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Source: http://www.purefood.org/ge/playinggd.htm
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This also helps explain monocropping in a GE dependent world.
Please read it with a more open mind than usual. We never fully
understand until we explore, I am trying - DAVE
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Michael Pollan wrote a very thought-provoking article called "Playing
God in the Garden" which you can find in the October 25, 1998 issue
of The New York Times Magazine. In his own wonderful meandering way
he discusses the New Leaf Superior potatoes (which contain Bt) he has
obtained from Monsanto, planting them in his garden, watching them
grow, and finally making the decision about whether or not to eat his
harvest. In between he interviews representatives from the EPA,
Monsanto, a Harvard geneticist, a conventional potato farmer, an
organic potato farmer, as well as other pertinent people to help him
make up his mind. It's great "food for thought" and may help you
think through the controversy. Personally, I want to have the choice
not to fill my body with a pesticide which is what Bt is, safe or
not. I also choose to drive a car, choose not to take most
medicines--that's what makes me hysterical, when my choice is taken
away.
{FYI, I have pulled out just one interviewed portion Michael wrote:}
Danny Forsyth laid out the dismal economics of potato farming for me one
sweltering morning at the coffee shop in downtown Jerome, Idaho.
Forsyth,
60, is a slight blue-eyed man with a small gray ponytail; he farms 3,000
acres of potatoes, corn and wheat, and he spoke about agricultural
chemicals like a man desperate to kick a bad habit. "None of us would
use
them if we had any choice," he said glumly.
I asked him to walk me through a season's regimen. It typically begins
early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes, many
potato farmers douse their fields with a chemical toxic enough to kill
every trace of microbial life in the soil. Then, at planting, a systemic
insecticide (like Thimet) is applied to the soil; this will be absorbed
by the young seedlings and, for several weeks, will kill any insect that
eats their leaves. After planting, Forsyth puts down an herbicide --
Sencor or Eptam -- to "clean" his field of all weeds. When the potato
seedlings are six inches tall, an herbicide may be sprayed a second time
to control weeds.
Idaho farmers like Forsyth farm in vast circles defined by the rotation
of a pivot irrigation system, typically 135 acres to a circle; I'd seen
them from 30,000 feet flying in, a grid of verdant green coins pressed
into a desert of scrubby brown. Pesticides and fertilizers are simply
added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth's farm draws most of
its
water from the nearby Snake River. Along with their water, Forsyth's
potatoes may receive 10 applications of chemical fertilizer during the
growing season. Just before the rows close -- when the leaves of one row
of plants meet those of the next -- he begins spraying Bravo, a
fungicide, to control late blight, one of the biggest threats to the
potato crop. (Late blight, which caused the Irish potato famine, is an
airborne fungus that turns stored potatoes into rotting mush.) Blight is
such a serious problem that the E.P.A. currently allows farmers to spray
powerful fungicides that haven't passed the usual approval process.
Forsyth's potatoes will receive eight applications of fungicide.
Twice each summer, Forsyth hires a crop duster to spray for aphids.
Aphids are harmless in themselves, but they transmit the leafroll virus,
which in Russet Burbank potatoes causes net necrosis, a brown spotting
that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. It happened to
Forsyth last year. "I lost 80,000 bags" -- they're a hundred pounds each
-- "to net necrosis," he said. "Instead of getting $4.95 a bag, I had to
take $2 a bag from the dehydrator, and I was lucky to get that." Net
necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect; yet because big buyers like
McDonald's believe (with good reason) that we don't like to see brown
spots in our fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields
with some of the most toxic chemicals in use, including an
organophosphate called Monitor.
"Monitor is a deadly chemical," Forsyth said. "I won't go into a field
for four or five days after it's been sprayed -- even to fix a broken
pivot." That is, he would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than
expose himself or an employee to Monitor, which has been found to cause
neurological damage.
It's not hard to see why a farmer like Forsyth, struggling against tight
margins and heartsick over chemicals, would leap at a New Leaf -- or...
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And so I ask if this is how a typical non-organic daily regimen of food
exists, why are we so complacent? And why not be concerned of GM foods?
Pesticides will never be a thing of the past unless we act accordingly.
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Source: http://www.purefood.org/ge/playinggd.htm
Recycler Dave - passing it along...... Geez, eating can be hard (not)!
Can you thankfully share your opinions and experiences, mostly other
research as to what you feel works, will work and why?
====================
recycler@eclipse.net
====================
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