March Against Monsanto

[Mike Henderson]

Let me make a comment about labeling food as GMO. Some years back, California passed Prop 65 which required stores to post a sign warning that some products they carried may contain chemicals "known to the state of California" to cause cancer, birth defects, and so on. I'm sure the intent was to get stores to quit carrying products with those chemicals.

However, what actually happened is that every store posted the sign at their entrance, whether they carried the products or not, just to make sure they couldn't get sued if they did carry such a product. And people who enter the store just ignore the sign.

So let's look at corn, which in one way or another (see high fructose corn syrup) finds it's way into a whole lot of products. It's impossible to carry corn in bulk without having some GMO corn mixed in. So if mandatory labeling comes into effect, just about every product will have a label on it saying "May contain GMO ingredients" and no one will pay attention to it except the people who are radical about it. Non GMO products will be available, but because of the special handling and testing, they'll be much more expensive and, again, the only people who will buy them will be the radicals.

You see this effect now with peanuts (not GMO peanuts, plain peanuts). Companies mark their product as "may contain small amounts of peanuts or peanut products, or may have been processed on equipment that also processes peanut products." That's just a way of protecting themselves from liability.

Unless GMO food is shown to be unsafe - and then it probably won't be able to be sold - labeling it is useless, but will open the door to lawyers who will sue everyone in the food chain for any violation of the labeling.

Mike

[If there's a market for non-GMO food, companies will produce it and label the product as "Non-GMO" Those people who are concerned about GMO food can vote with their dollars and buy that product. That way, the free market will decide about labeling of food and there won't be a feast for the attorneys.]

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Dale,

I would suggest that it's very useful to caution everybody about automatically accepting the information at websites with names like "Activist", Foodrevolution.org....responsibletechnology.org... . The names alone provide ample indication that the website proudly has an axe to grind, a political bias and the information contained there should be heavily scrutinized. The internet is the world's largest source of MISINFORMATION .....and misunderstanding..and NO.....the sky isn't falling Chicken Little.....there might be something falling out of the sky but the sky isn't falling.

It is ridiculous that Monsanto filed that lawsuit. I would love to know the unbiased truth why Monsanto filed that law suit. I would suggest you won't get that truth at websites supporting either party in the lawsuit. It's also just as ridiculous suggest they should be sued for contamination since neither the organic farmers or Monsanto can contain the wind, insects etc.

I would agree with mandatory labeling with regards to GMO food products. People should be able to make an informed decision.

The truth is most people in this country don't fully appreciate the high standards of living we enjoy at a relatively low expense when compared to other countries. I will take issue with my close friend Dennis and state that we have that standard of living partially because of large corporations like Monsanto and others. Period. New developments take money, lots of money. Often new products require research for periods of time of a decade or longer. Scientists, engineers, farmers, laborers have families to feed too. Thus they require payment for their labors during the research time. The type of financing required to fund long term research or in the case of huge expensive inventories of seeds or in the case of other industries for example, the spare parts for jet engines used in commercial airliners, can only be handled by large corporations.

The stocks for large corporations are owned by people, individuals. It surprising how many people are invested in the stock market directly or indirectly and don't realize it. They don't realize that their retirement funds are invested in the stock market. Current estimates indicate 52% of the US population is invested in the stock market. What does that have to do with Monsanto? If you don't like what they are doing, then buy some stock, attend the stockholders meetings and get resolutions passed to change corporate policies or executives voted out of corporate offices. If you can't get it done, then accept the fact that you ideas aren't popular.

I have family members who are farmers in Illinois and Indiana. I married into a family that has members who are farmers or professionally employed in farm related businesses. Farmers are, among a lot of other trades, businessmen. If there was as much profit in organic farming as current traditional farming, farmers would switch tomorrow. They have to be financially successful or go out of business. Note, I am not taking issue at organic farming but rather the profitability of it and the resultant increase in cost of living to the average US citizen it could cause.

In response to the OP....in past years, the main stream media carried coverage about the March on Monsanto because the news was the "soup du jour". It's not the current media interest and as is obvious by you disappointment, not many people are as concerned about it as you are.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Steve Rozmiarek,
If you make your living via GMO....then why don't you share what you know to be "truth"...real truth if you please. I am far more impressed by people who see the bad AND the good side of things when they post supporting arguments about "stuff". I don't mean this in a derogatory manner....just that if you complain because we don't know the truth? Then why not tell us?

I am against Monsanto because of their very poor business ethics and practices. It would suit me fine if someone shut them down for good...IMHO.

But....allow me to say this.....A Woodworking forum is not the place to fight nor bicker about stuff like this. I realize this is an Off Topic Forum section, but still, a woodworking forum is not the platform to get truth out to the general public that is causing your livelihood to be threatened.

