Jim Goodman, thanks for the article. One quibble, seemingly minor but with ramifications: the standard view, offered early in your piece, that agriculture provided a more stable food supply than hunting and gathering, has been rejected by most archaeologists interested in this issue.

What agriculture provided was a larger but narrower-based supply of calories, concentrating on fewer, higher-calorie sources, mainly grains. Because the base was narrower as well as mostly carbohydrate, it produced not only deficiency diseases (e.g., the spread of maize cultivation in North American prehistory can be tracked by the spread of periodontal disease) but also periodic famine, almost unknown to hunter-gatherers excepting Arctic ones. It was adopted, in the current view of most archaeologists, not because it offered greater stability, better nutrition, or more ease, but because hunter-gatherer populations had grown, willy-nilly (most tried to discourage population growth) beyond the ability of wild foods to support them (see, e.g., Mark Nathan Cohen's The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Population Pressure and the Origins of Agriculture).

Stilldreaming has it right: we must control, or better yet reverse, population growth. Whether that's possible, given the epoch-making failure of hunter-gatherers to achieve it, is another matter.

[This should be an article on Commondreams]

The Monsanto Connection
From the Marketoracle.co.uk/Article10347.html
By: Robert_Singer

I recently published an article "Grandmother Scores Huge Victory over Monsanto".

The article was a magnet for controversy because I claimed the best way to fight Monsanto and HR 875 was by growing your own food and saving seeds.

Linn Cohen-Cole, the libertarian grandmother at the forefront of the anti-HR 875 campaign called me “dangerous” for fostering complacency by encouraging readers to grow their own food instead of send e-mails and faxes...that no one reads.

The Cornucopia Institute and the Organic Consumers Association has already assured organic advocates that HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act, is only “trying to improve the safety of food products derived from large industrial processing facilities and does not intend to trample organic farmers, backyard gardeners or consumers of fresh local foods.”

Following the April 3 Cornucopia press release, “Family Farmers Fear Being Run over by Food Safety Juggernaut,” organic food activists received a mass e-mail exposing the role of Linn Cole in spreading disinformation about HR 875:

Subject: RETRACTION: URGENT! Monsanto Bill to Ban Organic Food:
“Monsanto, or one of their proxy groups, is actually feeding libertarian groups disinformation on this bill.

The bill doesn't ban organic. When you make that misinformed, but well-intentioned call to your Congressman, you are doing exactly what Monsanto wants—coming across as an ill-informed and hysterical extremist. Monsanto is making a last-ditch effort in this PR war, but they have already really lost it.”

Monsanto lost it because 43 million Americans, including First Lady Michelle Obama, have risked going to jail for growing their own food!

This will help you understand what really happened:

1. Monsanto is one of the most powerful multi-national corporations in the world. The Global One-World Government New World Order conspiracy, of which Monsanto is a part, is aimed at controlling millions via the food they eat. "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people," said Henry Kissinger in 1970.
2. Monsanto uses overt and covert strategies to accomplish their goals. Monsanto is behind both sides of the battle over HR 875. They don’t leave important matters like these to chance.

3. Monsanto’s tentacles reach into every aspect of our society: government, private industry, the military, law enforcement and, of course, agriculture. Large, small, organic and non-organic farmers—and don’t forget libertarian grass roots activists—are all influenced directly and indirectly by Monsanto. The company that rose to power in the 20th century as a leading chemical giant now focuses on agriculture. In Monsanto’s world, there is no room for the family farmer. The company’s well-known corporate bullying tactics have made this clear. Just ask Percy Schmeiser, the brave Canola farmer who dared to take on Monsanto.

4. HR 875’s vague wording was intentional.

5. Family Farmers (organic and non-organic) are under attack, but not by Congresswoman DeLauro, the author of HR 875 whose husband was a political consultant to Monsanto 10 years ago.
6. The timing of HR 875 coincides with the slow food, Locavore, and urban gardening movements in the United States and, for that matter, any slow food movement anywhere in the world.
7. The E-coli and salmonella outbreaks related to spinach, tomatoes and peanuts are the work of Monsanto’s agents: Things don’t happen; they’re made to happen.
8. Healthy Family Farm owner Sharon Palmer was arrested for selling raw goat milk, and the Ohio food co-op raided Gestapo-style was obviously instigated by Monsanto agents in a move designed to intimidate urban gardeners.

It doesn’t matter if libertarian grandmother Linn Cohen-Cole, or Paul, a farmer from Wisconsin, were accidental dupes or knowing agents of Monsanto’s disinformation campaign. It only matters that the disinformation campaign was discovered before it wounded the health freedom movement.

