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- The Farming Systems Trial – Celebrating 30 Years (Rodale Institute):

The hallmark of a truly sustainable system is its ability to regenerate itself. When it comes to farming, the key to sustainable agriculture is healthy soil, since this is the foundation for present and future growth.

Organic farming is far superior to conventional systems when it comes to building, maintaining and replenishing the health of the soil. For soil health alone, organic agriculture is more sustainable than conventional. When one also considers yields, economic viability, energy usage, and human health, it’s clear that organic farming is sustainable, while current conventional practices are not.

As we face uncertain and extreme weather patterns, growing scarcity and expense of oil, lack of water, and a growing population, we will require farming systems that can adapt, withstand or even mitigate these problems while producing healthy, nourishing food. After 30 years of side-by-side research in our Farming Systems Trial (FST)®, Rodale Institute has demonstrated that organic farming is better equipped to feed us now and well into the ever changing future.

Fast Facts

Organic yields match conventional yields.

Organic outperforms conventional in years of drought.

Organic farming systems build rather than deplete soil organic matter, making it a more sustainable system.

Organic farming uses 45% less energy and is more efficient.

Conventional systems produce 40% more greenhouse gases.

Organic farming systems are more profitable than conventional.

Tags: Agriculture, Atrazine, DNA, Economy, Environment, Farmers, Fertilizer, Food, Global News, Health, Herbicides, infertility, organic, Pesticides, Roundup, Roundup Ready, Science, Society, toxic, toxicity

More on RoundUp here:

- ROUNDUP: Birth Defects Caused By World’s Top-Selling Weedkiller, Scientists Say

- Coming in 2012: Genetically modified front lawns and the mass spraying of neighborhoods and playgrounds with RoundUp (NaturalNews, July 17, 2011)

Thanks to a recent admission by the USDA that it does not have the regulatory framework to even regulate GMOs, the world of biotech is set to unleash a tidal wave of genetically modified seeds upon the United States. This is the upshot of Scotts Miracle-Gro challenging the USDA over its GMO grass seeds, to which the USDA threw in the towel and essentially announced it can’t technically regulate many GMOs at all.

Welcome to the new world order of GMO self regulation, where the companies that produce the GMO seeds now get to regulate their own behavior! (http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott…)

Continue reading »

Tags: Chemicals, Environment, Genetically Modified Organisms, Global News, Glyphosate, GMO, Government, Health, Herbicides, Monsanto, New World Order, Obama administration, Politics, Roundup, Roundup Ready, Society, U.S., USDA

- The world’s largest human experiment part two: why Europeans (and everyone else) should be worried (Activist Post, July 11, 2011):

In part one of what will become a long-running series, I briefly outlined two recent papers published in the renowned peer-reviewed journal, Chemical Research in Toxicology, which revealed the horrifying effects of Monsanto’s best-selling glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide.

These two independent and highly rigorous studies found that Roundup caused critical cell damage including necrosis, a horrendous process in which cells break down and release their contents into the surrounding area, creating widespread, unmitigated cell death. The Monsanto formulation was found to be much more devastating to human cells than the glyphosate herbicide alone.

The studies that comprised the bulk of part one of this series were published in an American journal, yet the people of the United States seem, on the whole, ignorant of the dangers of Roundup and the specifically modified Roundup Ready genetically modified seeds made to be able to absorb the toxin and live.

Continue reading »

Tags: Cancer, DNA, Environment, EU, Europe, Food, Genetically Modified Organisms, Global News, GMO, Health, Herbicides, Monsanto, Roundup, Roundup Ready

- The worlds largest human experiment: GMOs, Roundup and the Monsanto monstrosity – part one (Activist Post, July 11, 2011):

Informed consent is one of the most basic aspects of patient-physician relations, as well as subject-researcher relations in the case of research studies. This involves making the patient aware of and verifying that they understand the risks, benefits, facts, and the future implications of the procedure or test they are going to be subjected to.

Continue reading »

Tags: Cancer, DNA, Environment, FDA, Food, Genetically Modified Organisms, Global News, GMO, Health, Herbicides, Monsanto, Roundup, Roundup Ready

And now:

- Organic Panic: Obama Administration Green Lights Mutant Alfalfa

Wheat affected after 10 years of glyphosate field applications.

