Monsanto's Bt corn still producing superbugs

About a week ago, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report expressing concern that Monsanto's genetically modified Bt-corn was causing corn rootworms to develop Bt resistance in at least four states.

Bacillus thuringiensis is not a pesticide -- it is a bacterium that occurs naturally in the soil and attacks corn rootworms and other insects. In healthy living soil, this bacteria should be able to help control populations of insects that damage crops. As the insects develop resistance, the Bt develops toxicity, in a balanced state of continuous evolution. It ought to concern organic growers everywhere that the vast oceans of Bt-corn are creating superbugs that vastly outpace the ability of Bt to keep up. It's akin to creating mice that are resistant to coyotes and housecats.

Monsanto isolated the toxin from the Bt and inserted it into living crops, essentially making the crop itself as deadly to insects as the soil bacteria. Their New Leaf potato was the first crop to be genetically modified with Bt, back in 1995. Since then, Bt has been added to dozens of other crops, including cotton, rice, and corn, the latter of which is heavily subsidized in the US by payments from the USDA. The EPA's report notes in several places that continuous corn planting -- year after year without rotation of even one other crop -- creates the selective pressure necessary to make rootworm resistance most likely. Scientists quoted in the report recommend, at the very least, alternating Bt-corn with non-Bt corn. But this would require farmers to endure sacrifice years, where they can expect most of their corn crop to be destroyed by the superworms already present in their fields, in an effort to pursue the greater good of reducing overall rootworm resistance.

After the initial assumption that the individual farmer struggling to make payments on his combine is probably not at all interested in sacrificing a year's worth of positive cash flow, my first question is this: Where exactly could a midwestern corn farmer find non-GMO seeds in the quantities needed for thousands of acres? Over 80% of corn grown in the United States is genetically modified -- about 11% of the world's total -- and sources for open-pollinated seed continue to be threatened. Monsanto has sued hundreds of small farmers for patent infringement when pollen from their GMO crops drifted into neighboring fields, making some farmers afraid to save their own seed at all.

On the bright side, the Organic Farmers and Growers Association is fighting back. In a lawsuit initiated March 2011, this association is asking a judge to declare that pollen drift, over which farmers have very little control, cannot be considered a source of patent infringement. I hope that one day, we'll see organic farmers suing Monsanto for the damages caused when their seed escapes and contaminates heirloom, open-pollinated varieties.

Pennsylvania Dept of Ag releases new raw milk guidelines

Last week, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture released its new guidelines for the production and sale of raw milk. My home is one of just ten states where it is legal for farmers to sell raw, unpasteurized milk from their cows. Penn State University's Department of Animal Sciences has also released an explanation of the official guidelines.

Highlights of this document for milk producers:
-Raw milk permits begin 1 September and end 31 August, and need to be renewed each year.
-You don't need state-regulated milk bottling equipment on your own farm, if customers bring their own containers.
-Your farm's water supply must be tested. Probably something you should be doing anyway, what with all the Marcellus Shale fracking going on.
-Advertising, delivering, or exchanging raw milk is considered "selling" under the law, and doing any of these things without a permit carries a stiff penalty.
-Your Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture played a big role in making this legislation possible, so thank them!

Highlights for consumers:
-Raw milk sold by Pennsylvania permit holders is randomly tested for several different types of bacteria throughout the year. This gives you more assurance that the milk you buy is safe to drink than many other distribution programs can offer.
-Cows whose raw milk will be sold for human consumption must be tested annually for several different bovine diseases and certified healthy by a veterinarian, a requirement that pasteurized milk producers do not have to meet.
-Pennsylvania raw milk is also tested for pesticide residue, an assurance you can't get from even most organic produce.
-You can check the permit status of a PA raw milk dairy online at any time.

Wall Street wants your military pension

The Young Farmers Coalition recently put out a fantastic report about the barriers that keep young people from starting farms, and how these affect America's food future. With the average U.S. farmer around 70 years old, some estimate that a quarter of our nation's food producers will retire in the next ten years. Recruiting new farmers is crucial, yet these young farmers cite lack of capital and poor access to healthcare as their primary struggles in starting new enterprises.

T and I are fortunate enough that we likely won't have to worry too much about either of these things. When I deployed to Iraq a few years ago debt-free, I put my entire tax-free paycheck for a year and a half into savings, a substantial amount that will likely be the down-payment for our farmland. And next year, T will hit 20 years in service and will be able to retire at the ripe old age of 38. We will have access to affordable healthcare through the Tricare for Military Retirees program, which charges a premium of about $500 a year for the entire family. We will have a small but steady monthly income from that pension, which will ensure that we'll have enough capital flow to buy gasoline and salt and coffee while we get our farm into the black. In short, the sacrifices we've made for the Army over all these years will translate into the perfect combination of benefits for starting a farm. We've earned them.

