organic

Earth Day Agriculture and Sustainable Intensification

by Greg Conko on April 22, 2010

in Agriculture, Culture, Environment, Health and Illness, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

What’s the most sustainable way to grow the food we eat? The answer environmentalists give is always “local and organic.”  But, increasingly, the answer from the scientists who’ve studied the question is the exact opposite.  A study from England’s Royal Society issued last October concluded that genuinely sustainable agriculture must embrace the use of science and technology for producing more food on less land.  It suggests that a healthy concern for protecting the environment necessitates the greater adoption of sophisticated agricultural technologies, including fertilizers, pesticides, and bioengineered (or GM) crops.  Why?  Because protecting the environment will require growing vastly more food without bringing new land into agriculture–what the report calls “sustainable intensification.”

And, just last week, the US National Academy of Sciences’s National Research Council issued an in-depth study on The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States, concluding that, “when best management practices are implemented, GE crops have been effective at reducing pest problems with economic and environmental benefits”.

Among the reports more specific findings:

  • “Adoption of herbicide-resistant crops could help improve soil and water quality.”
  • “Targeting specific insect pests with Bt toxins in corn and cotton has been successful, and insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant crops.”
  • “Many adopters of GE crops have experienced either lower costs of production or higher yields, and sometimes both.”
  • “Farmers who previously faced high levels of insect pests that were difficult to treat before insect-resistant crops have particularly benefited from applying lower amounts of or less expensive insecticides.”
  • “More effective management of weeds and insects also means that farmers may not have to apply insecticides or till for weeds as often.”

An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence amassed during the past two decades suggests that genetically engineered foods have been a huge boon for American farmers, consumers, and the environment.

Ironically, claims that organic farming is a nearer and dearer friend to the environment are difficult to substantiate because organic practices merely trade some environmental threats for others. For example, organic farms do not generate the same sorts of synthetic chemical run-off as modern, industrialized farms. But organic farms do still need to control pests, weeds, and pathogens. They also need to replace soil nutrients drawn off by growing plants. Judged by the standards of those who criticize modern agricultural practices, the techniques that organic farmers use to accomplish these tasks are far from eco-friendly.

While organic farmers do not use synthetic pesticides, they do use chemicals to control insects and plant diseases – including such potentially dangerous chemicals as copper sulfate, rotenone, pyrethrum, ryania, and sabadilla. These “organic” pesticides are derived from minerals or plants, are lightly processed, and thus are considered to be “natural” for the purposes of organic agriculture. Yet, ounce for ounce, most are at least as toxic or carcinogenic as many of the newest synthetic chemical pesticides.

In addition, because organic farmers must control weeds by using frequent, mechanical tillage – or sacrifice yields – organic agriculture contributes to topsoil erosion and disturbs worms and other soil invertebrates. Compared with modern conservation tillage practices, organic weed control is much more environmentally damaging.  And, instead of soluble nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous fertilizers, organic farmers rely on animal manure and so-called “green manures,” such as legume nitrogen fixation or organic plant matter, to restore soil nutrients. However, plowing legume crops and animal wastes into the soil leads to nitrate leaching into groundwater and streams at rates similar to conventional agricultural practices, and the chemical properties of soluble mineral fertilizers that are prohibited in organic farming are identical to those of that are released in uncontrolled quantities by the mineralization of organic matter.

Ultimately, many Americans have come to believe the organic food industry’s marketing campaign that consuming its products is the environmental way to eat.  But, those claims just don’t stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.

Green Thumbs and GMOs

by Greg Conko on April 13, 2010 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Environment, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

A friend just recommended this op-ed published in the Boston Globe on Sunday.  The title and subtitle say it all: “Green Thumbs: Genetically engineered crops are more environmentally friendly than organic ones.”  The author, Elliot Entis, argues that:

There is a green revolution going on, “doubly green’’ according to ecologist Gordon Conway, but it’s one the organic movement does not want to join. This revolution relies on modern biotechnology to create crop hybrids that can better utilize our scarce resources, and there’s the rub: the science is not trusted by organic farmers, and it plays against their economic interests.

and

The organic movement is largely a romantic ideal, far removed in many ways from science. It believes it is environmentally friendly, but it largely avoids science. True environmentalists look at the facts, and those facts do not support the growth of organic farming as a way to feed the world. However, with few exceptions, environmental organizations do not admit to this publicly. Why? Because they share a constituency: citizens who oppose certain elements of mass production farming, who yearn for a simpler time, when things were more natural. But this constituency is built on a shared belief system about the past, not the future.