Spreading misinformation, misleading or outright false information is not the way to defeat “food safety” legislation, because when you make that misinformed but well-intentioned call to your Congressman, you are doing exactly what Monsanto wants—coming across as an ill-informed and hysterical extremist.

The very clear and present danger is that our “unelected representatives” will be forced to sit down and actually read HR 875. But when they do, they won’t find a ban on heirloom seeds, farmers markets or backyard gardening, because it isn’t there. Does anyone think Monsanto would actually put in writing that we are going to arrest Michelle Obama for planting a garden?

If they did, our representatives wouldn’t need a flood of frantic messages hollering that HR 875 is the bill that will “kill all farms and eat your babies." No, believe it or not, our representatives eat and go to farmers markets just like we do.

So who is behind this disinformation campaign?

The Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF) originated the Linn Cole articles.

The Organic Consumers Association and other legitimate heath advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years, and the criticism is universally the same:

Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles such as Linn Cole’s?

The answers start with the NSF founders, husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me explain. I'm not saying they're doing sloppy research, and I'm not saying they're being overzealous. What I am saying is that they are working, for pay, to spread false information and to make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.

My conclusion is Stubblebine and Laibow are using the Natural Solutions Foundation—and Linn Cole—to undermine the health freedom community by spreading disinformation about HR 875.

Stubblebine is a retired U.S. Army major general who designed AEGIS, "a major Homeland Security private initiative." Given this background and his ties to the U.S. intelligence community, eyebrows were raised in the health freedom community in early 2005 when, along with Laibow, Stubblebine launched the NSF website and began to promote his wife as an expert on Codex Alimentarius, the commission working to adopt strict new guidelines for vitamin and mineral supplements.

Read full article...
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article10347.html

The dispossession of the small farmer and the loss of our soul-connection to the land parallels the growth of corporate agriculture and the explosion of population.

The Founders were yeoman farmers, and the farmer was a cultural ideal, a way of life, a weltanschuang. Then it was monetized and mechanized and industrialized to be more efficient and productive and responsive to changing market demand. Regular deflations allowed the richest farmers and ag-moguls to buy up the foreclosures and return many farmers to mere tenancy. Agribusiness took over as people left the land to concentrate in cities and reproduce like rabbits.

Now agribusiness is the only means to support a mass consumer population. Sustainable methods ( organic ) cannot feed the voracious urban areas. Sustainable retailers like Whole Foods ( Earth Fare & Green Life in my area, plus cooperatives ) cannot replace the agribusiness outlets. Organic, sustainable agriculture is not scalable.

Huge numbers of small organic farmers might feed the nation, but to sustain themselves, these small farmers must charge more for smaller volumes of production and the population couldn't pay for it. Trying to make agriculture a high profit industry destroys its sustainability. A farm is not a factory. Natue is not a factory.

The American population is screwed right now because it is nutritionally starved by agribusiness food and can't afford organic food. Americans are dying of diabetes, cancers, and a host of degenerative conditions resulting from bankrupt food. We are vulnerable to pandemics to sweep in and cull the human herd considerably. The huge cost of health care is largely a result of an agribusiness diet. Chronically ill and obese people are everywhere you turn.

We have made agribusiness necessary, though. "Or we can think about the environment and humanity when we make our food choices." Thinking about it only exposes the monumental dilemma we face. Humanity does not actually have "food choices". It's agribusiness and GMO or global famine.

"We produce more than enough to feed the world." Right now, maybe. Productivity is falling, however, which is why GMO is gaining in compensation. We are not smart enough to re-engineer nature.

There are 350,000,000 Americans demanding eggs @ 99 cents a dozen as they swill litres of Mountain Dew and cannot afford treatment for diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, etc etc. Is it possible to supply them with nutritious food from a sustainable agriculture at a cheap price they can afford?

No.

When the American people left the land and moved to the cities, they forgot how to live in harmony with nature. The 1% of people who actually farm are more attentive to the futures market than the needs of their land and they are largely ignorant concerning the nutritional content of their nitrogen-pumped produce. "Harmony with nature" is a cliche, of course, like "love thy neighbor".

We are not so different from the benighted animals jammed together in factory farms. We require constant pharmaceutical inputs. Fat people are often anemic.

When the British ecologist, James Lovelock, howls in anguish about the billions that will die because we have abused Gaia, he is not just whistling Dixie...

