I was reading this article today and wanted to share some excerpts with you. This kind of damage to our food supply is lining the pockets of big agribusiness – not creating the food our society needs to be healthy and free. I applaud everyone who is seeking alternative food sources. We still don’t know the total impact of the chemicals used in agriculture – and that includes many of the fertilizers and pesticides used in organic agriculture. That’s why our farm uses the least toxic processes available. We pick off insects or use oils and soaps to kill them. We use compost and cover crops for fertilizer. We manage our water sources to minimize impacts.
Here’s some excerpts I found interesting:
“I once was a proponent of big agriculture,” he said. “Now we eat strawberries shipped in here from California. They don’t have any flavor. They don’t have the antioxidents and the vitamins you find locally.
“How much longer can we support these high levels of production? We’re depleting our aquifers. Our grand rivers — the Colorado, it doesn’t even go into the ocean anymore. It’s all dried up [from irrigation].
“This monoculture — We put on these heavy fertilizers, these ammonium sulfates. It’s a salt, and if year after year after year you add these salts, then your soil becomes salinated and sterile.
“Over the past 30 years, the amount of pesticides and herbicides used — a lot of the bugs, a lot of the weeds, have become resistant.
“All these weeds that [Monsanto's] Roundup killed, the only ones that were able to metabolize that herbicide were the only ones able to germinate and produce seeds for the next year. That’s what we have now.
“MRSA — methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus — is a bacterial infection that is highly resistant to some antibiotics. It’s traced back to these big agribusiness systems, these confinement systems where animals have to have some therapeutic levels of antibiotics just to exist.
“Many animals on a small piece of land. And all the effluent eventually gets into the rivers.”
