The sixth most used farm chemical in California was Chloropicrin. This chemical is tear gas, the highly effective anti-riot gas that is released in major demonstrations. One might ask “Why are we using tear gas on our food?” The answer is that it is a deadly biocide. It is usually combined with methyl bromide to provide a warning taste and smell (that methyl bromide lacks) and because it greatly increases the fumigation toxicity of both poisons. It causes several birth defects, causes severe respiratory damage, and is very toxic to fish. California farmers used 6.9 million pounds in 2006.
In 2004, California Strawberry growers used 184 pesticides. They applied an average of more than 335 pounds of pesticides per acre. Metam sodium, methyl bromide, chloropicrin and Telone II accounted for 74% (or 248 pounds) of the pesticides used on each acre of strawberries. Four of the world’s most toxic chemicals, accounted for almost three-quarters of all pesticides used. Strawberry shortcake, anyone?
Data? What Data? California is the only state that has collected pesticide use data in the U.S. (New York recently passed the same law). Unfortunately, for all the other states, we do not have good data. California began collecting use data from farmers and applicators in 1970. The USDA and most states only collect survey data, not actual usage amounts. Because California has real data, and because California provides half of the fresh produce in the country, their information is an invaluable guide to the level of poisonous exposure that U.S. farmers, farmworkers, food handlers, and customers have endured on farm products for almost forty years.
We analyzed the use of pesticides on crops from California’s data set for the Sustainable Cotton Project and for The War on Bugs book. We found that factory farming has been very dependent on the worst poisons for all of the forty years that records have been kept. Although California has good data and toxicological analyses, it has not been aggressive in acting to cancel the registrations on even the chemicals it knows to be most poisonous, even those that cause multiple birth defects and cancer.
The USDA and each state should collect pesticide and fertilizer use data as California has for pesticides. Without real data, claims of increased or decreased use are groundless. Having the data will enable us to set real goals for chemical use reduction as European countries have. Then, and only then, will we be able to see if usage is declining or increasing and how many of the most toxic chemicals are used on our food and in our communities.
Besides collecting actual use data, we must evaluate all the farm and industrial chemicals as they are doing in the E.U. with REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals). Such data would greatly supplement the evaluations by Cal EPA and U.S.EPA, which are good, but significantly incomplete because they grandfathered in many chemicals that required no testing. REACH is currently evaluating even the grandfathered chemicals!
Even though our existing analyses are incomplete, the data from both Cal EPA and U.S. EPA are sufficient to begin to phase out dozens of the most toxic pesticides. Many chemicals are so toxic that we need a goal of a 50% reduction every five years. We must begin these reductions because cancer and birth defect clusters are now common in most U.S. farm communities and people are being exposed to multiple pesticide residues on their fresh and processed food and on their clothing.
Confinement Animals/Excess Antibiotics and Hormones: I have pointed out in The War on Bugs and in other articles that our confinement animal operations (where most of our meat comes from) are a serious health and safety threat.6 And, as we have all come to realize, they are very poorly regulated. Overuse of hormones and antibiotics has left us with antibiotic resistant meat, large quantities of antibiotics in rivers and drinking water, and even antibiotic resistant pork farmers and consumers. Beef cows are often injected with hormones, milk cows with genetically modified growth hormones. The U.S. meat supply is so dangerously unhealthy that large amounts of it are regularly recalled (about 200,000,000 pounds of beef in 2008) and some of the more suspicious or contaminated meat has been allowed by the FDA to be irradiated since the 1990s. Nuked meat?
We raised 11 billion meat, milk, and egg-laying animals in the U.S. in 2008. By 2008, we produced nearly 69 million pigs, 95% in confinement. We raised 300 million commercial laying hens in battery cages, Ten billion meat chickens, and half a billion turkeys were confined in abusive close quarter conditions. About 33 million beef cows and 9.7 million dairy cows spent their dreary days in disgusting feedlots and dairy barns.7 These facilities and their meat products are rife with disease that the public is advised to combat by thorough cooking. In December, 2008 Consumer Reports found that 83% of the 525 meat chickens they studied had salmonella or campylobacter. With deadly diseases on all but 17 chickens out of 100, customers are asking: What about the salmonella on my drain board or my hands? No wonder there is so much food borne illness!
These enormous populations of animals also produce a lot of manure, and massive amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. The largest amount of nitrous oxide comes from fertilizer used on farmland that produces feed for confined animals. High methane emissions come from mountains of animal manure and digestive gasses, and a lesser though significant amount, from unsustainable grazing. Seventy to eighty percent of our farm production and acreage is used to produce the aforementioned 11 billion beef cows, pigs, poultry, milk cows, sheep, and goats. Fertilizer use in the U.S. is variable depending on the needs of the crop and the natural fertility of the land. Corn and cotton farmers, who grow the corn and cottonseed to feed these confined animals, use 200 to 300 pounds of nitrogen per acre and about 100 pounds of phosphorous. This is much more nitrogen and phosphorous than the crops can use in a single season, but the farmers are advised to use “enough” to get the highest possible yields. So, most of the nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizer that the plants don’t need and can’t use are flushed into rivers, lakes and the ocean.
I could continue further with this litany of unregulated farm problems, but these are the major issues. We are living in a very polluted and dangerous food world, partly because of the unregulated excesses of U.S. industrial farming. If we are going to bring down our high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and birth defects we have to change our food choices and how that food is raised. Besides creating profound health and safety problems, industrial farming is a huge unregulated contributor to global warming and an enormous user of energy. We must regulate and significantly reduce the U.S. farm use of fuels, pesticides, and fertilizer. These are not choices! These are necessities! If we are going to seriously tackle climate change and fix our health system, we have to change our form of agriculture.
We Can’t Fix Factory Farming! The Pew Charitable Trust and the Johns-Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted a study in 2008 and determined that the U.S. factory farming system is dangerously out of control and that many practices, including animal confinement, and the prophylactic-use of antibiotics and hormones must be phased out. A second study, also in April of 2008, by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded much the same.8 Both studies found that the current factory farming paradigms are simply not sustainable for the land, the drinking water, the confined animals, the rivers, and the oceans, and they are seriously damaging our public health. The Union of Concerned Scientists reminded us that we will be subsidizing these bad farming practices once again on April 15th when we pay our taxes. That is the second payment for “cheap food”.
For more than one hundred years U.S. and European safe food activists’ demanded real regulation of farm chemicals. But, it was always a pipe dream, since chemical firms, the universities and the government all alleged that the pesticides were safe and that farmers couldn’t get good yields without chemicals. So, the regulators looked the other way. However, farmers around the world have demonstrated that they can produce as good or better yields of quality food and fiber without dangerous and damaging chemicals. Still, the regulators continue to look the other way and still refuse to stop the poisoning.
Salmonella contaminated pistachios, peanuts, tomatoes, melons, and jalapenos and the slaughtering of downer beef are glaring examples of sloppy farming and processing combined with regulatory failure. All of these regulatory failures and bad farming practices didn’t just cause bankruptcy or a huge cut in 401-Ks, they sickened hundreds of millions and killed hundreds of thousands of people over the last thirty years!9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
