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Welcome to this week’s update, prepared as corn pops up through mats of rolled hairy vetch at the Rodale Institute farm and the undulating hills around us are ribboned with contoured strips of ripening wheat and oats.
It’s also a week of grim assessment for farmers in the flood-ravaged Mississippi Valley from Wisconsin to Missouri, Nebraska to Indiana. Weather-related losses so far this season for the United States will top $8 billion—half of that in Iowa alone—the American Farm Bureau Federation estimated Wednesday. There is raw grief being experienced in so many farm communities, where actual flood waters scoured away, contaminated or junked up lower-lying farmland regardless of how carefully and organically it may have been farmed. We respect those losses, and share our advocacy for future farming changes as options when people are ready to think about what comes next.
This unfolding ecological and agricultural tragedy will be a catalyst, however, in a time of already-historic change in attitudes about the interplay of land, food and energy. Consider this passage from Felicity Lawrence, consumer affairs correspondent for The Guardian (London):
"History shows that empires rise and fall, and that the fall when it comes tends to be fast. Food empires are likely to be no different. We are now entering a period of rapid transition. The post-war food system, dependent on prodigious quantities of crude oil for its production, has not only pushed us to our biological limits but is hitting the environmental buffers."
Scientists who connect the dots of research on the impacts of agricultural chemicals can speak precisely about some of the critical biological limits being breached—a situation that has been largely ignored and denied in a pesticide-dependent production system. Lecturing this week at the Rodale Institute, Warren Porter, Ph.D., detailed how pesticides—aided by surfactants and solvents that enhance their biocidal effect by penetrating water and fat pest defenses, respectively—can also find their way into human cells.
Working in several academic disciplines, Dr. Porter and other researchers are showing startling impacts during gestation on neurological development, learning ability, hormonal activity, immune-function and genetic integrity of the offspring. They can explain the intricacies of how this damage happens, and show how ultra low-level exposure can do profound damage—often at levels well below those considered “safe” from the toxicological appraisal approach still used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Porter knows enough about the different strains of lab animals and methodologies to explain how industry-funded studies consistently show safety where he finds enough danger to warrant big changes in how pesticides are used.
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Challenging an accepted agricultural paradigm from the opposite direction is New York organic dairyman Jerry Snyder. He is meticulously assembling a stringent protocol to place raw milk that is optimally full of health and nutrition from his grass-based, low-stress herd to retail stores for carefully prepared consumers. He believes that shifting to a reliance on robust health and natural microbial biodiversity for cows and people will yield more benefits than using non-organic dairying practices combined with pasteurization to kill possible pathogens in the milk. Read more>>
These challengers to the “big-picture” views of farming as we know it demand a recalibration of what is acceptable, desirable and doable in a post-petroleum, biologically based agriculture.
Let’s listen well, even when we see mostly difficult choices ahead.
Greg Bowman and the
Rodale Institute editorial team
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