WESSEX
'Well, if you want your cattle to go off their feed, just switch them out to a GMO silage.'
US farmer, ACRES, USA Special Report 19 September 1999.
Back in March 1998 a letter appeared in the UK's
Farmers Weekly
reporting that livestock on farms from Nebraka to Iowa
were not grazing as they had in the past in fields that
contained GM Bt
corn (the same corn which researchers at Cornell
University earlier this
year found had toxic effects on Monarch Butterfly
larvae). Unpalatability of
the Bt stalks was suspected.
One farm specialist from Dawson County, Nebraska, was
reported as saying: "At first we
thought it was a joke, but I have heard it enough now
that we are looking
into what could be going on."
Since that alarming anecdote first appeared we have heard
nothing further on
this subject - until now.
Below is a detailed piece on the current disastrous
('Why have these fools
done this?') GM situation in the US from American
journalist Steven Sprinkel
entitled 'When The Corn Hits The Fan'.
The article is interesting for a number of reasons, but
especially for the
following extract about how animals are refusing to eat
GM versions of crops
they normally wolf down.
NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex
Extract from 'When The
Corn Hits The Fan' by Steve
Sprinkel
"....Well, the humans will eat this stuff, but the
animals won’t.
Evolution seems to have come full circle. Unlike a film
character played by
Sean Connery a few years ago, who 'won’t eat
anything that I can not identify…' modern
developed-world consumers have no idea what they are
eating because it
is delivered on the run in processed form. Cooking is a
lost art.
Grazing, however, remains unchanged, and I have heard
more than enough
stories about how the animals wont go for the GMO.
Why, you can put your cattle out into GMO corn stubble
and they just
won’t touch it. Oh, they’ll bite that new brome
down to the ground, but they
won’t eat the GMO corn stubble. After four
months of retrieving anecdotes
from Kansas to Wisconsin, I think its high time to sample
the producer
community more thoroughly to see how many stories there
are out there.
About the hogs that wouldn’t eat the ration when the
GMO crops were
included. About the farmer who said 'Well, if
you want your cattle to go off their feed,
just switch them out to a GMO silage.'
About the farmer who said that his cattle broke through
an old fence and ate
down the non-GMO hybrids but wouldn’t touch the
Round-up ready corn, and as
a matter of fact ' They had to walk through the GMOs to
get to the Pioneer 3477 on the other side.'
About the cattleman who saw the weight-gain of his cattle
fall off when he
switched over to GMO sources. About the organic farmer
with a terrible deer
problem on his soybeans, and when he drives out at night
there are forty of
them mowing down his tofu beans while across the road
there isn’t one doe eating
on the Round-up Readies.
About the raccoons romping by the dozen in the organic
corn, while down the road there isn’t one ear
that’s been touched in the
Bt fields. Even the mice will move on down the line if
given an alternative
to these 'crops'.
What is it that they know instinctively that most of us
ignore? I have been traveling around with a bag of
contaminated cob corn
on the floor of my vehicle, and I have begun to think of
it as if it was a
bag of plutonium. "
Additional comment by NLP Wessex
The people of the United States have the worst standards
of health of
all developed nations, despite having the highest
per capita
spending on health care in the world. What does
this tell us about their
approach to food generally and the qualifications of
their government for telling the
rest of the world that GM crops are not a threat to
health?
A recent report on GM crops by Deutche Bank (Europe's
largest investment
bank) entitled 'Ag
Biotech: Thanks, But No Thanks?' and itself written
by US
analysts, recently sniggered at the US public's trust in
the ability of the
Food and Drug Administration to competently supervise the
US food chain
based on its track record to date.
Meanwhile Bill Clinton and strategic ally Tony Blair may
be happy to eat
this material, but US farm animals are not.
If animals refuse to eat them what does this tell us
about these GM crops
which have never been subject to in-depth food safety
testing, except by Dr
Pusztai?
Perhaps little wonder then that the organs of Dr
Pusztai's GM potato fed
rats weren't in good shape when he investigated them (the
potatoes had been
genetically engineered to contain a gene for a protein
from the same family of proteins
as the Bt insecticide toxin contained in the widely grown
GM corn which American cattle now try to
stear clear of).
