March Against Monsanto

[Pat Barry]

Pat....I believe we are part of nature. I would suggest that nobody knows what "nature" had or has planned. As the population "naturally" expanded man's imprint on the land has expanded too. I am not defending past practices merely saying current practices are improving.


Even nature has and is constantly changing. The only thing guaranteed in life and death is "change". In 1964 on the first day of a geology class at the University of Idaho, a professor said "We coming to the end of an ice age of which there has been several." Some geologist think there are geological proof that the earth has warmed up and refroze several times.

While the forests in years past were pretty much trashed, it's not the case any more. Selective clearing cutting is a good example of how the logging processes have improved.

On private land, logging can be conducted any way they want within the limits of certain protective guidelines.

On federal land, they do have to meet standards. Calling loggers rapists? That's a little harsh!

Let me guess....you aren't a logger. You wouldn't be affected financially if they stopped all commercial logging. It is easy to be a critic of the other man's game.

What is or was your profession?

Starting from the last and working toward the first of your questions / comments
I am an engineer, not a logger.
I would not be directly affected financially if they stopped all commercial logging, but why do you jump to such an extreme point?
I will take pictures my next trip to the cabin, although now that spring is here the real damage won't be so easy to assess but the thought that does come to my mind is rape as to a good description of the logging practices I have seen recently - up close and personal. I wish it were federal land because maybe the rules would keep the loggers in line. Basically they whack down any tree in their path, then toss aside the ones they don't plan to sell. They cut off all the branches and leave the stumps and leave the unneeded trees piled up (not exactly the way nature would have it). Its an eyesore and it makes me sick to see the way they treat the forest in pursuit of a few lousy dollars profit per tree. The loggers are hired hands and I guess we could blame the property owners but all they do is own the property, they don't live on or near it. Seriously, if you think these are good practices or acceptable because that's what it takes to make a living from the forest, then go find a job where your destruction has less impact.
The idea that modern man is part of nature is so comical as to be the plot of a new comedy series (summer only). Where exactly do you equate 4 wheelers by the dozens tearing up the earth, and the loggers with their power equipment raping the forests willy nilly, and hugely overpowered fishing and pleasure boats tearing up the lakes as being part of nature? In my opinion, as valid as yours by the way, they are the antitheses of nature, not part of it. They are the cancer on nature.
Now I can see you are very passionate about forestry and I am not saying you didn't practice proper conservation and care for nature - its just not all folks out there are like you. Most tend to do more net damage than you may have, some its nothing but damage.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

I'll point out that almost all the hardwood forest on the east coast (certainly all the privately owned forests) is harvested on a regular basis, and has been since almost the founding of the country. People buy cut over forest land, hold on to it for years, and then either sell it for timber, or have it logged, sell the timber and then sell the land again. It can be a retirement investment.

I believe that forests are crops, just like corn or wheat. It's just that it takes a lot more years to produce a crop. If the land is privately owned, the owners are invested in protecting the forest.

This is not to say that all forests should be logged, but a lot of it could be. And if it was, we'd get value from it, and reduce the cost of wild-land fires. Much better than seeing it go up in smoke, taking homes with it.

Mike

I agree Mike.

I live close to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the Colorado and Wyoming Rockies, so with that frame of reference, I was specifically thinking of the pine bark beetle epidemic and the various approaches that I've seen in dealing with it. In Rocky Mountain national park, they seem to have take the ignore it, it'll go away, as they also have in the Norbeck wilderness of the Black Hills. All this has done is make a tinderbox, which won't be good for anything. Some careful logging would have at least helped manage the inevitable fire. It's not much of a forest when all the trees are dead, so all the delicate management strategies that I hear about are pretty irrelevant to manage it.

Ken, I agree, a well executed controlled burn is a useful tool. They did one in Wind Cave national park a couple years ago, and it's recovering, although I don't see what on earth they were trying to fix in that instance. Trouble is, all the bureaucracies that be, federal, state, NGO, and personal property owners are all fighting each other, and each insisting that their way is right. I doubt any one solution is, and usually the locals have the best answers. The result is inaction, and the cost is massive horrible fires that permanently hurt people, property and nature.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

When it is proven that organic farming is equally or more profitable than commercial farming, then they will make the switch.

