Off on a Long Sunday Rant
This is a pile of frustration I've been saving up for a good weekend dumping. Therefore, as all good LJ posters should, I will now include that simple bit of code that will prevent your screen rolling finger from falling off in a horrendous bit of over-exertion.
Over at his journal, tacit has been debunking myths behind genetically modified organisms grown as our food. It's a good word, this "debunking;" but what does it mean? It comes from a county in North Carolina, Buncombe. I recently came across that spelling of "bunkum" in Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step and had a bit of a thrill of recognition. The legend has it that at one time the House of Representatives had a member known for his long, boring, and pointless speeches. In defense of these speeches, he at least once told the House that he needed to say something quotable, something that would be picked up in the papers and printed back home. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he confessed, "but to Buncombe."
Which wraps very nicely with GMOs and agriculture in general, considering North Carolina's main product of the time.
One hundred years ago, most people worked to raise food. Getting enough to eat was a major concern at the time. Most people involved in their own small part in agriculture earned only enough money in four days to purchase one day's supply of flour for bread. The deficit was filled for most people when they supplemented their diets with small gardens, home chickens and pigs, hunting and fishing, gathering and preserving; the list is long. A wildlife guide from 80 years ago, for example, talks of the local smelt runs, hoards of fish that swim upstream from the ocean to spawn in such numbers that they are traditionally caught in hand-held nets. During the season, people have a limit not on the number of fish they can catch, but on the number of nets they use. This guide notes the calorie count of the fish not to warn people off the fatty swimmers, but to encourage them to grab a net just to get enough fat in their diets.
Then came the tractor.
True, there were innovations in agriculture before the mechanical tractor that made huge impacts on how much food one could produce. The steel plow comes to mind, as well as mechanical balers, de-seeders and sorters. The tractor, though, that metal beast changed things the most.
The migration of former sharecroppers from Oklahoma to California? Most of them were "tractored out," told to move on from the only livelihood the family had known for generations, standing behind a plow or cart and convincing beasts to move in the preferred direction, all in hopes of sharing a portion of the crops they could raise. Yes, the Dust Bowl of that time has a bit to do with the migration; but the tractor helped bring both, cutting into the prairies with greater fervor than the mere horse could, slicing up the grass root ecosystem that held the soil to, well, ground level and exacerbating a drought, turning it into a disaster.
What the tractor did was not to mess up a perfect system of food production; that I will never claim. It did, though, change that system without changing the basic economic system that supported it.
Here's the problem. In the past, horses and cows and all manner of cute beasts grazed on the grasses. They converted in their guts the grass undigestible for farmers into meat and milk and hides, things a farmer could use. They also did needed work: The cow has traditionally been a necessary restorer of agricultural land. In the words of Joel Salatin:
An herbivore is a grass pruner. Without the herbivore, the forage would grow to senescence, fall over, and oxidize CO2 into the atmosphere. The herbivorous pruning restarts the juvenile growth phase of the biomass engine - kind of like pushing a horticultural restart button. Without the herbivore, the photosynthetic activity - viewed like a solar collector - shuts down into dormancy. Throughout history and worldwide, the herbivore reawakens biomass, stimulating it to greater solar activity.
(Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advise for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, Center Street, 2011, p. 20.)
Fields used for our dominant crops lose vital nutrients to those crops. Allowed to rest, the fields revert to grasses. A farmer then allows his small herd to graze. This restores the nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium (NPK) balance to the soil and allows significant grass root systems to add organic energy to the dirt and encourage a below-ground ecosystem comprised of all manner of critters, bringing the soil once again toward fertility. When it came time, the plow did its work, cutting through that root system, killing it. As the root system-and the ecosystem of fungal hyphae, bacteria, insects, worms, et al.-rotted, it fed the planted crops the farmer needed to raise. Without the violence of the plow, the crop seeds would have had to compete for nutrients with all the grasses and other critters and life; the crop would have been stunted, if it survived enough for reaping.
That was why the cow and horse and other animals were present on the traditional "farmy" farms. They helped restore the natural energy cycle, pulled the equipment, and helped supplement the farmer's diet . . . and all without financial costs. It is why the Amish still eschew mechanized transport; without those horses, their fields would lose a prime source of cheap fertilization.
Yes, these beasts and their crappy effluent attracted bugs. Everyone knows that. Which is why most farmers kept some of the most efficient bug killers known, the chicken. Let them forage for and feed on bugs, and the farmer got their eggs and the nutrition contained therein, again at no extreme monetary cost.
Not at no cost. There were costs. These costs are the heart of the problem.
Other than initial purchase and supplemental feed, what are the only regular costs for raising horses and cows and pigs and chickens on a farm that only produced corn or wheat or soy? Labor. People needed to milk the cows, gather the eggs, put the beasts in the fields and gather them later. For the worst part, back to Salatin:
Imagine you're living in about 1910. America is in that disturbing cultural shift between the agrarian and industrial economy. . . .
People are tired of manure. On the farm, half the workload is shoveling manure. Low, dark, damp stables in bank barns must be bedded with straw each evening to soak up the manure. Routinely, these stalls must be cleaned out, using crude forks powered by strong backs. The bedding, packed down by the horses, contains a tight pack of straw and manure. The straw binds the pack together. Shoveling requires ripping those threads apart, stooping over the pile, breathing in the musty aroma of manure. . . .