At some point the contradiction between what organic farming leads to — more land devoted to farming, higher food prices, less biodiversity — and the goals of environmentalists — sustainability, more biodiversity – will fracture this alliance.

Skeptics, including many in the article’s comment thread, argue that a guy like Elliot Entis can’t be trusted, since he has a financial interest in the success of biotechnology and genetically engineered foods.  But those in the biotech industry aren’t the only ones saying these things.

As I wrote last October here on Open Market, environmental guru Stewart Brand has been saying the same thing for years.  And the UK’s Royal Society, one of the most highly respected scientific bodies in the world issued a report last fall calling for broader use of biotech crops and other technologies to bring about a “sustainable intensification” in global agriculture.

And just today, the US National Academy of Sciences’s National Research Council issued an in-depth study on The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States.  The NRC study concluded that “when best management practices are implemented, GE crops have been effective at reducing pest problems with economic and environmental benefits”.  Among the reports more specific findings:

  • “Adoption of herbicide-resistant crops could help improve soil and water quality.”
  • “Targeting specific insect pests with Bt toxins in corn and cotton has been successful, and insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant crops.”
  • “Many adopters of GE crops have experienced either lower costs of production or higher yields, and sometimes both.”
  • “Farmers who previously faced high levels of insect pests that were difficult to treat before insect-resistant crops have particularly benefited from applying lower amounts of or less expensive insecticides.”
  • “More effective management of weeds and insects also means that farmers may not have to apply insecticides or till for weeds as often.”

An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence amassed during the past two decades suggests overwhelmingly that genetically engineered foods have been a huge boon for American farmers, consumers, and the environment.

Meryl trash talks Julia on pesticides and fat

by John Berlau on September 5, 2009 · 2 comments

in Agriculture, Coalitions & Outreach, Culture, Environment, Nanny State, Nano & Biotech, Odds & Ends, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

In the new movie “Julie & Julia,” Meryl Streep does well portraying the late Julia Child, but one can say Streep also benefits from her subject.  The much-loved food author and pioneering television chef had a vibrant personality and passion about preparing food that made millions of Americans welcome her into their kitchens. It’s likely that no matter who played Julia in a biopic, her legions of fans would have flocked to the theaters.

So it is strange that Streep acts so ungrateful to Child in an interview with the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph. She berates Child for disagreeing with her on boosting organic foods and criticizing fats, proclaiming that Child was “seduced” by a “front orgnanization for agro-business and petrochemical business.”

Streep apparently still has a grudge against Child for refusing to lend her support to Streep’s fringe enviro group Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits. That group was one of the leading promoters of the discredited scare about the pesticide Alar that was spread on apples.

In a low point for Congressional hearings on science, Streep, despite her lack of any scientific credentials, was invited to testify in 1989 before a Senate Labor and Human Resources subcommittee. She proclaimed: ”We don’t know what’s on our food . . . I no longer want my children to be part of this experiment.”

As Neil Hrab, CEI’s 2003-04 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow, recounted in the American Spectator: “Within weeks of Streep testifying before Congress, Uniroyal, the company that manufactured Alar, began the triage to save its reputation, withdrawing the chemical from the U.S. market. In November of 1989, the EPA ordered a ban on the sale, distribution and use.”

But major scientific bodies would conclude that the Alar scare had been nothing but a bunch of hype. The American Medical Association stated in 1992: “The Alar scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion. When used in the approved, regulated fashion, as it was, Alar does not pose a risk to the public’s health.” Others who condemned the scare included the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Yet in the Telegraph interview, Streep seems oblivious to these facts and to her role in hyping a costly and unnecessary scare. Instead, she bashes Child for daring to question the organic orthodoxy and what many call the “Food Police.”

Streep recalls Child’s turning down a request to help Mothers and Others in its campaign to get supermarkets to carry organic agriculture. “She was very resistant and brushed us off quite brusquely,” Streep says. Also bashing Child’s love of rich fatty foods, Streep rips Child for not making “a connection between the high fat diet of a heavily laden cordon bleu-influenced cusine and cholesterol levels. (I admit I have no idea what “cordon-bleu influenced cuisine” means, but I imagine neither does Streep, who admitted in the same interview that she knew virtually nothing about cooking before she played Child.)

