Leslie Lytle's Blog

In late 2013 I circulated a call to action to support Vermont’s efforts to pass a GMO (genetically modified organism) labeling law. A reply came in from the opposition arguing that to condemn GMOs was backwards thinking akin to denying the evolution. I countered that the proposed legislation addressed people’s right to know what was in their food, not the validity of genetic research. I then stepped out of bounds and revealed that I did in fact oppose GMOs, but not because of the freakish tampering with genes. I opposed GMOs because the herbicides used with GMO crops were killing the soil.

Vermont’s GMO labeling law passed, and if it goes into effect on schedule in July of 2016, it will be the first active GMO labeling law in the nation. Twenty-five other states have considered GMO labeling laws, and Connecticut and Maine passed labeling requirements, but their legislation contains trigger clauses requiring multiple other states to pass labeling requirements before their own go into effect.

Big Food is freaked out about the Vermont law for obvious reasons. Separate labels for food sold in Vermont would be a real headache for Big Food. Ninety percent of what we eat and drink contains GMO ingredients either directly in the form of soy and corn products, especially high fructose corn syrup, or indirectly in the form of dairy foods from cows fed on soy and corn products and meat from beef, pork, and poultry fed on soy and corn.

Congress is trying to pass a law, in effect, banning GMO labeling which would invalidate the Vermont labeling law. This when a recent poll shows over 90 percent of Americans think GMO food should be labeled. But why? Are people afraid of GMO food? And if so, what are they afraid of?

A couple weeks ago I came across a blog written by a seventh generation farmer making the same argument I made in 2013 about the herbicide used with GMO corn and soy killing the soil...READ MORE at http://www.leslielytle.net/#!blog/c7bm

Sales of food going directly from farmers’ fields to consumer’s kitchens have more than tripled in the past twenty years and the number of farmers’ markets has quintupled. Food produced on small farms close to where it is consumed—or “local food” for short—accounts for only about 2% of all the food produced in the United States, but advocates are optimistic.

They point to the economic benefits of local food. A dollar spent on local food results in a local farmer spending part of that dollar on other goods and services in the local economy, creating a virtuous circle of wealth and jobs, or so the argument goes. Critics, though, counter more wealth can be created overall when food is produced by large corporate farms. Spinach can be grown on a corporate farm in California with fewer resources than it takes to grow spinach in middle Tennessee, for example, and that frees up capital for creating wealth elsewhere. In the local food production model, conversely, less food is produced per dollar spent, and the extra money we pay for locally grown food eats into our ability to buy other goods and services, or so the argument goes. But caveat emptor, there are hidden costs the corporate advantage model fails to take into account...Read more at http://www.leslielytle.net/#!blog/c7bm.

Take the Safe Cheap Food Quiz below to test your knowledge of the often overheard claim no-till farming and genetically modified crops are the solution to the world’s food shortage, providing a safe, affordable food supply.

1. The same basic traits introduced into genetically modified foods are often found naturally in plants. True or False
2. Practiced intensively since the 1980s, no-till farming has been good for the soil. True or False
3. Which of the following commonly used herbicides has been shown to be an endocrine disruptor linked to genetic and sexual deformities, Atrazine, 2 4-D, or Roundup?
4. Have genetically modified soybeans and corn decreased the price of food? Yes or No

The answers:...READ MORE at http://www.leslielytle.net/#!blog/c7bm

In the early 1980s my farmer husband and I were invited to a dinner at a local steakhouse, an evening I later came to think of as the Poison Supper. At the time, it pleased me my husband and I were invited to the event where we sat next to seasoned farm couples many years our senior. An ag chemical company sponsored the event, and along with our rib eye steaks came a colorful presentation about a new herbicide guaranteed to kill the weeds in our soybean crop without killing the soybean plants.

The summer before, my farmer husband had attended the first No-Till Field Day in Milan, Tennessee, a University of Tennessee sponsored event where corporate ag representatives demoed new equipment and offered advice on no-till strategies. My farmer husband came home beaming with excitement. No-till technology wasn’t entirely new to us. My father in law owned a no-till planter which made it possible to plant without plowing. The new news on the no-till front was herbicide, chemical weed control.

Traditionally, famers plowed before they planted to rid the field of weeds and after the crop came up dragged weeds out from between the rows with a cultivator, a device with spade-like feet you attached to the tractor. If you were a trendsetting farmer using a no-till planter, before planting you mowed or burned the field. You still had to deal with the weeds that came up afterwards by cultivating.

Not any more, or so the ag chemical industry promised. By the new technique, you attached a spray rig to the tractor, spraying herbicide to kill weeds and planting in the same operation, meaning fewer trips through the field so less compaction from the heavy tractor and reducing fuel costs. For the weeds that came after you planted, you sprayed again, a herbicide specially formulated to kill the weeds without killing your soybean or corn crop. Tricky business.

My farmer husband tried some of the herbicide promoted at the Poison Supper. The sicklepod weed plaguing his soybean crop turned yellow and sickly looking. So did the beans. The company rep paid us a visit, attributed our sick soybeans to drought conditions and predicted they’d recover. The soybeans survived but the yield was half what we hoped for.

Until then, my husband had only once before sprayed a chemical on a crop, a pesticide—a bug killer—when grasshoppers were eating their way through our bean field leaving bare stems in their wake. Driving the tractor through the field with a respirator strapped to his face, my farmer husband looked like giant bug himself. That evening he declined supper. I heard him in bathroom vomiting.