The following article reveals the devastating and unprecedented impact that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is having on the health of our soil, plants, animals, and human population. On top of this perfect storm, the USDA now wants to approve Roundup Ready alfalfa, which will exacerbate this calamity. Please tell USDA Secretary Vilsack not to approve Monsanto’s alfalfa today. [Note: typos corrected from Jan 16th, see details]

While visiting a seed corn dealer’s demonstration plots in Iowa last fall, Dr. Don Huber walked past a soybean field and noticed a distinct line separating severely diseased yellowing soybeans on the right from healthy green plants on the left (see photo). The yellow section was suffering from Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a serious plant disease that ravaged the Midwest in 2009 and ’10, driving down yields and profits. Something had caused that area of soybeans to be highly susceptible and Don had a good idea what it was.

Don Huber spent 35 years as a plant pathologist at Purdue University and knows a lot about what causes green plants to turn yellow and die prematurely. He asked the seed dealer why the SDS was so severe in the one area of the field and not the other. “Did you plant something there last year that wasn’t planted in the rest of the field?” he asked. Sure enough, precisely where the severe SDS was, the dealer had grown alfalfa, which he later killed off at the end of the season by spraying a glyphosate-based herbicide (such as Roundup). The healthy part of the field, on the other hand, had been planted to sweet corn and hadn’t received glyphosate.

This was yet another confirmation that Roundup was triggering SDS. In many fields, the evidence is even more obvious. The disease was most severe at the ends of rows where the herbicide applicator looped back to make another pass (see photo). That’s where extra Roundup was applied.

Don’s a scientist; it takes more than a few photos for him to draw conclusions. But Don’s got more—lots more. For over 20 years, Don studied Roundup’s active ingredient glyphosate. He’s one of the world’s experts. And he can rattle off study after study that eliminate any doubt that glyphosate is contributing not only to the huge increase in SDS, but to the outbreak of numerous other diseases. (See selected reading list.) Continue reading »

Tags: Agriculture, Alfalfa, Environment, Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO, Health, Herbicides, Monsanto, Roundup Ready, Science, Tom Vilsack, USDA

See also:

- Growing Power: Growing Fish in Greenhouses – 1 Million Pounds of Food on 3 Acres

- Sepp Holzer: Permaculture – Farming With Nature

- Sepp Holzer on Permaculture: Farming with Terraces and Raised Beds

A self-sufficient system of farming is increasing yields across Hawaii

Instead of using pesticides, bug baits consisting of beer in plastic bottles are hung along rows of Thai basil.

Farmer Samson Delos Reyes reached into his bluejeans pocket to grab a phone call from a buyer and ended up smiling but shaking his head.

The caller wanted to triple her order of his pungent Thai basil, to 60 from 20 cases a week, but S&J Farms of Waianae is already booked solid. Since trying “natural farming” last year under the guidance of a folksy South Korean master farmer known as Han Kyu Cho, Delos Reyes said production on his 10-acre plot has doubled — and demand is growing even faster.

“This is my first time having earthworms on my farm,” he said, scooping up a handful of earth and nutrient-rich worm castings in his fingers. “They’re cultivating the soil for me.”

Unlike conventional or even organic farming, “natural farming” is a self-sufficient system to raise crops and livestock with resources available on the farm. Rather than applying chemical fertilizers, farmers boost the beneficial microbes that occur naturally in the soil by collecting and culturing them with everyday ingredients such as steamed rice and brown sugar. They also feed their crops with solutions containing minerals and amino acids made from castoff items such as eggshells and fish bones.

“What others consider rubbish, we use,” Cho told gardeners and farmers at a workshop in Honolulu last month. “Natural farming uses local resources, but you have to give what the plants need, when they need it and in the right amounts.”

On land once classified as unsuitable for farming, Delos Reyes’ sturdy stalks of Vietnamese kalo now stand taller than he does, and his basil bushes are thick with leaves. He no longer has to buy fertilizer, herbicides or pesticides, and he has cut water use by 30 percent. The indigenous microorganisms in the dirt — bacteria, fungi and protozoa — help nourish his crops. The plants grow hardier because their roots have to reach further to find water, according to Cho.

“You use less water, you use less inputs and you end up with a healthier plant which produces more nutritious food, of a higher quality,” said landowner David Wong, who ran Oahu’s last dairy on this Waianae property and is working with Delos Reyes in the first commercial operation using Cho’s methods on Oahu. “Here’s a system that is not freight-dependent, and it changes the economics of how agriculture could be done in Hawaii.”