Sure, be glad to. A little background is probably in order. I am a farmer first, growing corn, sugar beets, hard red wheat, and several types of dry edible beans. My farm has grown around 10% of this nation's great northern bean production for example. I've also worked in boardrooms of companies that take beans from the field to the grocery store shelf.

Monsanto brought out a trait called Round Up ready, more than a decade ago. I doubt that most of the anti GMO crowd even know what it does. What RR does is make the plant tolerant of a non selective Monsanto chemical, Roundup. It'll kill most everything but the RR ready crop. We use the RR corn, soybeans, and sugar beets. The benefits of this are that you can use a simple, safe chemical program of a couple that work very well, vs the massively expensive and much more dangerous cocktails of the past. Atrazine for example is a chemical that the enviros tend to bemoan. RR has pretty much replaced it in corn fields, and is much safer.

These RR crops can now be grown no, or minimum till, which eliminated erosion, ala the dust bowl. They can be grown cheaper now that competition has lowered the prices finally for the seed and chemical, and they are a better quality product, ie you can clean up the toxic nightshade infestations that couldn't be controlled in a beet field, so they don't happen in the food grade beans and end up on your table.

Flip side is, Monsanto acted like a monopoly to get to this point. It was tolerated because they make great products that really work, and probably significant lobbying. You can buy generic glyphosate (Roundup's active ingredient) now for a small fraction of the prices they were charging during the height of their reign. There is a new business model there now though. Sugar beets went RR several years ago. Because of the generic RR availability, the profit is built into a tech fee now. A unit of sugar beet seed will cost around $350, half actual seed, half tech fee. This is tolerable because the RR trait allows a safer cleaner product. The finances are similar at this point.

No RR crops are direct to human consumption. They all get turned into cattle feed, fuels, or processed into something else. Personally, I'd be much more worried about the safety of the processing facilities than the GMO trait. An interesting detail, consumers don't seem to care where their food comes from. There has been a tremendous fight to try to get beef source verified, and the consumer simply doesn't seem to care. They would rather save a buck and import cheaper dry edible beans from China that have potentially been fertilized with raw human waste than by local. To compete with whatever shady activities happen around the world to make "food" to sell to the USA, our farmers need these technologies to raise efficiencies to compete.

I mentioned sugar beets. The industry started growing RR sugar beets 5 years ago. Two years after that, a group of enviro's sued on behalf of a small seed grower. They claimed that the seed was being contaminated by pollinating sugar beets. Sugar beets don't pollinate in farming, they are a biannual, so they get harvested prior to flowering. The suit shut down the beet industry for a bit. It eventually got tossed but it cost many much.

I have to get going, will be happy to add more if any want.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Please post more when you have a chance Steve!

[george wilson]

I am afraid that Monsanto may be causing the bees to die off with their genetically altered plants. We do not know the unseen side effects these crops might have. But,something is very wrong with the bees. If we lose them,we will be in horrible trouble.

[David Weaver]

Sure, be glad to. A little background is probably in order. I am a farmer first, growing corn, sugar beets, hard red wheat, and several types of dry edible beans. My farm has grown around 10% of this nation's great northern bean production for example. I've also worked in boardrooms of companies that take beans from the field to the grocery store shelf.

Monsanto brought out a trait called Round Up ready, more than a decade ago. I doubt that most of the anti GMO crowd even know what it does. What RR does is make the plant tolerant of a non selective Monsanto chemical, Roundup. It'll kill most everything but the RR ready crop. We use the RR corn, soybeans, and sugar beets. The benefits of this are that you can use a simple, safe chemical program of a couple that work very well, vs the massively expensive and much more dangerous cocktails of the past. Atrazine for example is a chemical that the enviros tend to bemoan. RR has pretty much replaced it in corn fields, and is much safer.

These RR crops can now be grown no, or minimum till, which eliminated erosion, ala the dust bowl. They can be grown cheaper now that competition has lowered the prices finally for the seed and chemical, and they are a better quality product, ie you can clean up the toxic nightshade infestations that couldn't be controlled in a beet field, so they don't happen in the food grade beans and end up on your table.

Flip side is, Monsanto acted like a monopoly to get to this point. It was tolerated because they make great products that really work, and probably significant lobbying. You can buy generic glyphosate (Roundup's active ingredient) now for a small fraction of the prices they were charging during the height of their reign. There is a new business model there now though. Sugar beets went RR several years ago. Because of the generic RR availability, the profit is built into a tech fee now. A unit of sugar beet seed will cost around $350, half actual seed, half tech fee. This is tolerable because the RR trait allows a safer cleaner product. The finances are similar at this point.