You wipe your brow, sigh, and wonder when this manure tsunami will ever end.
(Joel Salatin, Ibid, pp. 123-124.)
The tsunami started to recede with the tractor. It did the job of several horses, and did not demand daily attentions with a curry brush, sack of oats or-best yet!-pitchfork. Shortly after the tractor's introduction, the vital fertilization of the fields could be achieved not with that manure and the labor-intensive spreading thereof, but with chemicals! Mr. Salatin:
Into this disturbing period of cultural change [the 1930s] came two violently disturbing events: World War I and World War II. Both of them needed explosives. Lots of explosives. As fortune would have it, explosives are made out of NPK. As a result, the war effort drove incredibly fast advances in the chemistry, manufacture, acquisition, and distribution of NPK. Soil scientists and bomb scientists worked side by side. The industry to efficiently utilize, manufacture, and distribute NPK grew at warp speed, financed largely by the war effort.
Fortunately for this manufacturing, petroleum was cheap and plentiful. Manures, plant residues, bacteria, ashes, and rocks had historically supplied NPK.
(Salatin, ibid, p. 126.)
Mechanization made possible by the Industrial Revolution, combined with chemicals also made possible, reduced the need for horses and cows and chickens and pigs on farms. Though the initial costs of purchase were high, farms using mechanization produced more than the traditional farms, meaning those who stuck to tradition were slowly being squeezed financially and doing the dirty work involving the animals. An expanding market for the crops, now possible through improved transportation technology and infrastructure, made it possible also to get your meats not from yours or your neighbor's barn but from the store, which was supplied by an ever-expanding network of barns.
Which brings us to the GMOs.
In their movie King Corn, two friends rent an acre patch of farmland to see what is involved in growing corn. The most revealing moment for me was the initial harvest; not the one done by the tractor, but an earlier one accomplished simply by yanking an ear from the stalk, shucking it, and taking the first bite of the kernels within. (Perhaps tellingly, I just noticed that this scene is depicted in the sketch within the movie's promotional poster.)
The biter spat out his bitter crop. It wasn't edible, tasting not of corn, but of "sawdust."
Why? Most of the corn grown in the US is bound for processing, not for looking traditionally cobby on the Thanksgiving table or summer picnic. Some of this processing produces the wonderful wonderfully inexpensive cane or beet sugar substitute high fructose corn syrup. Other corn is bound for grinding into corn flours to produce chips and the like. And still more is bound for the mouths of cows, pigs and chickens. You know, the animals that once had a working place on the traditional farms.
As the cost of moving stuff has fallen, it no longer made economic sense to let the animals move to their forage. People have to escort them, of course, and fencing isn't free. Just about every year, the cost of keeping the beasts confined in ever-increasingly huge structures fell relative to the falling price of moving the feed to their gullets. And since grasses do not keep as well, corn has been the feed stock of choice.
Which brings us to problems. There are bound to be lots of problems when one begins a transformation of any given system. That should be expected. How we deal with problems as they make an appearance might, though, alter any given form of production in the future. Let's briefly mention E. coli. Joel?
The E. coli strains that have been in the rumen of the herbivore since time immemorial and do play an important role in digestion enjoy a natural alkaline environment. When raw forages enter the herbivore's alkaline rumen, they are broken down by many types of bacteria that thrive in that environment. The process is akin to fermentation. . . .
I always wondered how a cow could cough up forage already in its first stomach and enjoy the taste. Whenever I cough up something from my one stomach, it doesn't taste like something I'd like to chew on contendedly. Yuck. But a cow is not like that. She enjoys that sweet taste of the nonacidic forage.
(Joel Salatin, Ibid, p. 299.)
Got that? Fermentation is sweet, breaking the complex starches of the grasses down into sugars. And it is into this sweet, higher-pH environment that the "normal" E. coli strains exist in grass-grazing cows and wild game. Remember Darwin? Those intestinal bugs that enjoy the environment continue to flourish, driving out those ill-suited. Ah, but we humans have an acidic digestive tract: "If a human were to ingest these natural E. coli strains, our acidic digestive juices would kill them immediately." (Salatin, ibid.) It's a win-win.
This is why, even in extremely unsanitary conditions, Native Americans and pioneers, and modern-day hunters, never suffer from E. coli contamination. When you kill an herbivore in the wild, it's virtually impossible to sanitize the carcass. . . .
(Salatin, ibid.)
Which brings us to the present day and the more common procedures involved in raising beef. Instead of letting the cows graze on grass to restart and restore the soil's fertility, we now keep the cows in vast pens and bring them their dinner . . . their dinner mostly comprised of grains. And there lies the problem:
But when a cow eats lots of fermented feedstuffs like silage, and especially eats grains, it causes the pH of the rumen to become more acidic. This creates a condition in the rumen called acidosis. To digest this new type of feedstuff, the bacteria in the rumen change to more acid-loving varieties. Over time, new generations emerge that thrive in a more acid environment. . . .
