This week’s earworm: “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head“. Not a problem if you are lettuce…
Just a few quick messages before we get into the meat of the newsletter.
Now is the time to make your final decisions on additional items. Just to remind you, we have a Multi-product discount. If you purchase three items you get $25 off. If you purchase five items you get $50 off. Included are VeggieShare, FruitShare, CheeseShare, SalmonShare, MeatShare, FlowerShare, and WinterShare. (EggShare, herbs, a la carte fruit and CoffeeShare are not included but you can still order them).
Speaking of a la carte fruit: I have uploaded an order form to the farm website with prices for a la carte fruit and meat. If you’d like to order blueberries or cherries or Colorado peaches or a half hog or a chicken six pack or a quarter beef or some other combination of fruit and meat all you need to do is let me know via email and then send in payment. No need to print out the order form if you prefer not to.
We are still shooting for June 19th as our starting date. No guarantee.
Farm News
We planted a whole bunch of plants last Thursday and Friday. It has been raining ever since, which in some ways is good but we need it to stop soon so we can get the rest of the plants planted. This has been quite the challenging spring!
Other than planting and getting wet there isn’t a whole lot more going on at the farm. So I thought I would rant about GMOs some more.
I hear this all the time, “How are we going to feed everybody without using high-yielding, genetically altered food? We need GMOs to feed the world!” Being a skeptic, and an arm-chair scientist I had to get to the bottom of this. Do we really need genetically altered food to feed the world? Time to hit the Google.
But before I do that, let me say a few things. As I mentioned in a previous posting, there are very few GE vegetables on the market today. This will change of course but as of the writing of this posting there are very, very few. Let me also point out that we as a nation have been told repeatedly that we need to cut back on junk food and eat more nutritious meals including increasing our consumption of fruits and vegetables. And also let me point out that the main food crops that use genetically modified seeds are corn, soybeans and sugar beets (I think there may be GE rice as well but I’m not sure).
Time for a quick Google. Ok, that really didn’t go well. It is tough to find figures on where the corn goes after harvest. So time to look at Wikipedia. Bingo. Here I found some numbers from the USDA. This is from 2008 but I can’t imagine the percentages have changed much in the last five years (if anything, moving more toward fuel production and away from human consumption). The total amount of corn grown in 2008 was just over 12,000 million bushels. That’s a lot of corn. Of that, 5,250 million bushels was fed to livestock, 3,650 million bushels was converted to ethanol for fuel, 1,850 million bushels was exported (but we don’t know what it was used for), 943 million bushels was used for oil, sweeteners and starch, and finally only 327 million bushels was used for direct human consumption – or to look at it another way, only 3% of the corn we grow each year is eaten by people. Now you could include the amount used as sweeteners and oil but is this a healthy way to eat corn? Even then we are talking about only around 10% of the corn grown. Good thing we use GE seeds to produce all that corn. How else could we feed the world?
So, what if instead of planting corn and soybeans we planted fruits and vegetables – the things we all know we should be consuming more of? We could easily grow enough food to feed the world on far less land than we do for corn. Our diet would be far healthier. Our levels of obesity would decline. Our cost for healthcare would plummet. What could possibly be wrong with this approach?
The main issue is that growing fruits and vegetables is far more labor intensive than growing corn and soybeans. Corn and soybeans are easily planted and harvested mechanically. Some vegetables can be planted and harvested mechanically – e.g. carrots and bean – but many of the fruits and vegetables have to be harvested by hand. And we as a nation don’t want to do this type of labor. We have to “farm out” the work to immigrants – legal or not. Why is this? Mainly it is due to what we the consumers are willing to pay for our food. Hiring people at a living wage to harvest our fruits and vegetables would dramatically increase the cost of the food. On my farm labor is the number cost—by at least a factor of 10, and I don’t even pay a living wage (and barely make a living wage). Of course even if farmers did hire local residents and paid them a living wage, thus driving up the cost of the food, they would still have to compete against farmers in foreign countries paying labor rates far below what they paid here. And only a minority of Americans are willing to pay significantly more for an American made product no matter what it is.
But there is more to cost than just labor. Don’t these mechanized crops have to purchase chemicals thus driving up their cost? Sure they do. And it is a big expense to them. But what I find really interesting about the costs incurred by the large, chemical farmers is they don’t cover the cost of their farming on the degradation of the environment. There is a lot of pollution generated by chemical farmers. This pollution doesn’t stay on the farm. It flows into our lakes, rivers, oceans and underground aquifers. It pollutes our air. Do farmers pay to mitigate this problem? Absolutely not. The shrimp fishermen and women in the Gulf of Mexico shoulder the cost by having to fish farther out to sea or with reduced catches. The land owners near farms – and downstream of farms – have to shoulder the cost of digging deeper wells to reach uncontaminated aquifers. All taxpayers shoulder the cost by funding the dredging of our rivers and toxic waste disposal done by the Army Corp of Engineers. Recreational fishermen and women shoulder the cost by the restrictions on the amount of fish they can safely eat. Beekeepers shoulder the cost by having to replace their hives practically every year! And this doesn’t include the increased healthcare costs to society. If we add in all these cost – as well as the many not mentioned here – to the cost of growing our food chemically it suddenly becomes far more expensive and organic vegetables become far more cost competitive (and we didn’t even include the subsidies corn and soybean farmers get from all us taxpayers).
But what about feeding all those animals. 44% of the corn grown goes to feed livestock. We need the genetically altered seeds to grow enough grain to feed our cattle, no? I’m not going to get into all the details about corn fed cattle. There has been plenty of research and documentation on why it is a bad idea. Suffice it to say that cows are not built to eat corn. Their digestive tracts are designed to consume grasses. A much better approach to raising cattle would be to rotationally graze them on pasture near the final consumer. We could turn all these corn farms back into pasture for the cattle thus eliminating many of the problems associated with our current approach to raising beef. There goes 44% of the need for GE corn!
Which brings us back to the original point. Do we need genetically altered foods to feed the world? No we don’t. We can grow far more food/acre growing nutritiously dense foods like fruits and vegetables. But if we want the cheapest “food” possible regardless of the cost to the environment and the cost to our collective health we will continue to grow the stuff that is easy to mechanize no matter what its effects are on us and our planet. So the next time you hear or read we need GMOs to feed the world ask them to explain why. I would be interested in hearing their side of the story.