No RR crops are direct to human consumption. They all get turned into cattle feed, fuels, or processed into something else. Personally, I'd be much more worried about the safety of the processing facilities than the GMO trait. An interesting detail, consumers don't seem to care where their food comes from. There has been a tremendous fight to try to get beef source verified, and the consumer simply doesn't seem to care. They would rather save a buck and import cheaper dry edible beans from China that have potentially been fertilized with raw human waste than by local. To compete with whatever shady activities happen around the world to make "food" to sell to the USA, our farmers need these technologies to raise efficiencies to compete.

I mentioned sugar beets. The industry started growing RR sugar beets 5 years ago. Two years after that, a group of enviro's sued on behalf of a small seed grower. They claimed that the seed was being contaminated by pollinating sugar beets. Sugar beets don't pollinate in farming, they are a biannual, so they get harvested prior to flowering. The suit shut down the beet industry for a bit. It eventually got tossed but it cost many much.

I have to get going, will be happy to add more if any want.

Contamination of other pollinating crops is a problem, though, even if it's not with sugar beets. Anyone who has crop contaminated will just get rolled, there's nothing they can do about it.

I personally would rather see GMO labeling. To give monsanto a bye would be out of bounds in my book, though I'm sure our renter plants monsanto products. But they (M and not the renter) bought our legislature and got a law put on the books to keep us from being able to label milk has having rBST treated cows or not. Now, I'm not calling for BST to be made illegal or anything, but I'd like to be able to get labeled products. My distaste for them has more to do with how they conduct themselves than with necessarily known problems with their genetic trait.

There's really no reason they should've gone to our legislature and lobbied for a law to ban labeling something that is perfectly honest, factual and true. That's what I don't like.

Should there be a problem (like there was with dioxin laced Agent Orange), their response would probably be the same as it has been for Agent Orange, which is, and I quote:
"Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange.....reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects"

(maybe not, but when you lace it with dioxins and they are, you should probably take some responsibility).

I agree, though, too, that eating food grown in heavy concentrations of atrazine isn't an attractive option, either.

Maybe if we weren't so wasteful with our crops, we wouldn't need to have the perfect yield conditions that are needed to meet demands to burn food, etc. Maybe we'd have better quality food, too, instead of so much processed low protein and low vitamin trash.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

George,

Where did you get the idea that GMOs are causing the bee problem?

I would suggest it's in Monsanto's best interest to not be causing that problem as bees provide a lot of pollination.

Copied from the USDA website:


CCD History
In October 2006, some beekeepers began reporting losses of 30-90 percent of their hives. While colony losses are not unexpected, especially over the winter, this magnitude of losses was unusually high.

The main symptom of CCD is very low or no adult honey bees present in the hive but with a live queen and no dead honey bee bodies present. Often there is still honey in the hive, and immature bees (brood) are present. Varroa mites, a virus-transmitting parasite of honey bees, have frequently been found in hives hit by CCD.
This is not the first time that beekeepers are being faced with unexplained losses. The scientific literature has several mentions of honey bee disappearances—in the 1880s, the 1920s, and the 1960s. While the descriptions sound similar to CCD, there is no way to know for sure if those problems were caused by the same agents as CCD.
There have also been unusual colony losses before. In 1903, in the Cache Valley in Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to an unknown "disappearing disease" after a "hard winter and a cold spring." More recently, in 1995-96, Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53 percent of their colonies without a specific identifiable cause.
In June 2007, ARS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), USDA's extramural research grants agency, co-chaired a workshop of scientists and stakeholders to develop a Colony Collapse Disorder Action Plan. This plan identified areas where more information was needed and developed a research priority list for additional research projects related to finding the cause/causes of CCD.

I point out George....Monsanto didn't exist in most of those historical time periods I marked in bold.

[Mike Henderson]

I am afraid that Monsanto may be causing the bees to die off with their genetically altered plants. We do not know the unseen side effects these crops might have. But,something is very wrong with the bees. If we lose them,we will be in horrible trouble.

The cause of colony collapse disorder (CCD) is not clear and is probably due to multiple stress factors affecting the hive at the same time. Researchers have examined GMO pollen as a factor and have not found that it correlates with CCD. I'm not an expert on bees, although I have one hive in my backyard to pollinate my avocado trees. I do follow the research on bees just because I'm interested.

I'll just comment that pollination of the almond crop here in CA is big business but puts real stress on the hives. The hives are transported long distances and the crops around the almond groves may be using certain chemicals which stress the bees, even if the almond growers are not.