No wonder Dr Pusztai was silenced.
No wonder no one in the biotech industry or in the
British and American
governments wants Dr Pusztai's experiments to be redone.
No wonder American GM corn is unsaleable on major
international markets.
To quote Steven Sprinkel's article:
"When the rotting corn hits the fan, it
will make a tremendous mess, with the debris lying
equally on the tables of the great leaders of the world
as well as on the plates of consumers."
NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex
September 1999
Full article by Steve Sprinkel
When The Corn Hits The Fan
An ACRES,USA Special Report
By Steven Sprinkel
Yankton. South Dakota, EEUU
18 September 1999
Cuando el Maize pudrido lo pega el
ventilador, se hace una depapaya
tremdenda, y los restos quedan en la mesa de los
gobernantes mas altos
del mundo, igual como en los platos del consumidor. [See footnote for
translation*]
A few sundry observations on the state of the US corn
crop at harvest,
mingled with the usual inevitable questions. Having
pulled aside by the
banks
of the lovely, broad Missouri River on the South
Dakota-Nebraska border,
impressions, interrogations, and inspirations mass at the
same point on
the
compass. First, a bit of better news.
Super Corn.
Aye, not much of that around, amigos, but a few choice
and well
sequestered
fields may prove to be certifiably organic in the end,
which may or may
not
be ultimately resolved through further testing. Fear
that, especially if
you
are a North American organic producer with an export
crop. Fear also for
the
entire corn genome, with the real possibility that a
double-digit
percentage
of the acreage of the 2000 corn seed production may have
been
accidentally
contaminated through cross pollination. Seed providers
are asking now
that
farmers reserve non-GMO seed for next year. Perhaps they
should ask for
seed
held over from 1998 or 1997, if it still exists.
Leo and Mari Schultes thought their forty acres of open
pollinated
organic
corn crops near Coon Rapids, Iowa, would probably be best
used as silage
for
their livestock, especially once the Minnesota Blue field
started to
lodge
prematurely. Harvesting the blue for chip-corn, if left
to stand, would
probably have resulted in a ten-bushel to the acre yield.
Much of the
blue
had already been chopped and put up. Adjacent to the
Minnesota Blue was
25
acres of Reed’s Dent and Minnesota Dent. Those two
varieties were
standing
well, with around 10% down. Once we had come to rest at
the top of the
hill,
we could better judge the value of this corn, because
very little
conventional corn was visible from that vantage point. I
suggested to
the
Schultes that what they might have was a corn seed crop
rather than
cattle
feed. Instead of a 4 dollar per bushel product, such open
pollinated,
organically produced corn may be worth five or even ten
times as much. I
believe that it should be and, moreover, that such corn
should be
recognized
as a public heritage. I suggested that the Schultes
should politely
inquire
about the corn varieties planted within a mile of their
crop to further
evaluate GMO contamination potential.
The side-by-side cropping of the Minnesota Blue and the
Reeds Dent
instructs
well the cross-pollination issues: we continued to find
many blue
kernels in
ears ten rows within the Reeds field. Corn seed
production segregation
protocols call for 660 feet between crops. Has that
really been imposed
on
the US corn seed production for 1999?
Gerald and Carol Koch have fifty six acres of blue corn
near Newcastle,
Nebraska with nearly ideal segregation. No corn at all
can be seen from
the
top of the northern ridge where Koch’s Blue has been
planted. Literally
for
miles around, the surrounding hilly country has been
seeded down to the
USDA
Conservation Reserve Program or is in cattle pasture. For
the past five
years, Gerald Koch has been selecting out his blue corn
for color,
height,
and stand-ability, saving back only ten percent per year
to replant. His
current "seed patch" of around three acres is a
nearly uniform stand of
perfectly deep-purple corn, with less than 5% down at a
late stage of
maturity. Seventeen cents a pound is the best price the
Kochs have found
so
far for the corn, which translates out to around $8.50 a
bushel.
