Organics in the News

Writing in the journal Epidemiology, Ward's team reported that its examination of more than 20,000 older women in Iowa showed that those who had consumed water that had nitrate levels of five milligrams per liter or above were three times as likely to develop thyroid cancer as women who consumed water low in nitrates. Five milligrams per liter is half the nitrate concentration that the Environmental Protection Agency deems "safe."

Organic fertilizers such as manure also produce nitrate, but because they break down slowly, plants are able to absorb more of the nitrogen, leaving less to percolate into groundwater. Nitrates can also enter the water table through polluted rain.

A July 8 article in Time published under the headline “Organic Eggs: More Expensive, but No Healthier” misleads the consumer. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture research cited, as published in Poultry Science, includes no reference to certified organic eggs and says nothing about nutritional value, according to the Organic Trade Association, which reviewed the findings before writing a letter to Time to protest.

SCIENTISTS have called for a government crackdown on pesticides that they warn are putting pregnant women at greater risk of having children with cancer.
The researchers say studies have shown that pesticide exposure either before conception or during pregnancy increases the risk of childhood cancer.

Writing in a report for the Chemicals, Health and Environment Monitoring (Chem) Trust, they have called on the government to step up action to ban the most harmful pesticides and to bring in a duty for the public to be informed before spraying takes place.

Over the last century, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers has saturated the Earth’s soils and waters with nitrogen. Now scientists are warning that we must move quickly to revolutionize agricultural systems and greatly reduce the amount of nitrogen we put into the planet's ecosystems.

A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an addiction. Call it the nitrogen fix. It is like a drug mainlined into the planet’s ecosystems, suffusing every cell, every pore — including our own bodies.

If you want to grow a bigger potato, organic farming may be the way. The balanced mix of insects and fungi in organic fields does a superior job of keeping pests in check, leading to larger plants, according to researchers at Washington State University in Pullman.

The findings may help potato growers cut back on spraying and make more effective use of natural predators to control pests, said entomologist David Crowder, who led the study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

"The goal is to learn as much as we can about how these natural enemies are doing their jobs and what impact they're having, so we can incorporate their effects into management practices," he said.

Long-term exposure to nitrates through food and water may increase a woman's risk of thyroid disease, finds a study of older women in Iowa. Public water supplies contaminated with nitrates increased the risk of thyroid cancer in the women. Eating nitrates from certain vegetables was linked to increases in thyroid cancer and hypothyroidism, one type of thyroid disease.

This is the first study to show a link between nitrates and thyroid cancer in people, although nitrates have been shown to cause thyroid tumors in animal studies.

Thyroid cancer is the eighth most common cancer among women. In the United States, the incidence of thyroid cancer has increased steadily since 1980.

Federal food regulators took a tentative step Monday toward banning a common use of penicillin and tetracycline in the water and feed given cattle, chickens and pigs in hopes of slowing the growing scourge of killer bacteria.

But the Food and Drug Administration has tried without success for more than three decades to ban such uses. In the past, Congress has stepped in at the urging of agricultural interests and stopped the agency from acting.

As consumers become increasingly aware of what they eat, they are also taking control of where their food comes from. Some shop at farmers markets. Fewer go out and buy stakes in an organic farm.

It's a small trend in Illinois that reflects the growing interest in organic food consumption. But the recession also has helped nurture this idea for people of means who want to invest their money in places other than the volatile, and now languishing, stock market or in certificates of deposit or savings accounts that pay 1 percent interest or less.

Today, in a 7-1 opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court reversed both District Court injunctions, saying that the Court had overreached itself procedurally in halting the plantings. (Both Justices Steven Breyer and Clarence Thomas had conflicts of interest in the case -- Breyer's brother was the District Court judge on the case, while Thomas was corporate counsel for Monsanto earlier in his career, but only Breyer saw fit to recuse himself.)

Despite the news reports claiming victory for Monsanto, the Supreme Court did not overturn the central tenet of the case: that the USDA prematurely approved Roundup Ready alfalfa. The District Court, in effect, made it once again illegal to plant Roundup Ready alfalfa -- and the Supreme Court endorsed that ruling. While the Justices did declare that the USDA, if it wants to, has the right to give the seed a preliminary approval (i.e. for limited, restricted planting), the Supreme Court decision does not by itself give Roundup Ready alfalfa the green light.

Few companies spin financial growth out of crop growth better than Monsanto. By making an early, successful R&D-heavy bet on biotechnology, Monsanto transformed itself from an agricultural-chemicals company in an increasingly commoditized sector into a cutting-edge seed-and-biotech firm. Because its rivals are still catching up to its prowess in creating biotech traits — the software of seeds — Monsanto has become the standard bearer and lightning rod for the controversial advance of genetically modified (GM) crops, sometimes derisively described as Frankenstein foods.