But these new, virulent acid-tolerant strains of E. coli are a different story. Already acclimated to acidic conditions, instead of our acidic digestive system killing these bacteria, the mutated strains kill us.
(Salatin, ibid, I emboldened.)
Acidosis. That's the real culprit behind outbreaks of E. coli and all the nasty disease-carrying organisms that plague us in our modern era, not sanitation. We have created a food growing and processing system that creates disease, necessitating our current focus on extreme sanitation.
What have we done to prevent this potential killer in our meat-not control, as through sanitation, but actually prevent from occuring? Is there any way (short of reverting to a pre-"modern" meat raising system) to prevent this acidosis-caused danger? Well, yes. Salatin briefly mentions a Cornell University study (confirmed by a Wiki entry) noting that cows finished with at least two weeks of grass greatly reduce the count of the E. coli types most likely to harm humans. It does mean, though, that "ranchers" must bring food other than that cheap, cheap corn to their cattle. Their reaction was typical:
Several years ago when Cornell University's research showed that feeding forage for two weeks prior to slaughter would practically eliminate the risk of E. coli problems, wouldn't you think the industry would have created new protocols for forage-finished feeding?
No, instead the industry vilified Cornell.
(Salatin, ibid, pp. 299-300.)
The above example of food contamination is but one example of eminently avoidable problems stemming from our modern food creation processes. There are others, including overuse of antibiotics, water quality difficulties-the list is long. None of these, however, addresses the core problem facing the raisers of food in this our modern era. The core problem? The Production Trap.
The users of steel plows in the 19th century could produce more crop than someone using more traditional wooden plows; the same effort garnered more reward. Likewise, the average tractor-driving farmer could plow, seed, fertilize and harvest more land than a more traditional farmer driving his beasts of burden. Far more. Simplifying the fertilization process with phosphates and ammonia instead of more natural effluent cut down further on the labor burden of farming with similar results to the other two mentioned technological breakthroughs.
But at any time did these innovations improve the lot in life for the average farmer? That is enormously questionable. Sinclair, again from his 1923 book The Goose-Step, notes that improved wheat production led to farmers getting screwed by the "Elevator Trust," a cartel of grain elevator operators and owners that colluded to fix prices. Without alternative sales outlets-or other, out-of-the-box uses for excess harvests-the farmers were forced to take these sometimes ruinous gougings. This led in the Progressive Era to some push back, like Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorting Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." (Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, 2004, p. 32.)
But we are no longer in a progressive era, let alone the Progressive Era.
Even with the innovations that make this task or that more efficient in terms of time spent by the farmer, the market that buys the finished product-far too often the only market for the produce-lowers the price of the crop as the overall tonnage improves. This is the Production Trap; no matter how much the farmer harvests, the overall glut of product in bumper years lowers the price, and the occasional bad harvest hits the farmer hard because he or she suffers the want with everyone else.
The farmers have no negotiating leverage. Unless they are willing to burn crops-which has happened in the past-they are stuck selling to the buyers.
It gets worse. The Roosevelt farm subsidy policies against planting fencepost to fencepost-enacted, largely, to avoid plowing in sensitive areas and recreating the devastation of the Dust Bowl-gave way to the Nixon/Earl Butz reforms of the same system, which forced farmers to (in Butz's words) "get big or get out." Without farm subsidies, it is unlikely the modern farmer would bother to plant at all.
And into this mess of a situation we introduce GMO crops.
Let me emphasize that I am not slamming tacit for his deep dig into the fallacies that surround GMO crops in general. Fallacies are fallacies, no matter where they are used. It should be a general rule in Life that one seeks to examine what fallacies guide our behavior, and if need be abandon them.
I am, instead, pointing out that there are reasons to question many entries into the current run of GMO crops available for planting. The Monsanto Roundup Ready™ corn, for example; again, according to the producers of the film King Corn, it could barely be called "food." This corn is used only to promote the sale of Roundup™ herbicide. Yes, it does help farmers. They don't necessarily have to till to kill the plants that would choke out the crop, meaning a savings in tractor time and fuel. But let's remember Mr. Darwin, whose name I invoked above. One need not shoot seeds with stainless steel bullets coated with genetic material to successfully breed resistance in plants:
Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Not everybody abandoned these techniques. Take Joel Salatin, for example. He's producing food on a massive scale, and at the same time improving his soil's fertility. Of course, his techniques are wildly different from that of an average farmer. First, he is raising mostly beef, not corn. But the way he raises this beef, again, improves his soil's fertility; in an interview he noted his soil's fertility was five times the average for his county.
And Salatin's Polyface Farms has a huge advantage for those farmers reading this thinking of switching over even a little of their land to Salatin's way: volunteer labor. Hoards of eager students flock to Polyface to learn the ways of the master in apprenticeship programs. Without this low-cost labor, whether or not Salatin could afford to keep going at his current level of production is an open question.
Does that mean that Salatin should shut down all the "inefficient" practices he runs?
Here, finally, we have the one problem with the current regimen of food production not addressed in most analyses of GMO crops and their costs/benefits.
In regarding food production, most fail to think, well, big enough. Every aspect of food production seems to be considered except the current lack of alternatives for "excess" food. I put excess in the scare quotes there because to even broach alternatives is seen by many as a threat to the current system of profit enjoyed by their businesses.
