Organics in the News

Organic farming learned through 'trial and error'

It's a dream life...with a few nightmares thrown in for fun," says Heidi Thompson of her involvement in organic farming.

Thompson's Painted Hill Farm is an organic farming operation situated on 47 acres south of Wells. It is the result of a vision and a lot of hard work by owners Chuck and Heidi Thompson.

The Thompson's journey began in the early 1990s, when, as a newly-married couple, they immersed themselves in the lifestyle that accompanies living in Minneapolis as students. At this time, Heidi was attending art school and Chuck was completing his apprenticeship to become an electrician.

After a few years of the hustle and bustle of city life, the country began calling louder and louder to the couple.

"Chuck had been raised on a small acreage in northern Minnesota where his parents raised a few chickens," says Heidi. "I always wanted to live on one, so we were getting the itch to get away from the city."

U.S. court cuts off appeals in Monsanto alfalfa case

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday left in place an injunction barring Monsanto Co from selling its Roundup Ready alfalfa seed until the government completes an environmental impact study on how the genetically modified product could affect neighboring crops.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the company's request for a rehearing of its appeal and said it would accept no more petitions for rehearing in the three-year-old case.

Monsanto's only remaining avenue appears to be U.S. Supreme Court review. A Monsanto spokesman could not be reached for comment.

"This is a major victory for consumers, for farmers and for the public as far as protecting their rights and the rights of farmers to sow the crop of their choice and consumers to eat the food of their choice," said George Kimbrell, staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety.

Kimbrell, whose group is a plaintiff in the case, predicted that Monsanto's chances of getting Supreme Court review of the case were "slim to none and slim just left town."

WVU Organic Farm experiments with new methods

The Organic Research Farm at West Virginia University is taking the lead in finding ways to grow crops without chemicals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture encourages farmers to apply for grants helping them shift to this type of production.

The farm at WVU helps these farmers and teaches students about the benefits of organic farming.

The Organic Farm at West Virginia University sits on more than 70 acres of grassy land.

Looking around, you can see fruit trees, livestock, and farming equipment.

Here, Plant and Soil Sciences Professor James Kotcon and WVU students are experimenting with newer and safer methods to grow crops.

"Organic agriculture is one of the fastest growing sectors of the American food market; it's been growing at something around the range of 20 percent per year for the last 15 or 18 years," Kotcon said.

Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant

Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.

Divided into chapters dedicated to points along the commercial food chain — from farm to fork, to borrow a loaded agribusiness phrase — the movie is nothing if not ambitious. “There are no seasons in the American supermarket,” the unidentified voice intones in the opening scene, as the camera sweeps the aisles of one such brightly lighted, heavily stocked if nutritionally impoverished emporium. From there the director Robert Kenner jumps all over the food map, from industrial feedlots where millions of cruelly crammed cattle mill about in their own waste until slaughter, to the chains where millions of consumers gobble down industrially produced meat and an occasional serving of E. coli bacteria.

The voice in the opening belongs to the ethical epicurean and locavore champion Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” as well as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. (Somewhat confusingly, the movie uses voice-overs without clearly identifying who’s issuing forth on the soundtrack.) Mr. Pollan, who periodically appears on screen seated at a homey-looking table, is a great strength of “Food, Inc.,” as is one of its co-producers, Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation.” These two embodiments of conscience, together with Mr. Kenner, chart how and why the villains not only outnumber the heroes in contemporary food production, but also how and why they outbluff, outmuscle and outspend their opponents by billions of often government-subsidized dollars.

Farmacology

Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. "There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment."...

Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm. He, Silbergeld, and others assert that the level of danger has yet to be widely acknowledged. Says Schwab, "It's not appreciated until it's your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken."

The American Academy Of Environmental Medicine Calls For Immediate Moratorium On Genetically Modified Foods

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) today released its position paper on Genetically Modified foods stating that "GM foods pose a serious health risk" and calling for a moratorium on GM foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes "there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects" and that "GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health."

Breaking Bread: When Churches Join the Good Food Movement

I recently organized an event at a small Methodist church in Cedar Grove, North Carolina: the newly-minted Bishop’s Task Force on Food. The meeting was comprised of fourteen farmers, theologians, pastors, community gardeners, and one ex-Special Forces soldier-turned-food activist named Stan. Stan’s newest tactical mission: getting churches involved in the sustainable food fight, which is why I invited him along to join us.

This food task force is but one example of a groundswell of interest among churches. For a faith whose central sacrament is the Eucharistic meal, a number of Christians are seeing the far-reaching implications of that meal for how they eat. And they are beginning to ask some hard questions. Why, for example, must that old warhorse known as The Church Potluck still feature tables brimming with Jell-O, high fructose corn syrup, and other “food products” we know to be bad for us? And why should our food supply be so dependent on fossil fuels which are quickly disappearing? Why has the number of malnourished people in the world (one billion) been surpassed by the number of obese? Clearly our eating habits are destructive. How, then, do we rethink the way we eat and what resources for that re-imagining do we already have within our faith tradition?

Battle over beets

Organic seed producer Frank Morton has been warning people for years that genetically modified organisms pose a serious threat to the Willamette Valley’s vegetable seed industry.

Now he thinks his worst GMO nightmare may be coming true.

Roundup Ready sugarbeets — a patented variety engineered by Monsanto to tolerate the company’s widely used Roundup herbicide — have turned up in a soil mixture being sold to gardeners at a Corvallis landscaping supply business just a few miles from Morton’s fields.

He fears some of those roots may now be sprouting in area gardens. If so, they could soon start to bolt, sending out clouds of pollen that could fertilize his crop of golden chard — a closely related plant — and render it worthless for the organic seed market. It would also negate years of breeding that went into producing an especially cold-hardy line.

Worse still, Morton says, the GMO sugarbeets could cross-pollinate the fields of other chard growers in the area who supply seed to major bagged-salad distributors in California, potentially introducing genetically modified chard into the food system without the approval of federal regulators.

Greening the Herds: A New Diet to Cap Gas

Sweetening cow breath is a matter of some urgency, climate scientists say. Cows have digestive bacteria in their stomachs that cause them to belch methane, the second-most-significant heat-trapping emission associated with global warming after carbon dioxide. Although it is far less common in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it has 20 times the heat-trapping ability.

Frank Mitloehner, a University of California, Davis, professor who places cows in air-tight tent enclosures and measures what he calls their “eruptions,” says the average cow expels — through burps mostly, but some flatulence — 200 to 400 pounds of methane a year.

More broadly, with worldwide production of milk and beef expected to double in the next 30 years, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious near-term threats to the global climate. In a 2006 report that looked at the environmental impact of cows worldwide, including forest-clearing activity to create pasture land, it estimated that cows might be more dangerous to Earth’s atmosphere than trucks and cars combined.

Deputy Secretary Vows USDA Organic Integration

Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan pledged that organic will be integrated across all agencies at USDA in a message to attendees of the third annual Organic Summit on Thursday. Delivering pre-recorded comments, Merrigan stated, “Here is where I’d like to fulfill a promise I made to many of you...and that is, organic should be integrated across all the agencies, not just the NOP (National Organic Program), but each and every agency at USDA should have some engagement with the organic sector.” In addition to the integration, Merrigan said, “Organic can no longer be stove-piped at USDA.”

“This kind of data will help us do more at USDA and help us in conversations with members of Congress to talk about the organic need,” said Merrigan. She urged the organic community to encourage full survey participation among organic producers.