Organics in the News

This pea plant shows the cupped leaves that indicate the soil contains damaging levels of a potent herbicide. Last fall, our report on manure, hay and compost contaminated with Milestone herbicide (aka aminopyralid), made by Dow AgroSciences) told of 2008’s tragic summer in the United Kingdom, where thousands of gardeners lost their tomatoes, beans and other sensitive crops to manure and hay laced with this potent, highly persistent herbicide. This year the problem has hit home, with U.S. gardeners, organic farmers and commercial growers reporting damaged or lost tomato crops from Milestone contamination. (Aminopyralid is also sold under the brand name of Forefront.)

Why now? “We had the perfect storm to set up the situation,” says Dr. Jeanine Davis, associate professor of horticulture at North Carolina State University and author of several recent extension service advisories about Milestone’s persistent toxicity. The drought caused animal owners to buy hay trucked in from other areas, and at the same time many people created new vegetable gardens and bought contaminated compost, or hay to use as mulch.”

Eat right and exercise, conventional wisdom has it, if you want to avoid joining the diabetes epidemic.

But a new study adds some muscle to a growing body of research suggesting those steps, although beneficial, might not be enough for people exposed to chemicals in the environment.

The scientists linked diabetes and people’s body burdens of DDE, a chemical produced as the body breaks down the pesticide DDT, banned in the United States more than 35 years ago.

“Even though we haven’t used DDT in decades, its metabolites are still detected in almost everyone in the country,” said lead researcher Mary Turyk, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s School of Public Health.

"Eating is an agricultural act," essayist Wendell Berry famously wrote. It's also a political one. Which is why last week Berry, geneticist Wes Jackson and sustainable-agriculture advocate Fred Kirschenmann made a pilgrimage to Washington to make a case for a new kind of food policy.

Jackson is president of the Kansas-based Land Institute; Kirschenmann is a fellow at Iowa State University's Leopold Center and president of New York's Stone Barns Center. The three met with administration officials and senators to promote a 50-year-farm bill, a proposal for gradual, systemic change in American farming. The plan asks for $50 million annually for plant breeding and genetics research. But it also puts forward a new vision of agriculture, one that values not only yields but also local ecosystems, healthy food and rural communities.

A new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has revealed that children are dangerously vulnerable to the effects of environmental pesticides, and for far longer than originally suspected.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered that children lack sufficient levels of the enzyme most responsible for detoxifying pesticides up to the age of seven and possibly for longer. Known as paraxonase or PON1, the enzyme is the most important defense the body has against organophosphate chemicals, a major ingredient of the most commonly used agricultural pesticides.

458 children from rural communities were tested for levels of the enzyme, with results showing it to be consistently around a third lower than that of the mother of each child. To compound the concern, more than 40% of the children tested positive for a genetic type that made them particularly susceptible due to the inactivity of the enzyme, whilst nearly one in ten had a genetic profile that made them 'extremely vulnerable'.

If you’re looking for the small, family farm, you can find it in history books. Or in Iowa. Amid the oceans of corn and hogs being raised by giant industrial concerns is a small but tenacious under-current of small farmers determined to make it on 60 acres, give or take, on their own terms.

These small business owners (they’re not just in Iowa of course) are gambling that America’s taste for organic and naturally grown vegetables, grains and meats will sustain them as they revive trusted old methods, (like enriching the soil with natural compost), and incorporate technology that fits with their humane, sustainable model.

There’s hope on the horizon for these mavericks: Consumer demand for natural products is soaring. Organic agricultural production, despite more than doubling in the last decade, can barely keep up. Groceries and schools are increasingly looking for local food sources.

Phil and Marjorie Forbes, with part-time help from both their parents, are one farm family trying restore the land to feed this growing market. We talked with Phil during a visit to central Iowa, where he’s been farming outside of Kalona since the 1998.

Dunham’s crew was in the field picking broccoli and spinruts (“turnip” backwards—a Japanese form of the root vegetable). They witnessed the plane as it failed to shut off its spray mechanism in time, and the fungicide drifted into their tree planting and hay field. “The hay ground is in the third year of transition and would have become organically certified on September 1st,” Andrew said. Now, probably not.

You’d think that this would be a clear-cut cause of action, as the legal folks would put it. But the clever folks at Monsanto hire the crop dusters as contractors, and they in turn use a corporate shell with no assets, so when something like this happens and a victim sues, they simply file bankruptcy and then form a new corporation.

Iowa is the single most radically altered landscape in the country. No state has changed more since the arrival of European settlers, and today the land is heavily “mono-cropped.” Nature abhors a lack of diversity, but pathogens love it so farmers respond with more and stronger chemicals to fight off the bugs and weeds and fungi. No one owns the airspace, so planes can fly over any land they choose. Even if the pilots are incredibly accurate, Iowa is a windy place (thus the massive increase in wind energy production here in recent years). Drift is practically inevitable.

Monsanto Co. has revived plans to develop higher-yielding wheat seeds, five years after dropping research into the crop amid concerns that genetically modified varieties could hinder U.S. exports to markets opposed to biotech farming.

The world's largest seed producer by revenue said Tuesday that it had acquired the assets of U.S. wheat-seed developer WestBred LLC for $45 million, as part of a long-term program to develop more drought-resistant strains. WestBred specializes in wheat germplasm, the crop's seed genetic material.

The St. Louis company won't try to develop genetically modified wheat seeds resistant to its Roundup herbicide, a plan it dropped in 2004, though it will "explore herbicide-tolerant and disease-resistant biotech traits."

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.

In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.

Both practices lead to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments, he said.

An alliance of consumer, farmer, environmental, ethical investor, and food safety groups today urged Ohio Governor Ted Strickland to repeal a February 2008 emergency rule he issued for labeling dairy products in his state. The rule stipulates that Ohio’s dairy producers cannot use the widely used and understood term “rbGH-free” on labels and must rather describe products as “from cows not treated with artificial growth hormones.” The rule also requires that a disclaimer must be included stating that there is “no significant difference between milk from rbGH-treated cows and milk from untreated cows.”

...

“Governor Strickland has essentially made it illegal to tell the truth,” said Carol Goland, Executive Director of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association. “Rather than continue to defend this rule in litigation, we urge the Governor to rethink the wisdom of spending State resources to support a rule that interferes with Ohioans’ ability to make an informed decision about the dairy products they buy, with farmers and dairies’ rights to free speech, and with consumer right-to-know. In this era of increased concern over how our food is produced, Ohio should be making more information available, not less.”

Many Americans have been going through some soul searching in the past few years about the current state of agriculture in this country. From decades of enjoying cheap food with little concern over its origins, we have now become transfixed by video of sick cows in feedlots, reports of poorly inspected imports and the ever increasing piles of evidence concerning agribusiness and the use of chemicals. Frontline personally scared the crap out of me with a special last month on the pollution flowing into the Chesapeake Bay from chicken farms in the area. Trust me, it wasn't pretty.

In Texas, Hamilton met Harry Lewis, an African American with dairy cows on land that has been in his family for generations. The story of Lewis and how African Americans came to farm such a large swath of land near Louisiana makes for fascinating social history. Combined with how some thrived there while others have left sets up for Lewis's many opinions on what makes a farm a success and what made him want to farm. "When I was young, I didn't want to farm because I didn't want to be confined. You know when the baseball game's goin', you in the milk barn. Of if you wanna do somethin' during the day then you have to do the milkin' earlier, and then you have to get up earlier. What I failed to realize at that age: anything you do is confining, but everything you do don't offer you a sense of freedom. And farming, as we were farming, allowed that."