Likewise, when production methods are considered, few allow for consideration alternatives that increase human labor input, even when that increase improves the food-per-acre metric. Simply put, labor is expensive. As Salatin ably demonstrates, this labor well applied can vastly improve the soil, the product, the ancillary benefits; it is still expensive.
Ah, but we are in a bit of an economic slump now, aren't we? People are out of work. People have time on their hands. Why shouldn't we be considering ways of getting people out of their current situations and, perhaps, producing food in old ways with touches of the new?
Back to tacit for a moment. In one piece of a recent entry he mentions Golden Rice, a GMO developed to combat vitamin A deficiencies. Unlike most rice strains, it has vitamin A in it. There are, however, irrational objections to GMOs, Golden Rice included, objections that limit its spread as a staple crop.
There are other objections, though. In one of his books (either Deep Economy or Eaarth, I forget which) Bill McKibben mentions being in Bangladesh when people came through the village he was visiting promoting Golden Rice. The Bangladeshi farmers' reaction? To them, it was a solution in search of a problem. Why plant a crop that does everything? In traditional farming, no one planted just one crop! That would be silly! Families need a balanced diet, so one plants a balanced diet! The farmers scoffed at the Golden Rice pushers and sent them on their way.
Malnutrition is not a problem with food; it is a problem with food distribution. Such problems are less often caused by natural disasters and more often caused by human disasters; power and resource distribution practices; in a word, politics.
In fact, I'd like to share something I tried thanks to tacit's piece. He recommended here a way to search internet images. Fun!
An image I stole from Tacit!
I entered the image above into the Google Image search. Best guess? According to the results, this should be an "agriculture in UK" image. Why? Because it was used multiple times by the Telegraph, a London-based publication. The pieces that use the photo, though, concern African agriculture . . . investments. One talks of losses due to setbacks by an "Africa-focused conglomerate." Another mentions contrarian investments, such as African agriculture.
And here we find a problem. In a recent podcast interview, I heard Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute, describe the current plague of land grabs in Africa and other parts of the globe. Multi-national corporations, like those mentioned in the Telegraph pieces, take advantage of corrupt governments to grab "unused" land and create sprawling industrial farms. The people who had cultivated that "unused" land? It varies from case to case, but they are largely turned out to fend elsewhere, often forced to work for wage labor.
And here we get back to GMOs.
GMOs are (with notable exceptions, like Golden Rice) a profit source, patented to assure a lack of competition. They are designed to fit within an agricultural and economic system that does not allow farmers to do certain things like save seeds and have alternative markets or non-market uses for crops in times of plenty. John Deere™ builds combines. Monsanto sells Roundup™ and Roundup Ready™ corn seed. The Federal Government (not trade marked as of yet, at least not officially) responds to the major players in this system and establishes rules and regulations that encourage farmers playing with big combines and GMO seed, and discourages farmers that avoid the same. "Get big or get out" still applies, according to Salatin in his book filled with examples.
Whether or not GMOs should be patented is not the issue, at least not for me. (I do lean against "not" as an answer, only because a patented process to be self-perpetuating speaks to a system where patented material could-and has-gotten out of the confines of one area and into another area, where it has caused disaster. Take the major case study of this, Monsanto Canada, Inc. v. Schmeiser. I've seen Mr. Schmeiser talk about his case, the only time Monsanto officially sued a farmer for saving seeds. What the Wiki page does not note is that Schmeiser was an organic seed grower! That little unexplained spill onto his property was enough to force him to destroy all his crops to purge the unwanted genetic material, a major financial blow!
(Look, I am not here excusing what few fallacies people might harbor to justify an "organic" diet. They do not have to be excused. We are all entitled to eat what we want. We do not need a fallacy-free explanation. I doubt anyone who keeps kosher can avoid an Argument from Authority Fallacy, after all; that doesn't mean folks should necessarily ditch the beanies and pile bacon and cheese on the next burger.
(Enough diversions.)
What we are not discussing enough is the current emphasis in agriculture that follows the same blind spots as neo-classical economics, the blind spot of money. If it can't be sold, it doesn't exist. The traditional communities in Africa, driven from their land by a corrupt sale to a multinational? Not even on the radar screen, not being discussed. The forces that drive so many to vitamin A deficiencies? Not the problem of no Golden Rice, but the problem of no balanced diet, largely thanks to the lack of sufficiently remunerative employment to provide one and the barriers to growing one's own.
And the problem of farmers that don't want to grow GMOs for (insert reason here, fallacious or not makes no nevermind), but are forced to do so by the continual race to the bottom of financial costs and the maximization of financial benefits?
That last is not really a problem. It's a predicament. The difference is that a problem can be solved, while a predicament will always be there. Predicaments can be dealt with, but they are never going away.
Like tacit, I do hope those that have objections to GMO proliferation can find the time to use more precise language, verbiage that does not fall prey to stretches in logic and, therefore, fall to corrective observations like those tacit engages like trees falling from the cut of a chain saw.
