Monsanto Fails at Improving Agriculture Article

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Monsanto's advertisements tell an impressive tale of the agribusiness giant's achievements: Feeding a growing population. Protecting natural resources. Promoting biodiversity. 

It sounds wonderful, but unfortunately, there's a catch: These claims are often exaggerated, misleading or downright false. Monsanto's products—and the practices they promote—may sustain the company's profits, but the evidence shows that they stand in the way of truly sustainable solutions to our food and farming challenges.

In the ads below, we counter Monsanto's feel-good rhetoric with some facts gleaned from UCS analysis. Share them with friends, and spread the word:  when it comes to healthy farming, Monsanto fails!

(Click on the images to see full-size versions.)

#1: More Herbicide + Fewer Butterflies = Better Seeds?

Monsanto Says: "In the hands of farmers, better seeds can help meet the needs of our rapidly growing population, while protecting the earth's natural resources."

In Fact: Monsanto's Roundup Ready crops, genetically engineered to tolerate the company's Roundup herbicide,increased herbicide use by an estimated 383 million pounds between 1996 and 2008. And Monarch butterflies have laid 81 percent fewer eggs thanks to habitat loss since Roundup Ready was introduced.

#2: A Bumper Crop of Superweeds

Monsanto Says: "Our rapidly growing population is putting limited resources--such as land, water, and energy--under increased pressure."

In Fact: The challenge is real, but Monsanto's products aren't the answer. UCS analysis shows that GE crops have so far done little to improve yields in the U.S. Meanwhile—speaking of rapidly growing populations—overuse of Roundup Ready crops has spawned an epidemic of "superweeds," causing huge problems for U.S. farmers.

#3: All Wet on Drought Tolerance

Monsanto Says: "With the right tools, farmers can conserve more for future generations."

In Fact: If farmers want to conserve more water, Monsanto's DroughtGard corn isn't the right tool. A recent UCS study found that DroughtGard won't help farmers reduce water use—and its engineered drought tolerance will likely only be useful in moderate drought conditions. (Research has shown that organic farming methods could improve drought-year yields by up to 96%.)

Union Of Concerned Scientists Website

Mammals Breath Causes Aphids to Keel Over

By Jennifer Viegas
As appeared in http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38630807/ns/technology_and_science-science/

A whiff of danger prompts insects to keel over
Response to mammals’ breath helps aphids avoid being eaten

People may feign falling over backwards after smelling bad breath, but new research shows some insects actually do keel over when they detect warm, humid mammal breath.

It turns out the dramatic instinct, which causes insects living on plants to fall to the ground, is a life-saving strategy that often prevents the bugs from being eaten by potent breath-releasing mammals as they feast on the plant.

The study, published in the latest issue of Current Biology, is the first to show that any kind of defensive behavior exists against incidental predation by herbivores.

"Tiny insects like aphids are not helpless when facing large animals that rapidly consume the plants they live on," said lead author Moshe Inbar of the University of Haifa. "They reliably detect the danger and escape on time."

For the first part of the study, Inbar and his team allowed a goat to feed on potted alfalfa plants infested with aphids. The researchers were amazed to see that 65 percent of the aphids dropped to the ground just seconds before they would have been eaten along with the plant.

"As soon as we started to work on this problem, we suspected that the aphids responded to our own breath," said Inbar, who added that he and his colleagues later wore snorkels to prevent their own breath from affecting the experiment results.

The mass dropping of bugs might have been caused by other factors, however, such as shaking of the plant by the goat while it ate or rubbed against the alfalfa, and shadows produced by the goat's presence. So the researchers invented a special leaf-picking device that shook the plant, without, of course, emitting breath. The aphids didn't keel over.

Shadows also had no effect on the aphids' dropping behavior. Even shadows created by ladybugs, an enemy of aphids, didn't inspire that kind of synchronous response.

The scientists next allowed a restrained lamb to approach aphid infested broad bean seedlings. The breath of the lamb did the trick: aphids dropped off the seedlings left and right.

"It was now obvious that herbivore breath is the key player in conveying to the aphids the message of imminent obliteration," according to the researchers.

To further investigate what qualities in mammal breath cause this bug reaction, the team constructed an artificial breath apparatus that they tested out on the aphids. Carbon dioxide and isolated volatile organic compounds in the produced breath led to no bug response.

When the airstream was warm and humid, however, aphid drop off rates shot up to 87 percent, suggesting that the aphid's sensory system on ambient humidity might be key in their breath detection abilities.

"We predict that this sort of escape behavior in response to mammalian breath may be found among other invertebrates that live on plants and face the same threat," the researchers concluded.

Other insects pay attention to our breath too.

Scientists at the University of California at Riverside, for example, recently did extensive work on how mosquitoes use carbon dioxide, emitted in human breath, to find blood meal targets.

Project leader Anandasankar Ray, an assistant professor in the university's Department of Entomology, and his team hope to foil the mosquitoes by developing repellents that he said will "block mosquitoes' ability to detect carbon dioxide in our breath, thereby dramatically reducing mosquito-human contact."

The aphid work may also pave the way for the development of non-toxic insect repellents.

Copyright © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC. The leading global real world media and entertainment company.

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CRP Offers Pollinator Habitat Incentives

For Immediate Release

August 2, 2010

CONSERVATION RESERVE PROGRAM OFFERS POLLINATOR HABITAT INCENTIVES

New rules passed by the USDA now offer financial incentives for the establishment of pollinator habitat through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The limited time program sign-up, which opens today to new enrollment, provides one of the largest pollinator conservation opportunities ever in the United States.

The CRP program, first established in 1985, is the largest private landowner conservation effort in the United States with up to 32 million acres eligible for enrollment through the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Program participants take highly erodible land out of crop production, and establish permanent vegetation to protect topsoil and provide wildlife cover. Contracts which run 10 to 15 years provide annual rental payments on enrolled land, and cost-share assistance for establishing vegetative cover.

New rules which go into effect today offer priority ranking for land enrollment that include pollinator-friendly wildflowers and shrubs. Under the current CRP enrollment system, landowners who want to participate are ranked against one another to prioritize enrollment that offer the most conservation benefits. To receive a higher score on the pollinator ranking criteria, participating farmers must plant at least 10% of the CRP acres in wildflower parcels (or at least one acre for CRP enrollment less than 10 acres in size).

The addition of a pollinator habitat incentive for CRP has been promoted by numerous wildlife and pollinator conservation groups in recent years, and the new ranking system now offers one of the largest potential habitat creation opportunities of its kind ever for native bees, butterflies, and managed honey bees, all of which have experienced significant decline in recent years due to habitat loss and other factors.

In developing the new CRP technical requirements, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) worked closely with Dr. Marla Spivak, a leading honey bee researcher based at the University of Minnesota, and the California-based advocacy group, Partners for Sustainable Pollination. Now, as the enrollment period for new CRP contracts begins, the NRCS is working with the non-profit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to develop wildflower seeding recommendations for states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon. Those recommendations will focus on selecting native wildflower species that are abundant pollen and nectar sources, and that are most likely to thrive in their respective regions.

Rural landowners interested in more information about CRP, including the current sign-up period which ends August 27th, should contact their local Farm Service Agency office. For location information, visit their web site at http://www.fsa.usda.govhttp://www.fsa.usda.gov/> .

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Another objective is to support the Iowa Native Plant Society.

Farmland Drainage

This article brings our attention to some of the problems associated with farmland drainage. What are your thoughts?
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20102170339
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Choctaws: The True Master Gardeners

This is something you might use in the blog, and it is very close to my heart because I am half or more Choctaw Indian and I have been a vegetarian for 31 years.

Choctaws: The true master gardeners. Among my own people, the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi and Oklahoma, vegetables are the traditional diet mainstay. A French manuscript of the eighteenth century describes the Choctaws’ vegetarian leanings in shelter and food. The homes were constructed not of skins, but of wood, mud, bark and cane. The principal food, eaten daily from earthen pots, was a vegetarian stew containing corn, pumpkin and beans. The bread was made from corm and acorns. Other common favorites were roasted corn and corn porridge. The rich lands of the Choctaws in present-day Mississippi were so greatly coveted by nineteenth century Americans that most of the tribe was forcibly removed to what is now called Oklahoma. Oklahoma was chosen both because it was largely uninhabited and because several explorations of the territory had deemed the land barren and useless for any purpose. Although many Choctaws suffered and died during removal on the infamous “Trail of Tears “. Those that survived, survived with their agricultural genius intact. George Catlin, the famous nineteenth century Indian historian, described the Choctaw lands of southern Oklahoma in the 1840’s this way: “… the ground was almost literally covered with vines, producing the greatest profusion of delicious grapes,…and ganging in such endless clusters…our progress was oftentimes completely arrested by hundreds of acres of small plum trees…every bush that was in sight was so loaded with the weight of its…fruit, that they were in many instances literally without leaves on their branches, and quite bent to the ground… and beds of wild currants, gooseberries, and (edible) prickly pear.” (Many of the “wild” foods Anglo explorers encountered on their journeys were actually carefully cultivated by Indians.)Their sweetest treat, of course: melons, a never-ending supply. More tribes were like the Choctaws than were different. Aztec, Mayan, and Zapotec children in olden times ate 100%vegetarian diets until at least the age of ten years old. Such a diet was believed to make the child strong and disease resistant. The Spaniards were amazed to discover that these Indians had twice the life-span they did. Nearly half of all the plant foods grown in the world today were first cultivated by the American Indians, and were unknown elsewhere until the discovery of the Americas. Many history textbooks tell the story of Squanto, a Pawtuxent Indian who lived in the early 1600’s. Squanto is famous for having saved the pilgrims from starvation. He showed them how to father wilderness foods and how to plant corn. There have been thousands of squantos since, even though their names are not so well-known. In fact modern day agriculture owes its heart and soul to Indian-taught methods of seed development, hybridization, planting, growing, irrigating, storing, utilizing and cooking. Choctaws believe the Great Spirit resides within the sun, for it is the sun that allows the corn to grow!
Thanks so much Jerry for sharing with us. www.ionxchange.com

Jerry Hinton of the Natural Gait.
Source: Vegetarian journal
Jerry Hinton, ManagerThe Natural Gaiit
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Organic Farming Can Feed the World

Ion Exchange ran across this article and thought it might be of interest to our friends and neighbors of the world.

Study: Organic Farming Can Feed the World
Reuters, 7/10/2007 Straight to the Source
Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming in developing countries, and holds its own against standard methods in rich countries, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.They said their findings contradict arguments that organic farming -- which excludes the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides -- is not as efficient as conventional techniques."My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can't produce enough food through organic agriculture," Ivette Perfecto, a professor at the University of Michigan's school of Natural Resources and Environment, said in a statement.She and colleagues analyzed published studies on yields from organic farming. They looked at 293 different examples."Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base," they wrote in their report, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems."We were struck by how much food the organic farmers would produce," Perfecto said."Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies, all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food," she added.

More Honeybee News

We at Ion Exchange feel the plight of the Honeybee is a story worth following. This article was recently posted in The Iowa Native Plant Newsletter.

AGRICULTURE: BEE DIE-OFF COULD CAUSE $75 BILLION IN LOSSES, FEDS ESTIMATE

The mysterious malady affecting honeybees could cause $75 billion in
economic losses in the United States, said Agriculture Secretary Mike
Johanns.
Johanns said the Colony Collapse Disorder already threatens $14.6 billion in
pollinated crops.
The disorder has been found in 35 U.S. states, one Canadian province and
parts of Asia, Europe and South America. Its origin remains unknown.
Johanns said the Department plans to spend $7.4 million researching colony
collapse this year and noted that USDA would allocate an additional 2.7
million for pollinator projects from state extension service offices and
other parts of the department.
According to the White House budget request for fiscal 2008, USDA spent $2.7
billion on agricultural research last year.
Troy Fore, Executive Director of the American Beekeeping Federation, said
the disparity between those numbers shows USDA should be doing more to fight
colony collapse. In the week of June 25, which was National Pollinator
Week, Democrats and scientists asked Congress to boost research funding for
pollinators and to make more federal and private conservation programs
available to conserve habitat for the bees and other insects, birds and bats
that help pollinate plants and keep natural systems in order.
The Ecological Society of America held a congressional briefing regarding
ecosystem services, such as pollination, in agricultural
systems: http://www.esa.org/pao/policyActivities/briefing032007.php