Bingo. And that will take 2 to 4 times higher food prices, at least. It will also take a loyal base of customers, it's not possible to switch back and forth quickly from organic to not, so if farmers start going broke because demand slows, it's over. Because it's a global market, this also has to happen on a global level. If someone can import and undermine the prices, and hence demand, game over there too. Basically, it ain't happening.

[David Weaver]

Well, it depends on the food for organic cost. There are some things that don't cost much more. I don't think the per capita beef consumption is going to be going anywhere but down in the future. Same with milk. The old line about milk being "good for you" is not true, and the fitness and food fanatics have been telling everyone to avoid it for almost 75 years. Those two things are very inefficient ways to turn feedstock energy into calories for people, especially beef. (my grandparents on both sides raised beef, and one of my relatives just got out of the dairy business not long ago - I understand why they were staples in an older less diversified food system). Jack lalanne made a big deal out of staying away from milk ("what are you, a baby?"), and I remember someone asking schwarzenegger in pumping iron or one of those films back in the 60s when a reporter asked "boy, you must drink a lot of milk!!", and he said "no...no milk, I don't drink any milk".

I don't love organic for everything, either, it's just a specification and I doubt that all of the specification necessarily makes food safer.

The thing that I would be fine with, which most people are not, is food that does not look perfect. Organic food that had but damage wouldn't be that expensive to grow in a lot of cases, but making it look perfect is another story.

Either way, a lot of people say they want one thing, but when it comes time to buy, they buy whatever is cheapest and whatever tastes the best (which is rarely the healthiest). The average person will not put their money where their mouth is.

A decade ago, I would've never thought we could've eliminated beef, but at this point in my household we don't eat it, and we have more fish than I would've ever dreamed of having. I don't miss the beef - nothing good (for males) comes from eating it after it's past your tongue. And for women, iron can be gotten elsewhere.

[Larry Frank]

I think that it is fine to point out a problem.....The problem really is that the world population is over 7 billion and still growing. If we need to feed this many people, then we need to have very efficient farmers like in the US. While it might be desirable to grow all crops without chemicals and genetic modification, there is no way that we could produce sufficient food.
Given the choice of some (how much???) chemicals in the food stream and genetic modifcation or having huge starvation problems...it is an easy answer for me. Maybe, someone in the future will find a way to reduce the use of chemicals but until then, I think that we need to produce food/crops at the highest possible level to help feed the world.

[Jason Roehl]

A decade ago, I would've never thought we could've eliminated beef, but at this point in my household we don't eat it, and we have more fish than I would've ever dreamed of having. I don't miss the beef - nothing good (for males) comes from eating it after it's past your tongue. And for women, iron can be gotten elsewhere.

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Grass-fed beef is an excellent source of vitamin B12. Excessive amounts of beef are certainly bad for you, particularly if eaten in hamburger form most of the time, but a steak every now and then makes life worth living. (Full disclosure: my in-laws farm beef cattle...I almost can't eat store-bought beef any more.) I'd be open to eating more fish, but the rest of my family are not big fans, I don't have time (or the gear) to go fishing, and the good fish is pretty expensive here. I also don't like to eat soy anything for protein, so my options are somewhat limited.

I'm with Larry--the U.S. farmer feeds the world, and it's not the organic farmer, it's the farmer who uses hybrids and breeds of grains that are developed in an expensive laboratory. Is it the best? Maybe not, but until there's an alternative, let's not cut ourselves off at the knees.

[David Weaver]

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Grass-fed beef is an excellent source of vitamin B12. Excessive amounts of beef are certainly bad for you, particularly if eaten in hamburger form most of the time, but a steak every now and then makes life worth living. (Full disclosure: my in-laws farm beef cattle...I almost can't eat store-bought beef any more.) I'd be open to eating more fish, but the rest of my family are not big fans, I don't have time (or the gear) to go fishing, and the good fish is pretty expensive here. I also don't like to eat soy anything for protein, so my options are somewhat limited.