Likewise, I also hope that the pursuit of logic in language and the corrective zeal used in that pursuit does not curse the pursuers to, as they attack each tree of fallacy, miss the fact that they are standing in a forest. Perhaps even a forest that might be found in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
Over at his journal, tacit has been debunking myths behind genetically modified organisms grown as our food. It's a good word, this "debunking;" but what does it mean? It comes from a county in North Carolina, Buncombe. I recently came across that spelling of "bunkum" in Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step and had a bit of a thrill of recognition. The legend has it that at one time the House of Representatives had a member known for his long, boring, and pointless speeches. In defense of these speeches, he at least once told the House that he needed to say something quotable, something that would be picked up in the papers and printed back home. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he confessed, "but to Buncombe."
Which wraps very nicely with GMOs and agriculture in general, considering North Carolina's main product of the time.
One hundred years ago, most people worked to raise food. Getting enough to eat was a major concern at the time. Most people involved in their own small part in agriculture earned only enough money in four days to purchase one day's supply of flour for bread. The deficit was filled for most people when they supplemented their diets with small gardens, home chickens and pigs, hunting and fishing, gathering and preserving; the list is long. A wildlife guide from 80 years ago, for example, talks of the local smelt runs, hoards of fish that swim upstream from the ocean to spawn in such numbers that they are traditionally caught in hand-held nets. During the season, people have a limit not on the number of fish they can catch, but on the number of nets they use. This guide notes the calorie count of the fish not to warn people off the fatty swimmers, but to encourage them to grab a net just to get enough fat in their diets.
Then came the tractor.
True, there were innovations in agriculture before the mechanical tractor that made huge impacts on how much food one could produce. The steel plow comes to mind, as well as mechanical balers, de-seeders and sorters. The tractor, though, that metal beast changed things the most.
The migration of former sharecroppers from Oklahoma to California? Most of them were "tractored out," told to move on from the only livelihood the family had known for generations, standing behind a plow or cart and convincing beasts to move in the preferred direction, all in hopes of sharing a portion of the crops they could raise. Yes, the Dust Bowl of that time has a bit to do with the migration; but the tractor helped bring both, cutting into the prairies with greater fervor than the mere horse could, slicing up the grass root ecosystem that held the soil to, well, ground level and exacerbating a drought, turning it into a disaster.
What the tractor did was not to mess up a perfect system of food production; that I will never claim. It did, though, change that system without changing the basic economic system that supported it.
Here's the problem. In the past, horses and cows and all manner of cute beasts grazed on the grasses. They converted in their guts the grass undigestible for farmers into meat and milk and hides, things a farmer could use. They also did needed work: The cow has traditionally been a necessary restorer of agricultural land. In the words of Joel Salatin:
An herbivore is a grass pruner. Without the herbivore, the forage would grow to senescence, fall over, and oxidize CO2 into the atmosphere. The herbivorous pruning restarts the juvenile growth phase of the biomass engine - kind of like pushing a horticultural restart button. Without the herbivore, the photosynthetic activity - viewed like a solar collector - shuts down into dormancy. Throughout history and worldwide, the herbivore reawakens biomass, stimulating it to greater solar activity.
(Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advise for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, Center Street, 2011, p. 20.)
Fields used for our dominant crops lose vital nutrients to those crops. Allowed to rest, the fields revert to grasses. A farmer then allows his small herd to graze. This restores the nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium (NPK) balance to the soil and allows significant grass root systems to add organic energy to the dirt and encourage a below-ground ecosystem comprised of all manner of critters, bringing the soil once again toward fertility. When it came time, the plow did its work, cutting through that root system, killing it. As the root system-and the ecosystem of fungal hyphae, bacteria, insects, worms, et al.-rotted, it fed the planted crops the farmer needed to raise. Without the violence of the plow, the crop seeds would have had to compete for nutrients with all the grasses and other critters and life; the crop would have been stunted, if it survived enough for reaping.
That was why the cow and horse and other animals were present on the traditional "farmy" farms. They helped restore the natural energy cycle, pulled the equipment, and helped supplement the farmer's diet . . . and all without financial costs. It is why the Amish still eschew mechanized transport; without those horses, their fields would lose a prime source of cheap fertilization.
Yes, these beasts and their crappy effluent attracted bugs. Everyone knows that. Which is why most farmers kept some of the most efficient bug killers known, the chicken. Let them forage for and feed on bugs, and the farmer got their eggs and the nutrition contained therein, again at no extreme monetary cost.
Not at no cost. There were costs. These costs are the heart of the problem.
Other than initial purchase and supplemental feed, what are the only regular costs for raising horses and cows and pigs and chickens on a farm that only produced corn or wheat or soy? Labor. People needed to milk the cows, gather the eggs, put the beasts in the fields and gather them later. For the worst part, back to Salatin:
Imagine you're living in about 1910. America is in that disturbing cultural shift between the agrarian and industrial economy. . . .
People are tired of manure. On the farm, half the workload is shoveling manure. Low, dark, damp stables in bank barns must be bedded with straw each evening to soak up the manure. Routinely, these stalls must be cleaned out, using crude forks powered by strong backs. The bedding, packed down by the horses, contains a tight pack of straw and manure. The straw binds the pack together. Shoveling requires ripping those threads apart, stooping over the pile, breathing in the musty aroma of manure. . . .
