Each day seems to bring more pesticide spills and injuries, more poisoned food, more contaminated drinking water, more dead zones and more residues on our food. Consequently, immediate regulation of and a rapid phase-out of the most toxic farm chemicals now seem like urgencies, instead of pipe dreams.
If We Can’t Fix it, Let’s Change it: While U.S. factory farming can’t be fixed, the good news is that changing U.S. agriculture it is not an unattainably complex goal. However, it does call for a paradigm shift. We must stop pretending that fossil based fertilizer and fuel is endless, sustainable, or environmentally justifiable. The Green Revolution is over! After one hundred years of use the jury is in. What looked in 1909 like a cheap and efficient fertilizer has polluted our drinking water, turned deadly to the oceans, is increasingly more expensive, and today is doing more harm than good. We must dramatically reduce the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and began an immediate phase out.
In 1945, only five percent of the nitrogen used on U.S. farms was synthetic. Now, more than ninety-five percent is. Before the synthetic takeover, farmers grew fertilizer crops and applied small amounts of composted manure for fertility and tilth, to increase organic matter, and to feed the microorganisms. These techniques and more modern ones are used by both organic and non-organic farmers today and enable them to produce high yields of quality produce, meat, fiber, oilseeds, and grains. Farmers all over the world are getting higher yields of calories per acre on diversified organic farms than on monocultural chemical or GMO farms.
We can solve the dead zone problem by switching back from synthetic nitrogen and soluble phosphorous fertilizers to organic plant-based fertility. This is not rocket science and it is not a long shot with outmoded technology. It is, in fact, achievable within a few years. As a plus, fertilizer crops sequester carbon, which our currently barren soils in the fall and winter don’t.
We can eliminate the cancer and birth defect clusters and high pesticide residues on our favorite foods by using biological IPM strategies to control pests and diseases. Releasing beneficial insects, altering our growing practices, rotation of crops, soil balancing, and careful monitoring of pest damage are a few of the successful techniques that thousands of farmers are using to control pests and eliminate poisonous pesticides on their farms.
This is a challenging time for farmers, with many sorting out how can they produce their own energy on the farm as well as auditing and reducing their use. Most of us know that the cheap era of fossil fuel is over. With agriculture being responsible for such a large percentage of fossil fuel consumption, it is essential that resources be invested in alternative energy strategies by farmers, entrepreneurs, and by state and federal government agencies.
At this critical juncture, we should see these factory farm problems and their solutions as an opportunity. This is an opportunity for us to demand that Washington regulate our food supply. It is a chance to make real changes in our own diets by eating safe foods, supporting local organic farms, and frequenting farmers markets. Additionally, each of us can grow chemically free vegetables and fruits in our own yards, like the Obamas are doing at the White House.
It is also a time of opportunity to assist farmers and merchants in converting U.S. farming and the food system. To do this, we need much more government investment in the reinvigoration of our agricultural extension service. These new or retrained extension agents would help farmers make the transition to sustainable and organic agriculture (as some currently are). We also need access for young and not so young farmers to financial aid and government held farmland. Clearly, we also need lots more regulators. Only the government can address these issues. But, we must pressure the Obama run EPA, USDA, and FDA to address them as if they were urgent.
U.S. organic farmers developed a set of standards in the 1970s and 1980s to regulate farms and farmers with third party inspections. They did this to assure a suspicious public that the food they produced was really organic. The standards they enforce require crop rotation, an organic fertility and pest control program and prohibit the use of toxic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, genetic modification, sewage sludge, irradiation, and the feeding of animal protein to animals.
“Conventional” food in the U.S can be grown with all the farming practices outlawed in organic. Conventional is a semantic ploy to avoid calling the food “chemical”, or “poisonous”. Whatever you call it, it should be regulated and the most damaging practices should be made illegal.
Finally, we need to internationally harmonize our regulations, so that there is as much unanimity to the rules as possible and the enforcement is transparent. This is just as important in food as it is in finance. We are all too connected globally to pretend that we should not worry about another culture’s food regulations or health concerns. Ideally, we should all embrace a more rigorous international REACH-like program that would protect farmers, farmworkers, processors and consumers.Hopefully, the Obama administration attitude toward regulation will extend to U.S. agriculture. If it doesn’t, we are in deep sh*t! And, I’m not talking manure.
FOOTNOTES:
- U.S.EPA Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, 1990-2005 (April, 2007)
- Environmental Working Group (EWG), National Tap Water Quality Database. U.S. EPA Data Bases on Water Pollution, required by the Clean Air Act.
- Dr. Robert J. Diaz, Professor of Marine Biology at the Virginia Institute for Oceanography, and Rutger Rosenberg, Science, Aug. 15, 2008, Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Eco Systems.
- Environmental Working Group (EWG), National Tap Water Quality Database. U.S. EPA data bases on water pollution required by the Clean Air Act.
- California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA), Department of Pesticide Regulation, Pesticide Use Reports: 1970-2006.
- See Allen, Will, The War on Bugs, Chelsea Green, Vermont, March, 2008, The Death of Food, Alternet, April, 2008. The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Alternet. June, 2008.
- Data gleaned from USDA, ERS , Orange County People for Animals, U.S.EPA,
- CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal feeding Operations, Doug Gurian-Sherman, Union of Concerned Scientists, April, 2008. Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Production in America, Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, April, 2008.
- The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 1999 that food borne illness in the U.S. sickens 76 million people, 325,000 end up in the hospital and more than 5,000 die, every year. Food And Water in 1996 estimated that pesticides kill about 10,000 people a year. Adding these figures over a 30 year period equals several hundred thousand dead from the U.S. food system.
First posted at ChelseaGreen.com.
Will Allen’s War on Bugs reveals how advertisers, editors, scientists, large scale farmers, government agencies, and even Dr. Seuss, colluded to convince farmers to use deadly chemicals, hormones, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to pad their wallets and control the American farm enterprise.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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