I'm with Larry--the U.S. farmer feeds the world, and it's not the organic farmer, it's the farmer who uses hybrids and breeds of grains that are developed in an expensive laboratory. Is it the best? Maybe not, but until there's an alternative, let's not cut ourselves off at the knees.

The feed the world thing is a good slogan, but there are a lot of other regions in the world that grow food without a problem. Unfortunately, we waste more and more of the "food" on non-food uses where they are really inappropriately and wastefully used. That demand from non-food and non-livestock users puts an artificial burden on acre production to grow stuff that really has little value other than caloric quantity (corn).

Grass fed beef is better than corn, though I do think corn fed beef tastes better. When we've had grass fed beef in the last couple of years, I get flashbacks to childhood when every cow we got was mostly pastured and not feedlot fed. I guess once the feedlots and corn feeders came along, along with the USDA's ridiculous butchering requirements for small growers, we stopped buying relatives' cows and having them butchered locally and started getting beef at the grocery store. But the grass fed and pastured beef tastes the same as I remember it.

One thing that strikes me as interesting is when euros come visit us, they are used to grass fed beef, especially the UK and scottish folks. They think the beef over here is fantastic, but I've never gotten into why that is. It might be because of the way corn fed beef is finished. I've talked to more than one midwest farmer who says they won't eat grass fed beef and their customers don't like it either.

And then there was my grandfather who really had little tolerance for any meat other than beef. If he shot a crop damage deer (which he did often), he threw the carcass out and if it had large antlers, he hacksawed the skull off and gave them to my dad () who I suppose had plans to mount them and pretend that he'd gotten them himself - until my mother decided she didn't like hanging animal bits in the house.

Anyway, I think we have a problem with quality of food, not quantity. And I don't necessarily mean quality in terms of pesticides, I mean quality in terms of a lot of the stuff that we process into food is pretty much worthless as food. But it's cheap to process and make, and if you put it in a big flashy wrapper as "prepared food", I guess people buy it.

[Jason Roehl]

I suppose I should clarify that my inlaws' beef is not entirely grass-fed, but it is pastured most of the time. My FIL does supplement with grain, and in recent years, corn gluten because he could get it for something like 1/4 the price that he could sell his corn. He said the first time the cows ate it, they laid down next to the feed trough, just happy as clams--the corn gluten is the leftovers from ethanol processing, and there is some residual ethanol in it. The next time he turned on the feed trough conveyor, the cows came running. At any rate, it tastes better to me. Who knows, maybe that we haven't paid much more than processing costs (and sometimes not even that) over the nearly 19 years I've been in the family has an effect... A couple years ago, my wife and my MIL had worked out a deal on a half, and my FIL about blew a gasket when he found out we had paid them for beef. I took that as a good sign.

I'm with you on the processed garbage. I still eat some because it tastes good and is convenient if I'm busy, but we're making our yard smaller and smaller in favor of food production, and our church has a colossal garden as well (5 40'x100' plots we all work on together).

[David Weaver]

health stuff notwithstanding, I wouldn't mind going back to what my mom was feeding me 30 years ago. That was our pastured beef, local chicken (back then, it took longer for chickens to grow, they didn't grow them in the dark, and I'll admit they were smaller and didn't taste quite as good), local vegetables. We pay through the nose now (because of my wife, i'm cheap, I'd buy the low quality food where there's a big price difference and save organic for stuff like wheat to make bread where it only costs a buck or buck fifty a pound or so) to get foods that aren't just a bunch of cheap feedstock with a lot of flavoring to make them taste like something.

I'd love for an "ugly food" store to show up with no process food that was too ugly to be sold to the main line grocery stores when it shows up at the fruit and veggie terminal here. I have no idea where it goes. Presume a lot of the scratch and dent gets culled before it ever gets in a box, and ends up in things like canned or diced tomatoes where you can't tell whether the fruit was nice to start with.

We drank a LOT of whole milk, though, when I was a kid. I could do without that.