You wipe your brow, sigh, and wonder when this manure tsunami will ever end.
(Joel Salatin, Ibid, pp. 123-124.)
The tsunami started to recede with the tractor. It did the job of several horses, and did not demand daily attentions with a curry brush, sack of oats or-best yet!-pitchfork. Shortly after the tractor's introduction, the vital fertilization of the fields could be achieved not with that manure and the labor-intensive spreading thereof, but with chemicals! Mr. Salatin:
Into this disturbing period of cultural change [the 1930s] came two violently disturbing events: World War I and World War II. Both of them needed explosives. Lots of explosives. As fortune would have it, explosives are made out of NPK. As a result, the war effort drove incredibly fast advances in the chemistry, manufacture, acquisition, and distribution of NPK. Soil scientists and bomb scientists worked side by side. The industry to efficiently utilize, manufacture, and distribute NPK grew at warp speed, financed largely by the war effort.
Fortunately for this manufacturing, petroleum was cheap and plentiful. Manures, plant residues, bacteria, ashes, and rocks had historically supplied NPK.
(Salatin, ibid, p. 126.)
Mechanization made possible by the Industrial Revolution, combined with chemicals also made possible, reduced the need for horses and cows and chickens and pigs on farms. Though the initial costs of purchase were high, farms using mechanization produced more than the traditional farms, meaning those who stuck to tradition were slowly being squeezed financially and doing the dirty work involving the animals. An expanding market for the crops, now possible through improved transportation technology and infrastructure, made it possible also to get your meats not from yours or your neighbor's barn but from the store, which was supplied by an ever-expanding network of barns.
Which brings us to the GMOs.
In their movie King Corn, two friends rent an acre patch of farmland to see what is involved in growing corn. The most revealing moment for me was the initial harvest; not the one done by the tractor, but an earlier one accomplished simply by yanking an ear from the stalk, shucking it, and taking the first bite of the kernels within. (Perhaps tellingly, I just noticed that this scene is depicted in the sketch within the movie's promotional poster.)
The biter spat out his bitter crop. It wasn't edible, tasting not of corn, but of "sawdust."
Why? Most of the corn grown in the US is bound for processing, not for looking traditionally cobby on the Thanksgiving table or summer picnic. Some of this processing produces the wonderful wonderfully inexpensive cane or beet sugar substitute high fructose corn syrup. Other corn is bound for grinding into corn flours to produce chips and the like. And still more is bound for the mouths of cows, pigs and chickens. You know, the animals that once had a working place on the traditional farms.
As the cost of moving stuff has fallen, it no longer made economic sense to let the animals move to their forage. People have to escort them, of course, and fencing isn't free. Just about every year, the cost of keeping the beasts confined in ever-increasingly huge structures fell relative to the falling price of moving the feed to their gullets. And since grasses do not keep as well, corn has been the feed stock of choice.
Which brings us to problems. There are bound to be lots of problems when one begins a transformation of any given system. That should be expected. How we deal with problems as they make an appearance might, though, alter any given form of production in the future. Let's briefly mention E. coli. Joel?
The E. coli strains that have been in the rumen of the herbivore since time immemorial and do play an important role in digestion enjoy a natural alkaline environment. When raw forages enter the herbivore's alkaline rumen, they are broken down by many types of bacteria that thrive in that environment. The process is akin to fermentation. . . .
I always wondered how a cow could cough up forage already in its first stomach and enjoy the taste. Whenever I cough up something from my one stomach, it doesn't taste like something I'd like to chew on contendedly. Yuck. But a cow is not like that. She enjoys that sweet taste of the nonacidic forage.
(Joel Salatin, Ibid, p. 299.)
Got that? Fermentation is sweet, breaking the complex starches of the grasses down into sugars. And it is into this sweet, higher-pH environment that the "normal" E. coli strains exist in grass-grazing cows and wild game. Remember Darwin? Those intestinal bugs that enjoy the environment continue to flourish, driving out those ill-suited. Ah, but we humans have an acidic digestive tract: "If a human were to ingest these natural E. coli strains, our acidic digestive juices would kill them immediately." (Salatin, ibid.) It's a win-win.
This is why, even in extremely unsanitary conditions, Native Americans and pioneers, and modern-day hunters, never suffer from E. coli contamination. When you kill an herbivore in the wild, it's virtually impossible to sanitize the carcass. . . .
(Salatin, ibid.)
Which brings us to the present day and the more common procedures involved in raising beef. Instead of letting the cows graze on grass to restart and restore the soil's fertility, we now keep the cows in vast pens and bring them their dinner . . . their dinner mostly comprised of grains. And there lies the problem:
But when a cow eats lots of fermented feedstuffs like silage, and especially eats grains, it causes the pH of the rumen to become more acidic. This creates a condition in the rumen called acidosis. To digest this new type of feedstuff, the bacteria in the rumen change to more acid-loving varieties. Over time, new generations emerge that thrive in a more acid environment. . . .
But these new, virulent acid-tolerant strains of E. coli are a different story. Already acclimated to acidic conditions, instead of our acidic digestive system killing these bacteria, the mutated strains kill us.