I hoped he would never need to spray a field again. He agreed about the dangers of pesticides, but the chemicals farmers used for weed control were safe, he argued. He rigged up our tractor with solution tanks and spray booms and borrowed his daddy’s no-till planter, embracing the new technology with kid on Christmas morning giddy enthusiasm. He was spraying herbicide, not pesticide, he reassured me. The poison killed plants, not bugs—which was to say, killed plants, not people. For him no-till farming was a way to “keep my butt out of a tractor seat. It’s the best thing to happen to farmers since tractors replaced mules.” And, yes, I stole that quote from him and gave it Lonnie’s daddy in my novel Chicken Stock. The sentiment was widespread among farmers at the time.

All around us farmers were transitioning to the new technology. I tried to share in the enthusiasm, joined my husband on road trips to shop for a bigger tractor, bigger solution tanks, a new used no-till planter of our own. But the high use of herbicide worried me. I forbid my sons to drive the tractor if spraying chemicals was involved. A few days after my oldest son turned 18, I pulled up to the field with lunch to see him planting beans with the no-till planter, spraying the herbicide Atrazine. He was 18. His choices were his own, and the choices he made scared me.

My son has children of his own now. He seems in good health, but I’m still worried.

Atrazine has been around since 1959. It’s used alone or in combination with other herbicides in more than forty products marketed to farmers. Killing weeds with herbicide before the crop comes up is fairly easy, but killing weeds growing up midst soybeans or corn is delicate business. Complex combinations of herbicides, many containing Atrazine, target specific weeds. For years Atrazine was the farmer’s darling.

But in the 1990s, evidence began to emerge that Atrazine degraded slowly, had leached into the water supply, and was an endocrine disruptor shown to cause DNA mutations in rodents and reproductive disorders and sexual deformity in frogs and aquatic animals. Heeding scientists’ warnings, the EPA started regulating the permissible amount of Atrazine in drinking water.

Farmers needed a new herbicide, a safe herbicide. Glyphosate, marketed under the name Roundup, looked like a hopeful prospect. Glyphosate didn’t linger in the water supply so concerns about residual effects were minimal. Roundup was popular in the early 1980s to kill Johnson Grass in corn. The Johnson Grass often grew taller than the corn. Roundup killed pretty much anything green it touched. But using a device attached to the tractor called a wick bar, you could brush the Roundup across the top of the Johnson Grass without contacting the corn.

Seeing Roundup’s potential as a safe alternative to Atrazine, Roundup manufacturer Monsanto went to work to figure how to get Roundup to kill only what you wanted it to kill. But instead of changing the Roundup, Monsanto changed the crop. They developed a magical new type of soybean seed, a genetically modified variety of soybeans resistant to Roundup. You could spray a field with Roundup and everything would die except the Roundup resistant soybean plants. Marketed as Roundup Ready Soybeans, Monsanto began selling the new genetically modified seed to farmers in 1996. Roundup Ready Corn hit the market in 1998.

Roundup Ready soybeans and corn were immediately popular with farmers. The manufacturer of Atrazine, Roundup’s main competition, was embroiled in lawsuits filed by communities alleging Atrazine run off from field crops had contaminated their drinking water.

Today, 70 percent of the corn and 93 percent of the soybeans grown in the United States are raised from Roundup Ready herbicide resistant seed. Monsanto has also developed and actively markets Roundup Ready alfalfa, canola, cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, and wheat.

So what’s gripe?, you might ask. Thanks to Roundup and genetically modified crops, we’re blessed with an abundance of cheap meat, fattened on genetically modified grain, and other cheap, safe food, as well—right?

Wrong. Roundup resistant super weeds now plague farmers. As a result, the use of Atrazine is on the rise again. Even though Atrazine manufacturer Syngenta was fined $65 million to help communities pay for cleaning up their Atrazine contaminated water supply, the EPA still allows its use. In fact, Atrazine is the number two top selling weed killer in the country after Roundup. Farmers are also using 2-4 D to combat super weeds, another herbicide linked to hormonal interference and reproductive disorders.

And the need for ever more chemicals is only one critter in the Pandora’s box of ills released by no-till farming, Roundup, and genetically modified food. Coming up next: The safe, cheap food quiz. Stay tuned.

Why is it American’s eat more meat than any other country in the world except Luxembourg? Is it because we’re blessed with abundance or is something else going on?

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends we eat three to six ounces of meat or fish a day. That averages out to 106 pounds a year. Americans eat all most twice that much meat. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans ate an average of 190 pounds of meat per person in 2012.

But we didn’t always eat this much meat. In 1910, Americans ate an average of 109 pounds of meat a year, very close to the AHA recommendation—a little over 10 pounds of poultry, 43 pounds of beef, about the same amount of pork, about ten pounds of fish and a few pounds of veal and lamb. America’s meat eating habits stayed pretty much the same through the mid 1940s.

But after World War II, our meat consumption spiked dramatically. By 1959 we were eating 10 more pounds of beef and ten more pounds of poultry a year. The late 1940s saw the advent of feed lots with cattle crammed shoulder to shoulder in large paddocks and chickens crammed wing to wing...READ MORE at http://www.leslielytle.net/#!blog/c7bm