Excellent if you can identify exactly where your beef is coming from. The "diversified" farms around here (the ones that had animals and row crops) are about gone. A relative of mine still raises feeders, but they are someone else's cows and we wouldn't have access to them anyway. As he put it to me, he's "treading water" pasturing feeders because he doesn't want to sit around.

[Jerry Thompson]

Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project responds: “We’ve eaten about 7 trillion meals in the 18 years since GMOs first came on the market. There’s not one documented instance of someone getting so much as a sniffle.”

[David Weaver]

That's a good storyline, but I don't think anyone has concerns about people catching a cold from GMOs. I think they're more concerned about whether or not it affects things at the DNA/RNA level.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Funny how people remenisce about their childhood, I do too. Grandparents place and the food they made are a big part of it. Honestly though, grandmas chicken noodle soup was just plain scary. You could find any part of a chicken in there. David, I think you are in the very small minority in your acceptance of odd looking food. The folks who grew up around it, and the attitude that you eat what isn't making money, would be ok with it, but most not really.

The edible bean industry sells splits for about 1/3 of the price of canners. They usually go to prisons and school lunch programs. I don't think there is much wasted food being produced, it just goes to some other food process then the store shelf. Another example is molasses from the sugar industry. Most of it gets turned into animal feed, and eventually ends up on the store shelf. Ag turns energy into matter, that matter all gets used someplace, even if it is just to grow more matter.

[David Weaver]

Burning corn with almost no net gain in energy from just burning the energy stocks that are required to turn it into ethanol are what I was referring to as a waste of food, though I see what you're saying about the uglies of the bean industry going to prisons. the entire biomass energy movement is a waste of energy, and via exemption, a way to put far more particulate and pollution into the air than is allowed with something like natural gas or liquid fossil fuels, and it makes no economic sense. It also wastes acreage that could be used to grow better quality food than yellow dent corn, which is basically trash. However, the economics of the scheme set up make it so that I can't tell you or anyone else something easy that takes little involvement from people (other than planting spraying and harvesting) and makes as much money per acre. I'd like to see all of the mangling of the market taken away, but it's a little too late because the subsidizing of the cost of building liquid fuel makers have already set the mechanism in place to keep consuming the feed stock.

What I didn't say directly is that I'd rather eat bug damaged food with no pesticides on it than food with no damage and a lot of pesticide use. Most people wouldn't tolerate that, though, because they have no concept of anything other than that they connect something looking good with being good.

(I did see some scary things as a kid, and one that was not scary that I wouldn't want to have a lot of now was cow tongue. We had that at least several times per year. And a friend's grandparents seemed to have liver all the time - which I'm not a great fan of. Chicken hearts and necks weren't uncommon there, either)

[Prashun Patel]

Didn't anyone see Jurassic Park? Jeff Goldblum accurately predicted that humans cannot accurately predict what happens when we manipulate nature. IMHO, the real issue is overpopulation, and humanity's basic nature to conquer nature.

Manipulation is nothing new. Today's GMO is yesterday's grafting/splicing. Shoot, basic agriculture is manipulation in the form of selective propagation of crops that are food to humans. Once we consume any of it in great enough abundance, other flora and fauna will necessarily be crowded out. We will have no choice but to seek more technology to squeeze more out of less and solve new diseases and problems.

Saying GMO's are evil is like saying blood pressure medication is evil. Don't blame the medicine, blame the illness.

[Ole Anderson]

Manipulation is nothing new. Today's GMO is yesterday's grafting/splicing. Shoot, basic agriculture is manipulation in the form of selective propagation of crops that are food to humans. Once we consume any of it in great enough abundance, other flora and fauna will necessarily be crowded out. We will have no choice but to seek more technology to squeeze more out of less and solve new diseases and problems.

Saying GMO's are evil is like saying blood pressure medication is evil. Don't blame the medicine, blame the illness.

I agree. Frankly I feel safer eating GMO food than I do taking all the meds I do, all of which, including the lowly aspirin, come with warnings that people have died from the same meds I now take. Can anyone say the same about GMO food? How many have died (GMO related) from eating those seven trillion meals. Do the med warnings keep you from taking something that addresses a serious medical condition?

The sky is falling, the sky is falling...