(Salatin, ibid, I emboldened.)
Acidosis. That's the real culprit behind outbreaks of E. coli and all the nasty disease-carrying organisms that plague us in our modern era, not sanitation. We have created a food growing and processing system that creates disease, necessitating our current focus on extreme sanitation.
What have we done to prevent this potential killer in our meat-not control, as through sanitation, but actually prevent from occuring? Is there any way (short of reverting to a pre-"modern" meat raising system) to prevent this acidosis-caused danger? Well, yes. Salatin briefly mentions a Cornell University study (confirmed by a Wiki entry) noting that cows finished with at least two weeks of grass greatly reduce the count of the E. coli types most likely to harm humans. It does mean, though, that "ranchers" must bring food other than that cheap, cheap corn to their cattle. Their reaction was typical:
Several years ago when Cornell University's research showed that feeding forage for two weeks prior to slaughter would practically eliminate the risk of E. coli problems, wouldn't you think the industry would have created new protocols for forage-finished feeding?
No, instead the industry vilified Cornell.
(Salatin, ibid, pp. 299-300.)
The above example of food contamination is but one example of eminently avoidable problems stemming from our modern food creation processes. There are others, including overuse of antibiotics, water quality difficulties-the list is long. None of these, however, addresses the core problem facing the raisers of food in this our modern era. The core problem? The Production Trap.
The users of steel plows in the 19th century could produce more crop than someone using more traditional wooden plows; the same effort garnered more reward. Likewise, the average tractor-driving farmer could plow, seed, fertilize and harvest more land than a more traditional farmer driving his beasts of burden. Far more. Simplifying the fertilization process with phosphates and ammonia instead of more natural effluent cut down further on the labor burden of farming with similar results to the other two mentioned technological breakthroughs.
But at any time did these innovations improve the lot in life for the average farmer? That is enormously questionable. Sinclair, again from his 1923 book The Goose-Step, notes that improved wheat production led to farmers getting screwed by the "Elevator Trust," a cartel of grain elevator operators and owners that colluded to fix prices. Without alternative sales outlets-or other, out-of-the-box uses for excess harvests-the farmers were forced to take these sometimes ruinous gougings. This led in the Progressive Era to some push back, like Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorting Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." (Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, 2004, p. 32.)
But we are no longer in a progressive era, let alone the Progressive Era.
Even with the innovations that make this task or that more efficient in terms of time spent by the farmer, the market that buys the finished product-far too often the only market for the produce-lowers the price of the crop as the overall tonnage improves. This is the Production Trap; no matter how much the farmer harvests, the overall glut of product in bumper years lowers the price, and the occasional bad harvest hits the farmer hard because he or she suffers the want with everyone else.
The farmers have no negotiating leverage. Unless they are willing to burn crops-which has happened in the past-they are stuck selling to the buyers.
It gets worse. The Roosevelt farm subsidy policies against planting fencepost to fencepost-enacted, largely, to avoid plowing in sensitive areas and recreating the devastation of the Dust Bowl-gave way to the Nixon/Earl Butz reforms of the same system, which forced farmers to (in Butz's words) "get big or get out." Without farm subsidies, it is unlikely the modern farmer would bother to plant at all.
And into this mess of a situation we introduce GMO crops.
Let me emphasize that I am not slamming tacit for his deep dig into the fallacies that surround GMO crops in general. Fallacies are fallacies, no matter where they are used. It should be a general rule in Life that one seeks to examine what fallacies guide our behavior, and if need be abandon them.
I am, instead, pointing out that there are reasons to question many entries into the current run of GMO crops available for planting. The Monsanto Roundup Ready™ corn, for example; again, according to the producers of the film King Corn, it could barely be called "food." This corn is used only to promote the sale of Roundup™ herbicide. Yes, it does help farmers. They don't necessarily have to till to kill the plants that would choke out the crop, meaning a savings in tractor time and fuel. But let's remember Mr. Darwin, whose name I invoked above. One need not shoot seeds with stainless steel bullets coated with genetic material to successfully breed resistance in plants:
Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Not everybody abandoned these techniques. Take Joel Salatin, for example. He's producing food on a massive scale, and at the same time improving his soil's fertility. Of course, his techniques are wildly different from that of an average farmer. First, he is raising mostly beef, not corn. But the way he raises this beef, again, improves his soil's fertility; in an interview he noted his soil's fertility was five times the average for his county.
And Salatin's Polyface Farms has a huge advantage for those farmers reading this thinking of switching over even a little of their land to Salatin's way: volunteer labor. Hoards of eager students flock to Polyface to learn the ways of the master in apprenticeship programs. Without this low-cost labor, whether or not Salatin could afford to keep going at his current level of production is an open question.
Does that mean that Salatin should shut down all the "inefficient" practices he runs?
Here, finally, we have the one problem with the current regimen of food production not addressed in most analyses of GMO crops and their costs/benefits.
In regarding food production, most fail to think, well, big enough. Every aspect of food production seems to be considered except the current lack of alternatives for "excess" food. I put excess in the scare quotes there because to even broach alternatives is seen by many as a threat to the current system of profit enjoyed by their businesses.