You may already know that in this age of federal deficit, Congress has been considering cutting benefits for military retirees. (I guess the $1,200 a month we will receive after five deployments and two decades away from our families just isn't fair to all of the other taxpayers.) But you may not know that this idea, and other similarly ridiculous ones, is the brainchild of the Defense Business Board -- a closed group of highly paid, Wall-Street bred civilian corporate advisors to the Department of Defense. Today's headline article in Mother Jones magazine, "Inside the Corporate Plan to Occupy the Pentagon," says that "a report from the board argued that paying soldiers and their families for 60 years after 20 years of service was "unsustainable," adding, "The 'Military Retirement' sacred cow is increasingly unaffordable." The board called for scrapping the system in favor of a mandatory 401(k)-style account whose savings could "be invested in higher yielding equities and bonds."

Clearly, this bunch of Wall Street investors are selflessly attempting to save the government money by advising the existing military pension system be scrapped, and instead invested on Wall Street.

Right?

As to their argument that paying people for 60 more years after they serve 20 is unsustainable, I first of all disagree with their math. The youngest a person can retire after 20 years of service would be 37, and very few veterans will live to be 97 years old. But more importantly, I think that the all-volunteer force is hopelessly unsustainable without the 20-year pension. Many of our most experienced, senior leaders are soldiers who are only staying in "till I hit my 20." Changing retirement benefits to require 30 years of service -- or, as the DBB recommends, eliminating them all together in favor of a corporate-style 401(k) plan -- would cause many of our most seasoned veteran leaders to decide that sticking it out for five or ten more years just isn't worth it. Even if we instituted the wildly unpopular option of a draft, this wouldn't solve the problem. Recruiting has really never been a problem -- lots of young people in America want to join the military. Giving up four years of your life and possibly a major limb in exchange for an almost-free college education is a big attractor. The problem is retention. It takes a particular type of person to want to stay in an organization which requires extraordinary sacrifices that are simply not comparable to any civilian job, not even police or firefighters. We are already offering bonuses of $35,000 or more to try to entice leaders to stay in after eight or ten years of service.

But hey, I'm a beneficiary of the current system, so what do I know. If T lives to be 97, the total cost to the government for his pension will be about $850,000. When you consider that a single brand-new F-22 Raptor costs $350,000,000, cutting benefits instead is clearly the way to go.

when farmers go hungry

“A year ago the food summit was taking place. How do you solve the problem of a billion people going hungry on a regular basis, something humanity has never suffered before? Hunger throughout human history has been localized in space and time. In some places some people starved for a short while, because of a drought, because of a flood, because of a war. But that permanently a billion people would be denied food is an achievement of a world based on capital intensive farming, control of agribusiness over agriculture, and systems of food production and food distribution designed not for human welfare, but for corporate welfare. That’s why we have hunger today. We have hunger because farmers who have to buy the seeds and the chemicals can’t afford to keep the food they’ve grown. They have to sell it immediately just to pay back the debt. And what they sell at a quarter price, they have to buy at four times the price just to eat as food. Most people who are hungry today are rural people who are producing food. Earlier hunger was an urban phenomenon. Now it is has become a problem faced by producers of food, which should tell us something is wrong with the way we are producing food.”

-- Vandana Shiva, "About Biotechnology."
Speech available for download here

a sound investment

Picked this patch up at NCOR back when I was in college. Still one of my favorite political slogans. Sadly, the National Conference on Organized Resistance seems to be no more.

Of course, they also kill people

“The Green Revolution was never about feeding people. It was really about finding a new deployment for weapons of mass destruction that had no use after the wars. Pesticides that were used to kill people were now used to kill insects. But of course, they would also kill people, as in the big leak of the Union Carbide bhopal gas disaster. Three thousand people dead in one night, 30,000 dead since then, and millions who die daily on farms. This combination of violence, of the tools themselves being tools of warfare, is part of the reason I started to look closely at agriculture. But to develop alternatives, in practical ways, not just scientific, intellectual ways, became an imperative to eat free, breathe free, stay free.”

-- Vandana Shiva

This quote is from an excellent 30 minute speech given by Vandana Shiva at a UU Church in San Francisco. Through the miracle of modern technology and the generosity of folks who don't believe in copyrighting ideas, you can download the entire speech and listen for free.

I think that most folks, at least within the activist community, are already aware that our good friend Monsanto is responsible for bringing us the pleasures of Agent Orange and DDT, in addition to handy household Round-Up. But everywhere I turn, I find more and more connections between the tools of warfare and those used, ostensibly at least, to create life in the form of food. If anyone out there knows of any existing books or research on this topic, I'd greatly appreciate if you pointed me towards it. Because, while little snippets appear everywhere, nowhere have I seen this phenomenon unified under one single heading. It's almost enough to make me want to write a master's thesis.