Continue reading »

Tags: Agriculture, Environment, Farmers, Fertilizer, Global News, Good News, Hawaii, Herbicides, Natural Farming, Pesticides, U.S., Water

Recently the unelected potentates of the EU Commission in Brussels have sought to override what has repeatedly been shown to be the overwhelming opposition of the European Union population to the spread of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) in EU agriculture. EU Commission President now has a Maltese accountant as health and enviromnent Commissioner to rubber stamp the adoption of GMO. The former EU Environment Commissioner from Greece was a ferocious GMO opponent. As well, the Chinese government has indicated it may approve a variety of GMO rice. Before things get too far along, they would do well to take a closer look at the world GMO test lab, the USA. There GMO crops are anything but beneficial. Just the opposite.

What is carefully kept out of the Monsanto and other agribusiness propaganda in promoting genetically manipulated crops as an alternative to conventional is the fact that in the entire world until the present, all GMO crops have been manipulated and patented for only two things-to be resistant or “tolerant” to the patented highly toxic herbicide glyphosate chemicals that Monsanto and the others force farmers to buy as condition for buying their patented GMO seeds. The second trait is GMO seeds that have been engineered genetically to resist specific insects. Contrary to public relations myths promoted by the agribusiness giants in their own self-interest, there exists not oné single GMO seed that provides a greater harvest yield than conventional, nor one that requires less toxic chemical herbicides. That is for the simple reason there is no profit to be made in such.

Giant super-weeds plague

As prominent GMO opponent and biologist, Dr Mae-Wan Ho of the  Institute of Science in  London has noted, companies such as Monsanto build into their seeds herbicide-tolerance (HT) due to glyphosate-insensitive form of the gene coding for the enzyme targeted by the herbicide. The enzyme is derived from soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Insect-resistance is due to one or more toxin genes derived from the soil bacterium Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis). The United States began large scale commercial planting of GMO plants, mainly soybeans and corn and cotton around 1997. By now, GM crops have taken over between 85 percent to 91 percent of the areas planted with the three major crops, soybean, corn and cotton in the US, on nearly 171 million acres.

The ecological time-bomb that came with the GMO according to Ho, is about to explode. Over several years of constant application of patented glyphosate herbicides such as Monsanto’s famous and highly Roundup, new herbicide-resistant “super-weeds” have evolved, nature’s response to man-made attempts to violate it. The super-weeds require significantly more not less herbicide to control.

ABC Television, a major US national network, made a recent documentary about the super-weeds under the rubric, “super weeds that can’t be killed.”[1]

They interviewed farmers and scientists across Arkansas who described fields overrun with giant pigweed plants that can withstand as much glyphosate as farmers are able to spray. They interviewed one farmer who spent almost €400000 in only three months in a failed attempt to kill the new super-weeds.

The new super-weeds are so robust that harvester combines are unable to harvest the fields and hand tools break trying to cut them down. At least 400000 hectares of soybean and cotton in Arkansas alone have become invested with this new mutant biological plague. Detailed data on other agricultural regions is not available but believed similar. The pro-GMO and pro-agribusiness US Department of Agriculture has been reported lying about the true state of US crop harvest partly to hide the grim reality and to prevent an explosive revolt against GMO in the world’s largest GMO market.

Superweed

One variety of super-weed, palmer pigweed can grow up to 2.4 meters high, withstands severe heat and prolonged droughts, and produces thousands of seeds with a root system that drains nutrients away from crops. If left unchecked, it takes over an entire field in a year. Some farmers have been forced to abandon their land. To date palmer pigweed infestation in GMO crop regions has been identified in addition to Arkansas, also in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Mexico, Mississippi and most recently, Alabama and Missouri.

Weed scientists at the University of Georgia estimate that just two palmer pigweed plants in every 6 meter length of cotton row can reduce yield by at least 23 percent. A single weed plant can produce 450 000 seeds. [2]

Roundup toxic danger being covered-up

Continue reading »

Tags: Agriculture, EU, Europe, Farmers, Food, Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO, Health, Herbicides, propaganda, Roundup Ready, toxic, toxicity, U.S., Weeds

“Atrazine can’t be sprayed in Europe because it contaminates groundwater, but it remains widely used in the U.S., where the EPA endorsed its continued use as recently as 2006, based on a scientific review from 2003. Federal records show the review was heavily influenced by industry and relied on studies financed by Syngenta, a Swiss-based company that manufactures most of the atrazine sprayed in the U.S.”

