoning

The promise of Roundup:

"No tilling, just seed, spray, and harvest."

Adriana Alvarez, who lives next door to an Argentinia GM soy field, says:

"They came from this side and sprayed the entire field. Here he turns, spraying all the time."

The farmer was wearing a mask. That's more than no-till farmers around here do.

Interesting statistic that in Argentina soy production increased 35-fold between 1996 and 2003 while Roundup use increased 56 times. And eventually it doesn't work at all, because it breeds resistant weeds. In Georgia it took only ten years to produce mutant pigweed that not just Roundup but not even paraquat can kill. Many farmers are realizing that it's cheaper, more effective, and more profitable to plow the weed under in the fall and plant a winter cover crop. Even mutant weeds are not resistant to cold steel.

The documentary points out many products in German stores that include GM soy. In Argentina, it's even worse, with increasing numbers of birth defects.

They interview Prof. Andrés Carrasco about his research on amphibians:

"The hemispheres do not separate, like you can see here. If you look closely you can see one brain. Glyphosate can cause this kind of mechanisms, for it is an enzymatic toxin."

Monsanto refused an interview, responding in writing:

"Monsanto is convinced of the safety and usefullness of its products and its contribution to efficacious agriculture."

As Dr. Carrasco has been known to say:

"Son hipócritas, cipayos de las corporaciones, pero tienen miedo. Saben que no pueden tapar el sol con la mano."

"They are hypocrites, those corporate lackeys, but they are afraid. They know they can't cover the sun with their hand."

The documentarians interviewed Gilles-Eric Seralini in Caen, France.

"To human cells glyphosate is already toxic in a very low dose. A farmer uses a much higher dose on the field. Roundup is even more toxic than glysophate, for that is only one of the ingredients in Roundup."

Roundup says none of this applies to humans and Roundup is safe. Seralini says:

"Transgenics are toxic for human health."

This is the same Monsanto that made Fox rewrite 80 times about RBGH in Florida cows.

The same Monsanto that was convicted by the French Supreme Court of lying about leaving the soil clean.

The same Monsanto that was fined $2.5 million by the U.S. EPA for selling genetically modified cotton seeds without labeling them as such.

Who should you believe? A corporation repeatedly convicted of deception, or scientists who say that GM crops cause liver and kidney damage in animals, according to research using Monsanto's own data.

The Roundup-spraying farmer said:

Roundup, mas algo! mas algo!

Roundup, more and more!

It's time to say:

Ya basta!

Enough already!

-jsq

PS: Credits to the German TV consumer series 'plus minus':

Bericht
D. Flintz
M. Rauck
Kamera
J. Fenske
C. Kültür
J. Midú
Schnitt
H. Bischoff
E. Elsner

GM toxic soy in animal feed broadcast (© WDR) by Detlef Flintz and Mathias Rauck. Translation and highlighting provided by TraceConsult. Broadcast Tue, 08 Feb. 2011 | 9:50 PM.

The Biotech Bully of St. Louis is having a Bad Year

Ronnie Cummins writes in Counterpunch, Coexistence With Monsanto? Hell No!

Monsanto’s Roundup, the agro-toxic companion herbicide for millions of acres of GM soybeans, corn, cotton, alfalfa, canola, and sugar beets, is losing market share. Its overuse has spawned a new generation of superweeds that can only be killed with super-toxic herbicides such as 2,4, D and paraquat. Moreover, patented “Roundup Ready” crops require massive amounts of climate destabilizing nitrate fertilizer. Compounding Monsanto’s damage to the environment and climate, rampant Roundup use is literally killing the soil, destroying essential soil microorganisms, degrading the living soil’s ability to capture and sequester CO2, and spreading deadly plant diseases.

In just one year, Monsanto has moved from being Forbes’ “Company of the Year” to the Worst Stock of the Year. The Biotech Bully of St. Louis has become one of the most hated corporations on Earth.

All that and paraquat doesn't work on mutant pigweed, either. The whole "no-till" fable is unravelling.

The article mentions scientific studies about bad health effects of genetically modified foods, and goes on to warn of Monsanto maneuverings through the EPA and the Gates Foundation. Then he points to the European Union as leading the way:

Monsanto Spraying Itself

Tom Philpott asks in Grist about Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides

...Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.

If you tend large plantings of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company's Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds -- supposedly -- but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.

The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto's longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way.

Roundup, trade name for glysophate, doesn't work anymore because the weeds mutated: