Crop Improvement Methods Ridiculed?

Hawaii’s One-sided Love Affair with GMOs

Sunday, June 19, 2011

By Molokai Dispatch staff

Community Contributed

Clearly the GMO corn seed companies have cultivated a love affair with Hawaii’s legislators and governing agencies with a crop of alluring promises of tax and employment benefits. Instead, this love affair has birthed unrestricted and unregulated access to our scarce agriculture resources of water and land for Monsanto, Pioneer,  Syngenta, Dow and BASF, with no oversight, no inspections and no protections against unintended – but sure to happen - consequences.

The GMO seed companies are the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone; with no consumer demand for the non- food product, the companies created an artificial demand called “crop improvement”, then manipulated genes to create new patented life-forms, then controlled all research, production, sales, distribution and ultimately replanting.

Better to advocate FOR environmental responsibility: GMO science promises that there is absolutely NO environmental risk from their new genetic life-forms; that it will never happen. These promises have nothing to do with prudent and practical safeguards that answer the “what if” question and that legislate environmental clean up of any contamination from GMO research companies. Why does our environment need protection?? Read More

Who Do We Trust?

Who do you trust to tell you the truth about food safety?
Posted Tuesday, February 16, 2010, at 2:00 PM
By Marcia Gorrell

Is our food safe or not?

Are today's farmers feeding and taking care of their animals properly?

It seems to come down to who you trust.

Do you believe the family farmers who have spent their whole lives producing food? The farmers who have built modern farming techniques, step by step, generation by generation -- building on the lessons, failures and successes of those who farmed before them?

Do you believe the scientists or researchers who have spent their entire careers studying animals, nutrition and food safety? Do you believe the USDA or the FDA who are tasked with making our food supply safe?

I have as much suspicion as anyone when it comes to the government, but in the case of food safety, I can't argue with the results.

Of course, if you don't believe those people -- or me -- you can believe the reports like the one recently by Katie Couric of CBS News. It blamed antibiotic use in animals for the rise of antibiotic resistance in humans.

If she would have contacted farmers and veterinarians, as I did, she might have found out there are two sides to every story.

Again, if you don't believe me, you might believe Michael Pollan, the journalism professor from the University of California-Berkeley, who has become a self-appointed "food expert" but has never spent time actually raising food or feeding an animal day after day.

Recently Pollan was on Oprah, spouting his oft-repeated line that corn is not a natural food source for cows (and ruminants) and that we are force-feeding the foodstuff causing them to become sick.

According to Pollan, in order to feed cattle corn, we have to also feed them antibiotics.
For most farmers, that statement is so laughable they can't believe someone would actually believe it. In fact, most don't think it is worth a response. Read More

As we travel the country and share the experience we had with Pollan, I continually remind our audiences that they are the experts in the discussion of food production. Pollan is a journalism teacher. Unfortunately, he has discovered that he can make himself quite wealthy by trying to frighten people about our food supply and demonizing the farmers and ranchers who raise it. For some reason, people would rather be scared about our food rather than hear the truth. Nice job of sharing this story with your readers Marcia.

Corn Genome Possibilities

300-bushel averages by 2030?
Posted: Saturday, December 12, 2009 9:25 am
By LORI POTTER Hub Staff Writer 0 comments

KEARNEY — Scientists who recently completed sequencing the corn genome may have ensured success for crop breeders and farmers racing to double 2000 world corn production by 2030.
That means Nebraska farmers who are harvesting a 2009 crop averaging 200 bushels or more per acre in many fields soon could see 300-bushel yields, said Chandler Mazour, manager of Monsanto’s Water Utilization Learning Center south of Gothenburg.

“It’s big on a global scale,” he said about the importance of the genome mapping, because doubling production while using fewer inputs is vital to feeding a world population expected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050.

Craig Wietjes of Riverdale, who has been a Pioneer seed representative for 20 years, said, “We are becoming very limited on obtaining or developing more acres for the products to be produced. We now must focus on making our products — mainly corn and soybeans — produce more per acre.”

He described the gene mapping as “a pivotal industry-changing movement.”

Smithfield farmer Dennis Gengenbach, who is vice president of the Nebraska Corn Board and serves on the National Corn Growers Association Research Committee, said, “It’s gonna take a few years to determine what changes we want to make and how. But it’s limited only by your imagination.” Read More

Several of our food crops have been sequenced now, including some of our livestock. Knowing this information will make it much easier for plant and livestock breeders to bring more favorable genes to the forefront and eliminate those that cause problems. Humans have been genetically enhancing their food crops for 10,000 years now and that continues today with new and better technology that will help us grow more food.