GMO-contamination concerns aside, Kochs Long Standing
Blue would be
highly
valued by other organic corn growers like the Schultes,
who have seen
theirs
keel over.
The thirty-seven acres of organic yellow corn grown by
John Lubke near
Bluffton, Iowa is where the search for Super Corn began,
because it was
the
first place that I actually observed it. The only
limitation on Lubke’s
crops
is that they are hybrids, which severely limits their
potential for
seed,
however, as a progenitor crop they may be suitable for
further breeding
because GMO contamination is nearly nil. The Bluffton
ground is
surrounded by
woods and ravines, a state park to one side, and much of
the acreage is
in
the bottom-land cut by Ten Mile Creek, with high
tree-covered limestone
cliffs to the north. We drove to the top of the ridge,
and all around
the
surrounding acreage, identifying parcels planted to corn.
Only one was
visible, nearly a mile to the south, and once again I
suggested that Mr.
Lubke should determine the corn varieties being grown
near him to
further
authenticate the GMO-free nature of this miracle. By the
way, the Lubke
corn
will come in at 120 bushels to the acre or better, should
it be of any
concern to latter-day altruists who claim we can’t
feed the world
organically.
Compromised Corn
Then there were the organic corn fields surrounded by GMO
varieties. You
may
observe the latter frequently from the side of the road,
with the
variety
named on a placard staked there. Any corn crop number
ending in RR or BT
is a
GMO, and depending on the locality and the style of
farming, these crops
are
planted by the linear mile, with no evidence that a
refuge or buffer had
been
planted. The GMO crops are designed for the brave new
industrial farming
system looming over the horizon. A case in point is the
agribusiness
production planted on the fine Iowa plain between
Blairsburg and Galt on
US
69. The hills and woods disappear east of the Des Moines
River here,
giving
way to fenceless industrial soil-mining, with the dirt a
sterile medium
utilized to hold the corn and soybeans erect until
harvest. They may as
well
have been sown into slag, sand and styrofoam. Just give
it a shot of
anhydrous and fly on the Round-up later. Along this
straight-line strip
BT-BT-BT seemed to be the only variety planted, mile
after mile, finally
giving way to ten acres of metal buildings and gravel,
upon which were
parked
a good dozen immense Deere 9460s, the all-wheel drive
eight wheelers
designed
for this form of "agriculture." There
wasn’t a grain wagon parked there
that
could hold less than 500 bushels, and in the field a
combine was
emptying out
into a semi-truck, with two others waiting. In the
distance on each side
of
the road one could see the sturdy, sparkling hog-feeding
plants where
this
crop is destined to be used. I imagine that the total
operation must
involve
20-30,000 acres. It took me ten minutes to drive through
it. This
vertical
pork-chop manufactory reminded me of what one Iowa
corn producer
observed
last winter in the style of farming now emerging in
Brazil . The Farm
Bureau
thought it would be nifty to fly a plane-load of farmers
down to see
what was
going on where once the rain-forest stood. Apparently, it
was pretty
much the
same picture as the Iowa facility on US 69, except
instead of real
towns,
there were intentional residential areas, sort of like
19th century
mining
towns, where specialists drove or fixed tractors, poured
chemicals into
airplane spray tanks and waited for cooks to put lunch
down in the
cafeteria.
All that Rio Grande Do Sul needs to complete the picture
is Round-Up
readies.
" Why did they think that we would enjoy or learn
from seeing this form
of
agriculture? Most of us were horrified to see what we are
up against
down
there. If that’s the future, I want no part of
it."
It is impossible for an organic farm to co-exist in these
environments.
Of
course one will discover contamination concerns
everywhere. One new
organic
farmer in transition, whose name and locality will remain
anonymous,
planted
a Bt variety immediately adjacent to his organic corn
crop. He was
looking
for yield, and had planned to merely cut eight rows of
the organic crop
as
his buffer. I suggested that he should create three
harvests, with the
compliant buffer and the conventional GMO crop going to
the elevator,
the
next 8 rows of compliant but suspect organic corn going
into a separate
grain
bin and the rest of the organic into another bin.