Streep also bashes Child for her involvement with a public health group that also had a long working relationship with CEI in promoting sound science: the American Council on Science and Health.  “I remember being so disappointed that she was in the thrall [of the ACSH],” Streep said. Calling the group a “front organization” for agribusiness and chemical companies, Streep stated, “They seduced Julia into giving them money, so she was on the other side for a while.”

But the only one sucessfully seduced is Streep– into faddish irational fears about conventioanlly grown and fatty foods. Longtime ACSH President Elizabeth Whelan, who knew Child for about 20 years, writes that Child “had two major pet peeves:

•She despised people who demonized specific foods, like butter and sugar.

•She despised activists who terrified people about the safety of their food. ”

Whelan adds: “For Julia, there were no “good foods” or “bad foods” — again, just a variety of foods, all in moderation — including an occasional cordon bleu. Julia, unlike her fictional counterpart, exhibited a constant stream of common sense.”

As for Streep’s charge of ACSH being a “front group” for corporate interests – and similar charges are levied against CEI — Whelan answers that the claim is “absurd — given the organization is funded by a full spectrum of foundations, individuals, and unrestricted grants from corporations.” CEI has a similarly broad-based funding structure.

The cherry on the cake of Streep’s nonsensical rant to the Telegraph is Streep’s claim that “Eventually I think she came around” to Streep’s point of view. But interviews from the last few years before she died show that Child never did “come around” to Streep’s anti-fatty food and anti-food technology extremism.

When asked by Business Week in 2000 what she thought of the low-fat movement, Child replied, “I don’t go for that at all.” She then reiterated the motto of the American Institute of Wine and Food, which she co-founded with winemakers Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff to advance enjoyment of food: “Small helpings No seconds. No snacking. A little bit of everything and have a good time.”

Child also fully endorsed what another bete noir of many enviros — food biotechnology or genetic engineering. In 1999, Child told the Toronto Star: “I think it’s all fascinating. There’s no one-minute answer. The technology’s here. If they can give us a better tomato, I’m for it.”

Perhaps the best epitaph for Julia Child came from Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, upon her death at age 91 in 2004. Lifson wrote in American Thinker:  ”Julia Child, who played a major role in changing the way Americans think about, prepare and eat food, has died at the ripe old age of 91, after a lifetime of urging Americans to go ahead and use butter in their sauces and fry lardons to render some pork fat in which to fry the beginnings of a stew. Take that, health Nazis!”

E. coli Happens

by RJ Smith on July 17, 2009

in Agriculture, Environment, Private Conservation

This story in the San Francisco Chronicle just shows the insanity of the conventional wisdom these days advanced by greens and anti-corporate farmers. They blame big agriculture for E. coli problems and some propose foolish laws and regulations that will simply create other problems.

Despite claims to the contrary, profits don’t cause microbes. And it’s not big “industry” farming that is the culprit. Small farms and family farmers can have just as much difficulty—if not more–eliminating pathogens.

E. coli just happens. And you can’t stop it. Deer, “wild” pigs, mountain lions, every kind of mouse, rat, ground squirrel, and whatever wild animal can carry virulent microbes. Same with irrigation water. Same with birds flying over the fields. And the barren buffer strips that some have proposed to keep these animals away don’t halt anything; they simply lead to water pollution.

Unfortunately, such foolish “wisdom” undermines good conservation efforts. For example, it discourages conservation at California vineyards. In the past, some have gone out of their way to use tail ponds to collect irrigation and rain water–and any dissolved pollutants–and then pump it back up hill for more irrigation. These tail ponds themselves become wetland habitats. Similarly, vineyards in the Temecula area, Viansa Winery, and others pioneered placing hawk roosting and nesting structures on their property to attract birds of prey to help control rodents, as well as placing nesting boxes for owls and falcons. Yet now the conventional “wisdom” is that such conservation efforts contribute E. Coli and should be dispensed with. In reality, such policies are surely more foolish than wise.

Photo: Escherichia coli bacterium, courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library.

Schadenfreude “Two-Fer”

by Greg Conko on March 6, 2009 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Environment, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

The New York Times reported this week that the Peanut Corporation of America plants in Texas and Georgia that were shipping salmonella contaminated peanut products were not just any old kind of food companies; they were certified organic. Furthermore, it was a Texas state employee who was responsible for granting the organic certification of at least one plant, despite the fact that it didn’t have state health certificate. And it was a private-sector certification firm that blew the whistle on this malfeasance.