We are all really in trouble

How One Farmer Turned Against Chemicals

A run-in with Roundup herbicide was a transformative episode in farmer Eric Herm’s shift toward sustainable agriculture. A fourth-generation farmer, Herm tells the tale in the book Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth: A Path to Agriculture’s Higher Consciousness (Dream River Press):

In May of 2009, my neighbor had his Roundup Ready cotton sprayed by Helena Chemical Company less than 40 yards from my home garden. The Roundup herbicide drifted and wiped out over 800 garlic bulbs, and all of my tomato, pepper, potato, bean, and corn plants. Within 48 hours every single plant in my garden curled up into a fetal position. Leaves curled upward, cupped around the edges, and plants showed visible signs of suffering. For three or four days I couldn’t figure out what had happened until I discovered my neighbor had sprayed Roundup a few days previous. I flew into a rage yet maintained my cool talking to Helena company officials. They were very courteous yet proceeded to blame a plane spraying half a mile away to the southwest.

Herm had tissue from his dead crops tested, and the results came back positive for glyphosate, the main active ingredient in Roundup. Still, the local Helena Chemical Company store manager insisted that his product wasn’t to blame.

That’s how these chemical companies work. Did I receive the $4,000 in damages? Take a wild guess. They put their lawyer against yours, and these chemical companies have a lot more money to spend on attorney fees than an individual farmer. Thanks to my neighbor and Helena Chemical Company, I lost an entire season of garlic, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, beans, and corn as months of hard work spiraled down the drain.

Tomato, people, onion, garlic, and potato plants are extremely sensitive to Roundup. One whiff and their leaves curl upward and they are unable to produce healthy, normal-sized fruit. Very frustrating when you begin an entire garden from seed. Money cannot replace healthy food. … As long as we continue to think Roundup Ready crops are the only answer, agriculture is doomed.

Herm’s writing has a folksy, ticked-off tone, kind of a Jim Hightower with a stronger streak of rural individualism, a distrust of big government, and a dash of new age spirituality. But his overall message is positive and forward thinking: Our industrial, chemical-intensive farming practices are destroying the land and harming our health and security, and we must change them:


“It is up to you and me—us. We the people,” he writes. “If not us, if not now … well, then we are all really in trouble.”

How many of your neighbors spray Roundup, herrbicides, pesticides indiscriminately on their lawns - into the wind and onto your vegetable plants? All for that "perfect" blade of grass, tomato, rose... But I think a healthy life is the "perfection' we should strive for. Time to garden with nature in mind.

Related articles

• Monsanto teams up with Sumitomo Chemical (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Monsanto's herbicide Roundup linked to birth defects (foodfreedom.wordpress.com)

GMO litmus test

Image via Wikipedia

Is Elena Kagan Leading Us Toward a Pro-GMO Supreme Court?

It's a good thing for Elena Kagan that there's no non-GMO litmus test for Supreme Court nominees. She'd flunk.

As solicitor general, Kagan is supposed to represent the interests of the American people in matters that come before the Supreme Court. Instead, she has gone to bat for Monsanto. In a case that the court is currently considering, Monsanto is trying to overturn a 2007 California decision that imposed a nationwide injunction on planting the company's genetically modified alfalfa. In March, Kagan's office interceded on Monsanto's behalf (click here for a PDF of its brief) even though the government was not a defendant in the appeal. The original suit was brought by Geertson Seed Farms and a collection of environmental groups, who claimed that pollen from Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa could contaminate neighboring plots of conventional alfalfa, causing irreparable harm to Geertson's non-GMO business.

Not too green is she!

Food from the lab

Farmers Who Plant Biotech Crops Grow Pesticide-Resistant Weeds

Weeds are developing resistance to the herbicide that genetically engineered crops are designed to tolerate, finds the first major assessment of how biotech crops are affecting all U.S. farmers, released today by the National Research Council.

Since genetically engineered crops were introduced in 1996, at least nine species of weeds in the United States have evolved resistance to glyphosate, a main component in Roundup and other commercial weed killers, according to the report.

The weeds have become resistant to glyphosate largely because of repeated exposure, the assessment found.

Did you ever think what it is doing to you when you eat that crop? If it is changing weeds, what is it doing to your liver, kidney...?