"The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) claims agriculture is one of the biggest threats to the environment"

It seems time that we start recognizing that the problems are not the tools we wield but our intent in wielding them. A hammer can break things or build things depending on our intent. We tried regulating the tool and it doesn't work. So let's try regulating the intent.

One may argue that we we can't regulate intent, but we know how to discover intent. Ask any lawyer. So when we discover that Monosonto's shareholders intend to turn a profit at any cost, we impose penalties. When elites argue in court that the profit motive benefits society, the prosecutor pulls out the facts and presents them to the judge/jury, which rules that the elites failed to better inform their intents, which they are legally required to do. So, the lies are exposed and the society moves toward production that is truly in the public interests.

Liked your comment, ezeflyer...it's the reality...
Best Regards from Brazil,
Luiz Soares. About Me

People love to go places where there is scenic, natural beauty. Then they move in and destroy it.

Mr. Goodman -- we need to make a CHOICE for global birth control and to voluntarily reduce both the growth rate and the total number of humans.

Articles such as this one are pointless unless the population factor is mentioned -- no matter how we change our ag systems, we're doomed, like our environment, unless we choose to stabilize and reduce our numbers.

It is not our choice. It is the likes of Monsanto and Archer-Daniels Midland who rule the farmlands of this country.

I help those I can as I am able, but I am not some kind of magician who can wave my hands, & solve other people's problems or the problems of this world.

Life is good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.

Myself, I am happy today to be a part of Creator's creation. Love getting out in nature with Creator's critters & other life forms. Enjoyed my visit to the Hopi Rez sometime ago in a thing called the past. My the story of the journey to their Rezm & meeting a Hopi family before I even got to their Rez. They invited me to stay with them.

Loved sitting on top of the mesa's where the Hopi dwell upon Creator's earth, & watching Creator's sunrises & sunsets. It was a wonderful journey.

Life good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.

avian flu, swine flu.... CAFOs...

let's not forget about "chronic wasting disease" and where its first signs came from..

"first recognized by biologists in the 1960s as a disease syndrome of captive deer held in wildlife research facilities in Ft. Collins, CO, but was not recognized as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) until 1978. CWD was subsequently recognized in captive deer, and later in captive elk, at other wildlife research facilities in Colorado (Ft. Collins, Kremmling, and Meeker) and Wyoming (Wheatland), as well as in at least two zoological collections. More recently, CWD has been diagnosed in privately-owned elk residing in game ranches in seven states (Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota) and two provinces (Saskatchewan and Alberta, Canada). In August 2002, CWD was diagnosed in a captive white-tailed deer on a hunting preserve in Wisconsin. Although CWD was first diagnosed in captive research cervids, the original source of CWD in either captive cervids or free-ranging cervids is unknown. There is no known relationship between CWD and any other TSE...."

http://www.dfg.ca.gov/wildlife/hunting/deer/cwd/

Captive deer programs, free range deer, and farmed deer.... now impacting wild deer and elk and moose populations. but, CWD doesn't transfer to any other TSE --as far as we know at this point....

As a vegetarian, I doubt I'll ever read Michael Pollan's book (though I've liked what he's said on the radio so far, looking over this review - http://www.powells.com/review/2007_08_28.html reduces my interest). However, if Pollan's advice of eat mostly plants is followed, doesn't this lead to a lot less dairy farming - thus hitting Jim Goodman's chosen profession?

It's been a long time since I've studied the numbers, but I recall that though dairy is better than beef for the environment (though the two processes are somewhat connected, people give separate numbers anyway), they are both still quite a bit worse than growing a plant-only based diet.

Two peculiar things about humans that have always puzzled me are: why so many of us crave animal products and why so many get so excited about motorized recreation. In the long run, I'm not sure we'll be able to keep either of these the way our population is growing and our resources not.