Alarmed by latest research, the Obama administration is conducting a broad review of toxic weed killer atrazine that could lead to tighter restrictions

John Kiefner prepares his boom sprayer for cleaning on his Manhattan, Ill., farm. (Chicago Tribune)

Despite growing health concerns about atrazine, an agricultural weedkiller sprayed on farm fields across the Midwest, most drinking water is tested for the chemical only four times a year — so rarely that worrisome spikes of the chemical likely go undetected.

High levels of the herbicide can linger in tap water during the growing season, according to more frequent tests in some agricultural communities.

Spread heaviest on cornfields, atrazine is one of the most commonly detected contaminants in drinking water. Studies have found that exposure to small amounts of the chemical can turn male frogs into females and might be more harmful to humans than once thought. Continue reading »

Tags: Atrazine, Chemicals, Contamination, Corporations, Environment, EPA, Government, Health, Herbicides, Obama administration, Politics, Pollution, Syngenta, U.S., weed killer

The debate on genetically modified (GM) brinjal variety continues to generate heat. Former managing director of Monsanto India, Tiruvadi Jagadisan, is the latest to join the critics of Bt brinjal, perhaps the first industry insider to do so.

Jagadisan, who worked with Monsanto for nearly two decades, including eight years as the managing director of India operations, spoke against the new variety during the public consultation held in Bangalore on Saturday.

On Monday, he elaborated by saying the company “used to fake scientific data” submitted to government regulatory agencies to get commercial approvals for its products in India.

The former Monsanto boss said government regulatory agencies with which the company used to deal with in the 1980s simply depended on data supplied by the company while giving approvals to herbicides.

“The Central Insecticide Board was supposed to give these approvals based on the location and crop-specific data from India. But it simply accepted foreign data supplied by Monsanto. They did not even have a test tube to validate the data and, at times, the data itself was faked,” Jagadisan said. Continue reading »

Tags: Corporations, Environment, Food, Genetically Modified Organisms, Global News, GMO, Government, Herbicides, India, insecticide, Monsanto, Politics, Science

Multinational Biotechnology Corporations And Their Supporters Mounted An Unprecedented Attack By Trying To Ridicule Andrés Carrasco’s Research, Incl. Personal Threats.

“I expected a reaction but not such a violent one.”
“If I know something, I will not shut my mouth.”

In April 2009 Andrés Carrasco, an Argentinian embryologist, gave an interview to the leading Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12, in which he described the alarming results of a research project he is leading into the impact of the herbicide glyphosate on the foetuses of amphibians. Dr Carrasco, who works in the Ministry of Science’s Conicet (National Council of Scientific and Technical Investigations), said that their results suggested that the herbicide could cause brain, intestinal and heart defects in the foetuses. Glyphosate is the herbicide used in the cultivation of Monsanto’s genetically modified soya, which now covers some 18 million hectares, about half of Argentina’s arable land. [1]

Carrasco said that the doses of herbicide used in their study were “much lower than the levels used in the fumigations”. Indeed, as some weeds have become resistant to glyphosate, many farmers are greatly increasing the concentration of the herbicide. According to Página 12, this means that, in practice, the herbicide applied in the fields is between 50 and 1,540 times stronger than that used by Carrasco. The results in the study are confirming what peasant and indigenous communities – the people most affected by the spraying – have been denouncing for over a decade. The study also has profound consequences for the USA’s anti-narcotics strategy in Colombia, because the planes spray glyphosate, reinforced with additional chemicals, on the coca fields (and the peasants living among them).

Three days after the interview, the Association of Environmental Lawyers filed a petition with the Argentine Supreme Court, calling for a ban on the use and sale of glyphosate until its impact on health and on the environment had been investigated. Five days later the Ministry of Defence banned the planting of soya in its fields. This sparked a strong reaction from the multinational biotechnology companies and their supporters. Fearful that their most famous product, a symbol of the dominant farming model, would be banned, they mounted an unprecedented attack on Carrasco, ridiculing his research and even issuing personal threats. He was accused of inventing his whole investigation, as his results have not yet been peer-reviewed and published in a prestigious scientific journal.

Continue reading »

Tags: Brain, GMO, Health, Heart, Herbicides, Monsanto, Science, Scientists