Everything within the
twenty-five foot buffer is "legally" organic,
but export capability and
the
potential to inadvertently contaminate mixed loads of
other organic corn
has
to be a concern of the producer and the buyer. I
haven’t any idea to
what
degree other organic farmers or their certification
agencies have
evaluated
GMO contamination in the field. After this year’s
experience, and with
my
limited knowledge, I have very little confidence that one
can assure
organic
integrity based on the current standards of production.
Owing to the
largely
unspoken potential for the seed crop to have been
contaminated as well,
I
fear that GMO pollution will haunt us for years.
As Gerald Koch said: " Why have these fools done
this? Don’t they know
they
have lost four years of corn breeding? As a matter of
fact, they have
probably lost eight years, because you have to take into
account all the
previous breeding experience as well. And it looks like
its all headed
for a
dead-end…"
Why Have These Fools Done This?
Well, the short answer is global domination. But, there
are better
questions
to ask at this point. Are there any seed-breeders worth
their salt that
have
seen this GMO-revolution as an opportunity to go entirely
in the other
direction? How could the professional entomologist
community have failed
to
raise the caution flag? Are there no independent
p-h-ds in universities
or
regulatory government, or even the crop-pest-management
sector who had
the
cojones to speak out against the madness? The answer is
either No, or
their
voices have fallen prey to the news-black-out. After the
Bt-killing-Monarch
news was released earlier this summer, how many
university entomology
departments undertook a field study of the affect of GMO
plant-pesticides on
other lepidopterans, or even non-target critters? Where
is the ecologist
who
will link plant-pesticides to a web of life at risk from
this
technology, for
surely a sudden lack of food will affect birds, mammals,
other insects,
even
the tiny microorganisms that feed on the millions of tons
of insect
debris
left after summertime’s bloom of life? Please,
don’t leave it to people
as
poorly prepared as I am to volunteer such queries.
Plant-Pesticides aside, there are Round-up resistant
weeds everywhere
now. Of
particular note is a crop rotation of
RRsoybeans-RRcorn-RRsoybeans,
which
will lead to rapid weed resistance, and the prospect of
resistant
volunteer
corn in the third year soybeans. Soy and corn can be the
same size when
screened, so this means the crop can not be adequately
cleaned without a
gravity table. I also observed Round-up resistant
shatter-cane, which is
considered by authorities in some counties as a noxious
weed. This same
species ( and perhaps grain sorghum and sudan grass), is
closely related
to
field corn, and may now also be carrying attributes of
the Bt. Maggie’s
Farm
is looking pretty bleak.
Darwin’s Tree is Upside-Down
Well, the humans will eat this stuff, but the animals
won’t. Evolution
seems
to have come full circle. Unlike a film character played
by Sean Connery
a
few years ago, who " won’t eat anything that I
can not identify…" modern
developed-world consumers have no idea what they are
eating because it
is
delivered on the run in processed form. Cooking is a lost
art. Grazing,
however, remains unchanged, and I have heard more than
enough stories
about
how the animals wont go for the GMO.
Why, you can put your cattle out into GMO corn stubble
and they just
won’t
touch it. Oh, they’ll bite that new brome down to
the ground, but they
won’t
eat the GMO corn stubble. After four months of
retrieving anecdotes
from
Kansas to Wisconsin, I think its high time to sample the
producer
community
more thoroughly to see how many stories there are out
there. About the
hogs
that wouldn’t eat the ration when the GMO crops were
included. About the
farmer who said " Well, if you want your cattle to
go off their feed,
just
switch them out to a GMO silage." About the farmer
who said that his
cattle
broke through an old fence and ate down the non-GMO
hybrids but wouldn’t
touch the Round-up ready corn, and as a matter of fact
" They had to
walk
through the GMOs to get to the Pioneer 3477 on the other
side." About
the
cattleman who saw the weight-gain of his cattle fall off
when he
switched
over to GMO sources. About the organic farmer with a
terrible deer
problem on
his soybeans, and when he drives out at night there are
forty of them
mowing
down his tofu beans while across the road there
isn’t one doe eating on
the
Round-up Readies. About the raccoons romping by the dozen
in the organic
corn, while down the road there isn’t one ear
that’s been touched in the
Bt
fields. Even the mice will move on down the line if given
an alternative
to
these " crops". What is it that they know
instinctively that most of us
ignore? I have been traveling around with a bag of
contaminated cob corn
on
the floor of my vehicle, and I have begun to think of it
as if it was a
bag
of plutonium. My truck should probably be de-contaminated
by a Haz-Mat
facility. I should probably be put under observation to
see what the
affect
of so much exposure to glyphos and Bt pollen has done to
me. I’ll bet my
blood will kill mosquitoes now.