Dara Parsavand

a few years ago i couldn't stomach what was happening in the american culture and so went on a walkabout of sorts to try my hand at living off-grid in a community with at least a notch above the average consciousness about 'sustainability' issues. i found it both tremendously encouraging and terribly disheartening by turns. what was encouraging was to meet so many people involved in creative ways to live outside the lock-step dysfunctional system of competition and egoic nonsense....and what was disheartening was the tendency to fall into the traps of that system (for lack of another way to put it) of learned helplessness & of enabling one another's addictions to convenience or abdication of responsibility out of habit. i believe the human drama on this planet is at a point where we need to achieve a tipping point in consciousness and release the entrenched views of power-over through violence and economic dominance.... especially the view of 'natural resources' as commodities to be bought and sold, enriching existing wealth and slowly strangling the rest of humanity, and indeed, all other life forms for the sake of maintaining and growing that so-called wealth. we see giant agri-business (what else could we expect from corporate personhood? conscience? compassion?) running roughshod over the small farmer, bank bailouts, wars on many fronts- some utilizing military violence, and others the institutional economic violence that increases the disparity of rights, access advantage, and solidifies the illusion of our separateness and the 'threat' of competition from the 'other'. i have returned to the city of my birth and, though the asphalting over of the soil is almost physically painful to be around day in and day out, i am much encouraged by all the networking at the grassroots to reclaim our humanity and turn away from the siren song of advertising, fear (esp of the type engendered during the bush regime) and entertainment... by all the informal meetups to learn about seed saving, canning, vermiculture, sharing resources and information and less dependence upon the private car. i think we humans naturally want to work cooperatively together and to get tuned into the land beneath our feet.... we've simply grown very rusty in that area, hypnotized as we've been by the allure of the marketplace which disconnects us from the marvelous earth and rhythms of nature that sustain us. rethinking capitalism is happening at many levels and none too soon. assigning blame doesn't seem to help.... what helps is reconnecting.... spending time with plants and stillness. it's an inside job which ultimately effects the outside.
WHEN WE TRULY DISCOVER LOVE, CAPITALISM WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE AND MARXISM WILL NOT BE NECESSARY
-WILL O'BRIEN

Jim___You list many serious problems with modern agricultural practices but I do not see any solutions in the article. What do you suggest we do to take agriculture back 75 years when we did "food farming"? Should we "nationalize" farmers and ranchers and the large companies that are involved in order to force a return to the old methods? Most people will not be interested in the hard work required without modern developments.

I grew up farming the old way, before hybrid seed, fertilizers, irrigation, modern machinery, and computers. Believe me, it is not something I wish to return to or wish on my children. There is absolutely no reason for pesticides to increase with use of GM seed as they do the job without using dangerous and polluting products. The only reason fertilizer use has increased is because farmers are raising 250 bu corn instead of 25 bu with the old methods.

You did not mention that increased yields are also a soil conserving feature as with more residue there is much less land lost to erosion by wind and water. The Soil Conservation Service will confirm this and that is my experience also.
Farmers are not entirely at the mercy of others as was the case years ago. With the use of computers and all the developments of selling and purchasing, there is a much better chance of stable income than before.

I agree with your statement that we should think before we eat. In my opinion that means be thankful that nearly all of our population has plenty of food at a reasonable price and modern agriculture has made that possible. Are you also going to insist that the rest of our businesses return to mom and pop operations instead of superstores and give up all of their conveniences? If you want to see another 1930 depression, wrecking the agribusiness sector would certainly accomplish that.

I'm about to end my life-long eco-friendly intimate and caring relationship with dairy cows and dairy farming, well before I wanted to; and also I am losing a large percentage of my investment because of unfair policies towards small family farms and because of cowardice and stupidity in people that should know better...

...I am frustrated, angry and fearful for my future. And that of my precious 3 children and good wife.

Thanks for nothing, Amerika.

nedlud

The stranglehold of corporate agriculture on America’s food supply must be broken. The way the current market operates the farmer must play the game according to the rules of companies like Monsanto, Dupont, Pfizer and the United States Department of Agriculture. The only choice the farmer has is which giant corporation to give his money to when it comes time to put out a crop or tend his livestock. Given the structure of the market, small scale, sustainable, agriculture that does not depend of genetically modified inputs, massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides and vastly oversized agriculture operations is not financially viable.

A second pox upon the American farmer is the conversion of food crops into fuels. Over subsidizing of ethanol caused massive overproduction of ethanol distilling capacity in the Midwest. Enough ethanol production capacity was built to turn every bushel of corn the U.S. exported into ethanol. Just a couple of years ago the United States accounted for more than 70% of the world’s corn exports.

VeraSun, the second largest producer of corn from ethanol went bankrupt last October, the company had such huge debts that reorganization was not possible and the assets of the company were auctioned off to partially pay off the company’s creditors. Velero energy, the largest independent oil refiner in the United States, recently bought at bankruptcy auction 7 of VearSun’s plants at a substantial discount below the cost of building them.

The byproducts of converting food crops into energy are livestock feeds. Every drop of fuel created this way creates additional livestock feed that, due to the massive volume, creates more food to supply more Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

Currently American and much of the world’s agriculture is out of control spiraling toward the increasing concentration of food production into the hands of a handful of giant agri-businesses. This trend must be stopped.