Likewise, when production methods are considered, few allow for consideration alternatives that increase human labor input, even when that increase improves the food-per-acre metric. Simply put, labor is expensive. As Salatin ably demonstrates, this labor well applied can vastly improve the soil, the product, the ancillary benefits; it is still expensive.
Ah, but we are in a bit of an economic slump now, aren't we? People are out of work. People have time on their hands. Why shouldn't we be considering ways of getting people out of their current situations and, perhaps, producing food in old ways with touches of the new?
Back to tacit for a moment. In one piece of a recent entry he mentions Golden Rice, a GMO developed to combat vitamin A deficiencies. Unlike most rice strains, it has vitamin A in it. There are, however, irrational objections to GMOs, Golden Rice included, objections that limit its spread as a staple crop.
There are other objections, though. In one of his books (either Deep Economy or Eaarth, I forget which) Bill McKibben mentions being in Bangladesh when people came through the village he was visiting promoting Golden Rice. The Bangladeshi farmers' reaction? To them, it was a solution in search of a problem. Why plant a crop that does everything? In traditional farming, no one planted just one crop! That would be silly! Families need a balanced diet, so one plants a balanced diet! The farmers scoffed at the Golden Rice pushers and sent them on their way.
Malnutrition is not a problem with food; it is a problem with food distribution. Such problems are less often caused by natural disasters and more often caused by human disasters; power and resource distribution practices; in a word, politics.
In fact, I'd like to share something I tried thanks to tacit's piece. He recommended here a way to search internet images. Fun!
An image I stole from Tacit!
I entered the image above into the Google Image search. Best guess? According to the results, this should be an "agriculture in UK" image. Why? Because it was used multiple times by the Telegraph, a London-based publication. The pieces that use the photo, though, concern African agriculture . . . investments. One talks of losses due to setbacks by an "Africa-focused conglomerate." Another mentions contrarian investments, such as African agriculture.
And here we find a problem. In a recent podcast interview, I heard Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute, describe the current plague of land grabs in Africa and other parts of the globe. Multi-national corporations, like those mentioned in the Telegraph pieces, take advantage of corrupt governments to grab "unused" land and create sprawling industrial farms. The people who had cultivated that "unused" land? It varies from case to case, but they are largely turned out to fend elsewhere, often forced to work for wage labor.
And here we get back to GMOs.
GMOs are (with notable exceptions, like Golden Rice) a profit source, patented to assure a lack of competition. They are designed to fit within an agricultural and economic system that does not allow farmers to do certain things like save seeds and have alternative markets or non-market uses for crops in times of plenty. John Deere™ builds combines. Monsanto sells Roundup™ and Roundup Ready™ corn seed. The Federal Government (not trade marked as of yet, at least not officially) responds to the major players in this system and establishes rules and regulations that encourage farmers playing with big combines and GMO seed, and discourages farmers that avoid the same. "Get big or get out" still applies, according to Salatin in his book filled with examples.
Whether or not GMOs should be patented is not the issue, at least not for me. (I do lean against "not" as an answer, only because a patented process to be self-perpetuating speaks to a system where patented material could-and has-gotten out of the confines of one area and into another area, where it has caused disaster. Take the major case study of this, Monsanto Canada, Inc. v. Schmeiser. I've seen Mr. Schmeiser talk about his case, the only time Monsanto officially sued a farmer for saving seeds. What the Wiki page does not note is that Schmeiser was an organic seed grower! That little unexplained spill onto his property was enough to force him to destroy all his crops to purge the unwanted genetic material, a major financial blow!
(Look, I am not here excusing what few fallacies people might harbor to justify an "organic" diet. They do not have to be excused. We are all entitled to eat what we want. We do not need a fallacy-free explanation. I doubt anyone who keeps kosher can avoid an Argument from Authority Fallacy, after all; that doesn't mean folks should necessarily ditch the beanies and pile bacon and cheese on the next burger.
(Enough diversions.)
What we are not discussing enough is the current emphasis in agriculture that follows the same blind spots as neo-classical economics, the blind spot of money. If it can't be sold, it doesn't exist. The traditional communities in Africa, driven from their land by a corrupt sale to a multinational? Not even on the radar screen, not being discussed. The forces that drive so many to vitamin A deficiencies? Not the problem of no Golden Rice, but the problem of no balanced diet, largely thanks to the lack of sufficiently remunerative employment to provide one and the barriers to growing one's own.
And the problem of farmers that don't want to grow GMOs for (insert reason here, fallacious or not makes no nevermind), but are forced to do so by the continual race to the bottom of financial costs and the maximization of financial benefits?
That last is not really a problem. It's a predicament. The difference is that a problem can be solved, while a predicament will always be there. Predicaments can be dealt with, but they are never going away.
Like tacit, I do hope those that have objections to GMO proliferation can find the time to use more precise language, verbiage that does not fall prey to stretches in logic and, therefore, fall to corrective observations like those tacit engages like trees falling from the cut of a chain saw.
Likewise, I also hope that the pursuit of logic in language and the corrective zeal used in that pursuit does not curse the pursuers to, as they attack each tree of fallacy, miss the fact that they are standing in a forest. Perhaps even a forest that might be found in Buncombe County, North Carolina.