We can take great anarchic satisfaction in noting that
the conventional
grain
harvesting system has been thrown into absolute fugue and
orbit by the
handling and segregation protocols now forced upon people
least prepared
to
do so. Trust it not. The in-house efficiency monitors
will have fun
figuring
out the extra cost associated with these measures-and the
inevitable
errors
that will pollute 100,000 bushels of "clean"
corn when somebody dumps
the
wrong truck into the hole. Every back-water grain
elevator from
Cherokee,
Iowa to Beatrice, Nebraska to Seymour, Wisconsin has been
obligated to
handle
each miserable semi-trailer of corn as if was filled with
hybrid corn
seed.
The other example one could use to explain the new
requirements is to
overlay
the methods imposed on organic farmers and handlers to
assure organic
integrity.
Wash out every truck? Run and dump ten bushels of crop to
clear the
combine?
These custom combine companies are interested in one
thing only: speed.
They
get paid by the acre. They swing into a field, drop the
head, turn up
the
cowboy rock music on the radio and push the accelerator
to the floor. A
fully
compliant clean out can take an hour. Does anybody know
what is in that
grain
wagon over there? Now do the math.
We heard it in the corn field:
" Cargill is thinking of segregating the corn crop
too." ( apparently
false)
" The non-GMO premium may go to thirty cents."
( wait and see, come
mid-October)
" Dekalb disced ten thousand acres of GMO corn seed
because it wasn't
worth
processing."
I actually saw a few fields of disced corn. Thought at
first it had been
silage-harvest, then realized the fields were full of
debris and corn
ears.
I still got paid 5.39 a bushel for my RR soybeans because
of the Loan
Deficiency Payments"
( Why is that not a WTO-deficient subsidy? And by the
way, does the US
Congress stall on making emergency farm-crisis cash
available to US
producers
because it will undercut our position in Seattle?)
While observing a weedy soybean field:" No , its not
organic, that's a
Pursuit field. That’s been the best advertising for
Roundup yet."
Oh really? And what will be the next ingredient we will
use once
Round-up
proves useless?
While observing a narrow field of organic corn sandwiched
between two
GMO
corn fields:
'" Do you think a 25 foot buffer is wide enough?'
Answer: " No. Combine it into three separate lots,
the 25 foot buffer,
another 25 foot buffer, and then the middle. Put it all
into three
separate
bins and see if the buyer wants the middle harvest
tested. Then be
prepared
to sell it as conventional or feed it to your
cattle."
Obviously I didn't tell him to feed it to organic cattle.
All the above just a whiff of what rural America is
dealing with.
Wisconsin
and much of Illinois is going to harvest a bin-breaking
crop of beans
and
corn this year. Where they will put it is anyone’s
guess. The Chinese
are
currently moving five to seven million bushels of 1999
corn offshore, so
if
that equals storage lost, alone, one may probably expect
to see
mountains of
corn piled in driveways. Just another reason why Iowa
Governor Tom
Vilsack is
amping the obligatory use of ethanol in gas mixtures.
[Translation footnote*]
"When the rotting corn hits the fan, it will make a tremendous mess, with the debris lying equally on the tables of the great leaders of the world as well as on the plates of consumers."
Will GM crops deliver benefits to farmers? - some realities behind biotechnology myths