Mike

[Greg Peterson]

Japan and Europe cancelled their wheat orders from the NW when it was discovered that a farmer's crop had contaminated by GMO's. Surprisingly, Monsanto has yet to sue the farmer for patent infringement although apparently they would have the right to do so.

The farmers who have customers that require non-GMO product should have standing in the US court system to seek remedy from Monsanto when the farmers crop is compromised by Monsanto's GMO's.

If Monsanto wants to lock farmers into annual leases (licenses), so be it. But if their product contaminates another farmers crop, it is the non-GMO farmer that is the injured party, not Monsanto. It is magnanimous of Monsanto to agree to not sue farmers whose crop is not significantly polluted by their product. But where is the recourse for the farmer when their seed line is contaminated and forever altered? How is this even remotely ethical or reasonable?

If I have a choice between a non-GMO and GMO product, I would select the non-GMO product. In part because I don't think the science on GMO's is in yet, but also because non-GMO farmers are fighting an uphill battle against the industrial agriculture industry.

Without farmers, there would be no us. I honestly do not understand how they do it. I can imagine few jobs more labor intensive for little in return than farming.

[jared herbert]

I am also a commercial farmer in nw Iowa. I make my living growing corn and soybeans. Every acre of crop that I have is either corn or soybeans that have the roundup ready gene in the seed. I pay a royalty that is included in the price of the seed that goes directly to Monsanto. The advent of roundup ready crops has made life much easier, safer, better for the environment and by the way more profitable. Every acre I have is farmed by the notill method meaning I just plant in to last years crop residue with no mechanical tillage. This method has cut my fuel usage by about 75% per acre. I use less than 2 gallons of diesel fuel per acre to grow the crop compared to about 8 gallons per acre in the past. The roundup technology allows me to use roundup, one of the least toxic chemicals, to control weeds as opposed to atrazine and a host of other products that were dangerous to the applicator and also to the environment and wildlife. I apply 22 to 40 oz per acre of roundup per acre compared to several times that amount of other chemicals popular in the past. Roundup has made the transition to notill farming much easier. The notill methods have cut soil erosion on my land drastically from what it use d to be when land was tilled several times each year. The organic matter of my soil has increased about 25% since I have adopted roundup technology and notill farming. The yield per acre I have has increased every year basically since I have started farming due to better technology, genetics and farming methods. I can grow more grain per acre with less chemical use and safer methods, a lot of this is directly traced back to Monsanto and their products.

That is not to say that Monsanto is lily white on any of this. They have good product that is dependable and safe for me to use. They have their faults I am sure but they have made my world better. I would not use their products if I felt it was unsafe to me or the environment.

One poster mentioned the huge increase in the amount of roundup used from sometime in the 90s until now. the insertion of the round up gene into commercial crops did not exist in 1990 so to compare that amount of gallons per year to what is used now is like comparing apples to oranges, or perhaps similar to comparing I phone usage in 1990 to what it is now.

I was the first farmer in my community to plant roundup beans, I don't remember what year it was, but I did it and never looked back. I do dislike paying a royalty to them on every bag of seed every year but that is the way the world works. If anyone has any questions I would be glad to answer them Jared Herbert

[Greg Peterson]

"In 2012, Dr. Charles Benbrook of Washington State University had a study on Roundup ready crops published in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe. The use of glyphosate based herbicides had increased each year by upwards of 25% due to the emergence of glyphosate tolerant weeds. In the first few years the GE crops worked well. But weeds migrated that were tolerant and existing weeds developed tolerance. In 1999, growers applied 1.5 million pounds of the herbicide. By 2011, 90 million pounds were being applied. The frequency and quantity per application increased each year in order to remain effective."

Link


Link to Study

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Greg,

Who paid for the study? What was the good doctor's pre-study beliefs and what was the beliefs of those who financed the study?

[David Weaver]

I think the bee issue right now is neonicotinoids, and I think those are a Bayer product and not Monsanto.

[Art Mann]

I can believe that the principle of natural selection would produce weeds that would be resistant to the initial rate of Roundup. So what? Since its discovery in 1928, the use of Penicillin has resulted in bacteria that are resistant to the original dosage. Consequently, higher doses have to be prescribed. Is that a good reason to abandon its use?

[Joel Goodman]

the bigger problem is the stranglehold monsanto has on commercial seed production and use.

+1 For 10,000 years farmers have been harvesting their seeds for the next planting -- I am not convinced that we should outlaw this practice based on the a few years experience. I am also not convinced that putting herbicide on "Round Up Ready" crops and then eating them is in my best health interests. My wife grew up chasing the DDT truck as it sprayed -- no one thought that was unsafe then.